Local SEO

If you have an address or a service area, this is the highest-return module in the curriculum and the only one where the results can arrive in weeks. It is also the one with the clearest published rules, which makes it unusually easy to do correctly.

Google tells you what local ranking is based on

No inference required. Google states that “local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity,” and defines all three: relevance is “how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for,” distance is “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching,” and prominence is “how well-known a business is.”

You cannot change distance. That is worth internalising before you spend money. If a competitor is physically closer to the searcher, they have an advantage you cannot buy, work around, or out-optimise. Which leaves relevance and prominence, and both of those are genuinely yours to influence.

Google is equally direct about the thing people ask agencies for: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” If someone offers you one, that is your answer about them.

Relevance is mostly data entry

Relevance is judged against what is in your profile, so the unglamorous truth is that completing every field is most of the work. Categories, hours, attributes, service areas, description, services, photos.

Your primary category does more than any other field. Choose it by looking at what the businesses currently ranking for your target term have chosen, which is the closest thing to a published answer you will get.

NAP consistency, and why it is boring and important

Your name, address and phone number need to be identical everywhere they appear. Not similar. Identical. “Suite 5” and “Ste 5” are two different addresses to a matching algorithm trying to decide whether two listings describe one business.

Write the canonical version once, in a document, and paste from it forever. That single habit prevents most of what citation cleanup services get paid to fix later.

The listings you did not create are the ones to look for. Data aggregators generate profiles from old records, and a listing with your previous address is actively contradicting your current one.

Have us run local for a Utah business

Reviews: the one lever that keeps working

Google says plainly that “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.” It is one of the few places where the mechanism is stated rather than inferred.

The businesses that do well here are not the ones with the best review-request wording. They are the ones where asking is built into something that already happens: the invoice, the follow-up message, the end of the job. Anything that depends on remembering will stop within a month.

Two things not to do. Do not offer anything in exchange, which violates Google’s policies and is obvious to readers. And do not ask only the customers you know are happy, because a wall of five stars with no texture reads as bought.

What I would do in your position

One afternoon: claim the profile, complete every field, fix the primary category, write down your canonical NAP. That is most of the available relevance.

Then one hour a month: search your business name, fix any listing that has drifted, reply to every review, and add one post or photo. That is the maintenance and it is genuinely all of it.

If you are a local business and you are working through this curriculum in order, this module is worth jumping the queue for. It is the one place where a week of work can move something you can see within a month, and that matters when you are trying to keep going through the flat part of the payback curve.