A short guide to local SEO

Every audit we run turns up some version of this. Everything we would tell a client about local SEO in the time it takes to drink a coffee.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. Check it against what you would want a competitor's site to get wrong.

What it costs to ignore

Consistent name, address, and phone details across the web matter. This is the sort of thing that compounds, quietly, in both directions. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

How we handle it

Local intent searches convert far better than national ones. None of that requires a large budget, only a decision and someone to own it. Budget a little time for it every quarter and it never becomes a project of its own.

The mistakes we see most

Reviews influence both ranking and the decision to call. It is worth being explicit about, because assumptions differ quietly. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. Three things worth confirming about local SEO before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Consistent name, address, and phone details across the web matter — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

Most of the value here comes from doing the first two things, not all of them.