Local SEO is how a business gets found for searches tied to a place: “dentist in Austin”, “car service near me”, “buy a bike Manchester”. It differs from ordinary SEO in two ways: Google adds a map block with three businesses above the usual results, and what people see depends on where they are searching from.
This article was first published in 2021 as a piece about local promotion in English-speaking markets. We have rewritten and broadened it: it is now a guide to the site side of local SEO, with a separate section on running local SEO across several countries. Our guide to the Google Business Profile covers the profile itself, so we don’t repeat it here.
Local promotion pays off when the buying decision depends on distance, or on whether the customer can reach you:
Local SEO is not for companies where the customer’s location makes no difference: SaaS, online services, B2B manufacturers selling nationwide. They get more from ordinary organic search and topic pages.
There is one in-between case: a company serves the whole country, but customers still search with a city name. Then location pages are worth building — not for the map block, but for the "service + city" queries themselves.
This is one of the rare cases where Google states the factors outright. Its help documentation names three:
The same page states plainly that there is no way to pay for a higher position in Google’s services.
Distance is what makes local results different from anything else: there is no single position. Two blocks away you are first; across town you may not be in the top three at all. That is why local rankings are checked from specific coordinates rather than with an ordinary rank snapshot.
The business profile drives the first two factors; the website drives the third. We covered filling in and verifying the profile separately. The rest of this article is about the site.
A page that covers three cities at once is not relevant to any of those queries. So the backbone of local SEO on a website is separate pages per location.
| Type of business | What to build |
| One location, one city | No separate location pages needed. The city belongs in the title, H1, body copy and on the contact page |
| Several locations in one city | A page per location with its address, hours and photos, plus one page listing every address |
| Several cities | A page per city. Where a city has several locations, a city page plus location pages |
| Several services in several cities | "Service + city" pages, but only for combinations people actually search for. Check the volumes instead of multiplying every service by every city |
| Mobile services with no address | A service-area page: neighbourhoods, suburbs, travel times, conditions |
Keyword research is what tells you which combinations have demand. In most niches it is spread very unevenly across cities, and half the planned location pages turn out to be unnecessary.
The most common mistake is to build one page and clone it with the city name swapped. Google calls these doorway pages, and they are a spam policy violation. In practice they simply don’t rank, because they give the reader nothing new.
Beyond the city name, a location page should carry:
Write the title and H1 the way people speak — "Refrigerator repair in Leeds", not "Refrigerator repair Leeds West Yorkshire cheap". Everything else about on-page optimization applies to location pages exactly as it does to any other page.
If the location pages did end up similar to one another, check whether Google is treating them as duplicates: the indexing report in Search Console shows this, and each page’s canonical tag should point to itself rather than to the main service page.
The name, address and phone number (NAP) should be written identically on the site, in the business profile, in directories and on social profiles — abbreviations included. "St." in one place and "Street" in another is already an inconsistency that makes matching harder for Google.
The minimum on the site:
On top of that comes LocalBusiness markup. It is worth knowing what it does: Google presents it as a way to earn a richer appearance in search, not as a ranking factor. Only two properties are required — name and address. Among the recommended ones, local businesses get the most out of openingHoursSpecification (including late-night and seasonal hours), geo (coordinates, with at least five decimal places), telephone, priceRange, and department for businesses with distinct departments.
For a chain, each location needs its own profile and its own page on the site. The usual mistakes: every profile points to the site’s homepage, the name is written differently in each profile ("Company", "Company Leeds", "Company on High Street"), and the site has no page listing all the addresses.
The name in the profile has to match the real signage. Adding a city or a service to it for the keywords breaks Google’s rules, and profiles get demoted or suspended for it.
If you don’t receive customers at your address, the business is registered as a service-area business: the address is hidden and the areas you travel to are listed instead. On the site, back this up with a page describing the service area: where you go, how quickly, and whether outlying areas cost extra.
Cloning a page for every neighbourhood doesn’t help — that is the doorway problem from section 4 again. One service-area page with real substance works better, plus individual pages only for the areas or suburbs people genuinely search for.
Prominence is the third factor in Google’s documentation, and links and mentions are what build it. For a local business they look different from ordinary link building.
What works:
What to avoid:
Link building for English-speaking markets is a separate service of ours — see link building.
Review count and content feed into prominence, but that is not the main point: people read reviews before they get in touch. From BrightLocal’s 2026 consumer survey:
| Metric | Figure |
| Read reviews of local businesses | 97% of consumers |
| Always read reviews | 41%, up from 29% |
| Will only use businesses rated 4.5 stars or higher | 31%, up from 17% a year earlier |
| Prioritize reviews from the last three months | 74% |
| Expect the owner to respond to their review | 89% |
| Use AI assistants to find businesses | 45% — third among sources, up from 6% the year before |
What follows from this: reviews need to be recent, not collected years ago; they need replies, negative ones included; and the moment to ask is when a customer is happy — never in exchange for a reward tied to the rating, which Google penalizes.
Once a business operates in more than one English-speaking country, another layer is added: you have to show Google which country each part of the site is for.
Per Google’s documentation, a country-code domain (.co.uk, .com.au) is the strongest signal of which country a site targets — and the most expensive option, because authority has to be built from zero for each domain. Subdirectories on one domain (site.com/uk/, site.com/au/) are easier and keep the authority together, although users may not recognize the targeting from the URL.
Google describes server location as a signal but not a definitive one, precisely because of CDNs. Moving hosting to the target country for the sake of rankings is not required.
Language and country versions are linked with hreflang, and its rules are strict:
An ordinary rank check is useless for local search, because results depend on where the search happens. What to look at instead:
In short:
If you want to find out what is keeping your site out of local results, start with an SEO audit. For businesses entering English-speaking markets, we handle this as part of SEO for English-language websites.
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