Business Profile audit
Categories, attributes, hours, service areas, images and posts — with primary category treated as the highest-impact field, because it usually is.
What decides the local pack
Three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance and prominence respond to work — categories, content, reviews, citations. Distance does not. A searcher two miles away sees a different pack from one across the city, and no amount of optimisation changes where your premises are.
That constraint is where most local SEO is oversold. An agency promising top-three placement across a whole metropolitan area is either misunderstanding proximity or hoping you will not check from different locations. Rankings in local search are personal to the searcher's position, so a single reported position is close to meaningless.
What proximity means practically is that your realistic catchment is smaller than your service area, and the two should be planned separately. You can rank in the pack near your premises, compete in organic local results further out, and reach the rest through paid or partnerships. Pretending all three are the same produces disappointment.
Google Business Profile carries more weight than the website for pack placement, which surprises teams who have invested heavily in their site. Primary category is the single highest-impact field on it, and it is frequently wrong — chosen once at setup by someone guessing, never revisited, and quietly capping everything downstream.
Consistency of name, address and phone across the web remains a real signal and a genuinely tedious one. Old listings from a previous address, variations in how the business name is written, and duplicate profiles from a franchise or an acquisition all fragment the evidence engines use to decide you are one business.
What the programme covers
The programme covers a Google Business Profile audit and correction, category selection, citation consistency across the sources engines check, review signal work, location page content where you have genuine premises, and rank tracking measured from multiple points rather than one.
Citation consistency
Name, address and phone reconciled across the directories and data aggregators engines actually consult, including old listings nobody remembers creating.
Duplicate resolution
Duplicate or unclaimed profiles from moves, acquisitions or franchise setups, merged or removed so evidence points at one business rather than several.
Review signal work
A compliant collection cadence, since review volume and recency feed local prominence more directly than almost anything else you control.
Location page content
Real pages for real premises, with genuinely local substance. We do not generate a page per town you would like to serve, for reasons the FAQ covers.
Grid-based rank tracking
Positions measured from multiple points across your catchment rather than one, because a single reported rank hides the proximity effect entirely.
How the programme runs
The programme runs continuously: fix the Business Profile first because it carries the most weight, reconcile citations and duplicates, build review volume, then add location content only where genuine premises exist — measuring throughout from multiple points across the catchment.
- 01
Fix the profile first
Categories, attributes and service areas corrected. The primary category alone frequently changes placement more than a quarter of website work, and it costs nothing.
→ A corrected, complete Business Profile
- 02
Reconcile the record
Citations, duplicates and old listings from previous addresses. Tedious, unglamorous, and the foundation everything else in local depends on.
→ Consistent NAP across checked sources
- 03
Build review signals
A compliant, consistent request cadence. Volume and recency feed prominence, and prominence is one of only two factors you can actually influence.
→ A running review collection process
- 04
Add real location content
Pages for genuine premises with substance specific to that place. Where you have no premises, we recommend organic and paid coverage instead of a fabricated page.
→ Location pages for real premises only
- 05
Measure across the catchment
Grid tracking from multiple points, so you can see the shape of your visibility rather than a single number that flatters or misleads depending on where it was taken.
→ Grid-based visibility reporting
The three local ranking factors
Understanding which factors respond to work is what separates a realistic local programme from an expensive one. Two of the three can be influenced directly. The third sets a hard boundary on what any amount of investment can achieve in a given area.
| Factor | Can you influence it | What moves it |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | Yes | Categories, attributes, on-site content, services listed |
| Prominence | Yes | Reviews, citations, links, offline reputation |
| Distance | No | Where your premises physically are |
Signals you need this now
You need this when you are invisible in the map pack near your own premises, when your business details differ across directories, when duplicate profiles exist after a move or acquisition, or when reviews arrived in a burst years ago and stopped.
- You do not appear in the pack even close to your premises
- Business details differ across directories and listings
- Duplicate profiles exist after a move, merger or franchise setup
- Reviews arrived in a burst years ago and then stopped
- Your primary category was chosen at setup and never revisited
- You have multiple locations with no page for any of them
- An agency reported one local rank without saying where from
What clients see
Profile corrections can move placement within days because the data is used directly. Citation and review work compounds over months. What does not change is proximity, so gains concentrate around your premises and thin out with distance — which grid tracking makes visible rather than hiding.
Where this fits
Related SEO services
Common in these sectors
The adjacent disciplines
Deciding between options
Questions about local SEO services
Each answer is written to stand alone in 40 to 60 words — the shape an AI Overview or Perplexity citation lifts. Ships with FAQPage schema.
Can you get us ranking across the whole city?
In the map pack, generally no, and anyone promising it is not accounting for proximity. Local pack results are personal to the searcher's position. We target realistically near your premises and use organic and paid coverage for the wider area.
Should we create a page for every town we serve?
Not unless you have genuine premises or substantive local content for each. Pages generated per town with swapped place names are doorway pages, they risk a manual action, and they are one of the most common causes of local penalties we are asked to fix.
What has the biggest impact on local rankings?
Usually the Google Business Profile rather than the website, and within it the primary category. It is frequently wrong — chosen once at setup by someone guessing — and correcting it costs nothing and can change placement within days.
Do citations still matter?
Consistency does more than volume. Engines use name, address and phone across sources as corroboration, so contradictory records fragment the evidence. Building hundreds of new low-quality citations adds little; reconciling the ones that already disagree adds a lot.
How should local rankings be reported?
From multiple points across your catchment, as a grid. A single reported position is close to meaningless because results vary by the searcher's location — and a convenient measurement point is an easy way for an agency to flatter a report.
We have several locations. Does each need its own profile?
Yes, each genuine premises needs its own profile and ideally its own page with real local substance. What causes problems is profiles for locations that do not physically exist, which is a common and detectable violation.
Find out whether this is your constraint.
Thirty minutes with a senior strategist. We pull your live visibility while we talk and tell you plainly whether a local SEO services is what you need — or whether your problem sits somewhere else.