When someone a few miles away searches for what you do, three different results decide whether they find you — the map pack, the regular local results underneath it, and increasingly the AI answer at the top. They don’t reward the same things. We work all three, and we’ll tell you which one your money is actually moving.
Most agencies sell “local SEO” as one thing. It isn’t. Knowing which surface a task moves is the difference between a plan and a shopping list.
The three listings with the map beside them.
Dominated by your Google Business Profile and your reviews. Your website matters here, but it’s the third lever, not the first. If someone promises you the map pack through website content alone, they’re selling you the wrong work.
The ordinary blue links below the map.
This flips: your pages do most of the work and the profile contributes far less. It’s also where most of the clicks live for considered purchases — the searches where someone reads before they call.
The summary above everything else.
Newest and least settled, but the pattern so far looks closer to local organic than to the map pack — clear, well-structured pages that state plainly what you do and where you do it.
We’re describing weightings from published industry research, not laws of physics. Anyone quoting you exact percentages with total confidence — including us — should be read with that in mind.
Roughly in the order we’d tackle it. The sequence matters more than people expect — some of these gate the others.
Categories first — it’s the one field Google explicitly says affects local ranking. Then services, the website link, hours, and photos. Done in the right order, because categories determine which services you can even list.
A real page for each service you want leads for, and location pages that earn their place — not twenty near-identical city pages with the town name swapped out.
See website services →Your details matching across the directories that actually get read. Unglamorous housekeeping, but it’s cheap and it removes a reason for Google to hesitate.
A repeatable way to ask, and a habit of responding. Review count and recency are among the strongest signals in the local pack, and they’re the part most businesses simply never get around to.
Chamber memberships, community sponsorships, local press, and the regional sites that already talk about businesses like yours.
Tagged profile links and goal tracking, so calls and clicks from your listing show up as their own line rather than disappearing into “organic.”
See SEO programs →Exclusive Image has a profile in the Sacramento area and another in Clarksville, Tennessee — same company, two regions, all the awkward problems that come with it. Which page each listing should point to. How to keep two profiles from competing for the same searches. What to do when the categories on offer don’t quite describe what you sell.
We’ve had to answer those on our own listings before charging anyone else to answer them. It also means when we tell you a particular tactic didn’t move anything, that’s usually because we tried it on ourselves and watched it not work.
Talk it through with usLocal SEO clients are concentrated around our two bases, but the work travels — we support businesses well outside both.
Google reviews profile edits before publishing them, and has been slower and stricter about it through 2026. Expect the visible work to be quick and the results to take months.
No. Nobody can, and the map pack is partly decided by how close the searcher physically is to you — which no amount of optimization changes. What we can do is make sure every field Google actually looks at is filled in correctly and that nothing on your profile is holding you back.
Overlapping, not separate. Local SEO adds the profile work, review strategy, and location-page structure on top of the same technical and content foundation. Most clients want one program covering both — see organic SEO services for how those are packaged and priced.
No. Only list what you genuinely sell. Misrepresenting your services violates Google’s policies, and enforcement runs from a warning up to losing the listing and every review on it. It also brings you enquiries you can’t fulfil, which costs you time and goodwill.
It does work, and it’s against Google’s naming policy. We won’t do it — the downside is losing the listing and its entire review history, which is not a risk worth taking with an asset you’ve spent years building. Where it’s blatant, it can be reported.
Not at all. Most of this applies to a single profile, and single-location businesses usually have an easier time — no split attention between listings and no risk of two of your own profiles competing for the same search.
