Local SEO guide: how to rank a business in local search and Maps

How Google ranks local results

When someone searches for a type of business, such as "dentist" or "emergency plumber", Google shows local results in Search, usually as a block of map listings, and in Google Maps. Practitioners call that block the local pack or map pack, and each entry in it opens the business's Business Profile. The searcher does not have to type a place name. Google's own example is a search for "salons near me" or "salons open now", where a salon can appear because it has provided its address and hours. The same data answers spoken "near me" questions, covered in voice search optimization.

Google's Business Profile Help names three factors behind local results, and states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking:

Google combines the three to find the best match, so the nearest business is not automatically the first result. Distance is the one factor you cannot optimize: all you can do is make sure Google has your real location. Relevance comes from complete, accurate information. Prominence is earned elsewhere on the web, and Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help.

Bing uses the same model with slightly different words. Its ranking guidance for Bing Places lists relevance, distance and popularity, says website SEO plays an important role in local ranking, and treats positive reviews on other sites, and how often a business is mentioned across the web, as signs of popularity.

Where Google gets your business information

Your Business Profile is not the only input. Google compiles its business profiles from publicly available web content such as your official website, licensed data from third parties, facts, photos and reviews contributed by users (including the owners who claim profiles), and its own interactions with the business. When your website, an old directory entry and your profile disagree, you are no longer the only voice describing your business. That is the practical reason local SEO spends so much effort on consistency.

Set up the Google Business Profile essentials

The Business Profile is the listing people see in the map results, and it is free to create, so it comes first. Optimizing it in depth is covered in our Google Business Profile guide; these are the essentials the rest of the strategy depends on.

Start by checking that you qualify. Google's guidelines for representing your business cover businesses that either have a location customers can visit or travel to customers where they are. A virtual office (a rented address you do not operate from) is not eligible, P.O. boxes are not accepted, and an office in a co-working space counts only if it has clear signage, is staffed by your team and receives customers during business hours. A business that does neither, such as an online-only shop, falls outside these guidelines.

1. Claim and verify the profile. Google says verification tells it you are authorized to represent the business, which makes the profile more likely to show in results.
2. Use your real-world name, as it appears on your signage, website and stationery. Adding a city, a service, a tagline or a phone number is not permitted and can get the profile suspended: "Example Dental" stays "Example Dental", not "Example Dental: Best Dentist Calgary".
3. Choose the fewest, most specific categories. Google's test is whether a category completes the sentence "this business IS a", not "this business HAS a". It can also infer categories from your website and from mentions of the business elsewhere.
4. Set the address or the service area accurately (see the table below).
5. Publish accurate hours, including special hours for holidays. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show in local results.
6. Use a local phone number under the business's direct control rather than a central call-centre line where you can. Premium-rate numbers are not accepted.
7. Point the website field at the matching location page, since Google asks for a website that represents that individual location, then add photos and reply to reviews. Both are on Google's own list of ways to improve local ranking.

Storefront, service-area or hybrid

How you set the address depends on where you serve customers:

Google's service area rules set the limits: up to 20 areas, defined by city, postal code or another area rather than a radius, and an overall area that should not reach beyond about two hours' drive from where the business is based. A service-area business gets one profile for the whole area it serves; separate profiles are allowed only for separate locations with their own staff and service areas. So the Calgary plumber lists Calgary, Airdrie, Cochrane and Okotoks, not every town in Alberta. Businesses selling age-restricted products, such as alcohol, cannabis or weapons, need a storefront.

Two naming rules matter in bilingual markets such as Canada. A profile must not repeat the same name in two languages or scripts, even if the sign does. But a chain whose locations consistently use a different name in one region may use it there: Google's own example is a fast-food chain known by a French name in Quebec and by its English name in the rest of Canada and the US.

Make your name, address and phone consistent everywhere

NAP stands for name, address and phone number, the three details every listing of a business repeats. A citation is any mention of them on another site: a map platform, a directory, an association's member list, a social profile. Keeping them identical matters because platforms check them against each other. Bing says it verifies what business owners submit by comparing it with information across search engines, websites and social media, and recommends keeping name, address, phone number and website consistent across every channel.

Treat your website as the source of truth and copy from it:

• Name: exactly as on the Business Profile, down to "&" versus "and".
• Address: in the format your national postal service uses, with the suite or unit on the second line, as Google's guidelines ask.
• Phone: one primary number per location, written with the country code on the website and in structured data.
• Website: one URL per location, the same one everywhere.

Where to list the business

List the business where your customers look, in this order:

1. Google Business Profile, set up as above.
2. Apple Business. Apple announced in March 2026 that Apple Business Connect would be folded into a new, free platform called Apple Business from April 14, 2026, in more than 200 countries and regions, with existing Business Connect locations migrated automatically. It controls the place card people see in Apple Maps, along with location details in Safari and Spotlight, and it reports how customers search for, view and act on the listing.
3. Bing Places for Business, also free, which feeds Bing's local results. You can import listings from Google Business Profile and sync them weekly, biweekly or monthly. A listing already verified on Google is verified on Bing automatically and typically published within 7 to 12 days. Bing's own help warns that syncing can create duplicates if the listing already exists there, and that categories and UTM tags may not carry over exactly. While a listing is synced, you edit it in Google, not in Bing.
4. The directories your field actually uses: a professional body's register for a lawyer or accountant, a trade association's member list for a builder, the chamber of commerce in each city where you have an office. The specific sites differ between Calgary, Manchester, Melbourne and Austin, so build the list per market.
5. Your social profiles, with the same NAP as everything else.

Stop there. Google's spam policies list low-quality directory and bookmark links as link spam, and a long tail of thin directory entries adds upkeep without adding trust.

Paid listing-management services push one set of business data to many directories from a single dashboard. They save time for a chain with dozens of locations. They cannot fix wrong source data, and they are no substitute for owning your Google, Apple and Bing listings directly, in accounts the business controls.

When you move or rename the business

A move or a rebrand is when inconsistency starts. Update the Business Profile first, then Apple Business and Bing Places, then your website and every directory on your list. Never create a second profile for the same location: Google allows one per location. A minor name change, where the proper nouns, services and category stay the same, can be edited on the existing profile. Anything bigger counts as a new business: mark the old profile as closed and create a new one.

Earn reviews within Google's rules

Reviews do two jobs: they feed prominence, and they are what people read before they call. Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking, and its review tips describe the allowed way to collect them. A process that works for any business:

1. Create a review link or QR code in the Business Profile. Customers need a Google Account to post, though it does not have to be a Gmail address.
2. Ask every customer, at the same point (after the invoice is paid, after the appointment), in the same words.
3. Reply to reviews, especially where you can answer a question or explain what changed. Keep replies short, specific and free of promotions, and never reveal a reviewer's private information.
4. Take disputes offline: invite the reviewer to call or email, and flag a review only when it breaks Google's content policies.

Google's Maps content policy is explicit about what merchants may not do:

• Offer incentives, such as payment, discounts or free goods and services, in exchange for a review, or for changing or removing a negative one.
• Discourage negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive ones.
• Pressure customers to review while they are on the premises, or ask for specific content.
• Set staff quotas for reviews, or ask for reviews that name staff members.
• Post or solicit reviews from people with a conflict of interest: current or former employees, contractors, family or competitors.

The consequences go beyond deleted reviews. When a business breaks the fake-engagement policy, Google may restrict its profile: no new reviews for a set period, existing reviews unpublished for a time, or a warning telling customers that fake reviews were removed.

What the law says in different countries

Platform rules are not the only ones. Consumer-protection regulators in the main English-speaking markets treat fake and manipulated reviews as deceptive:

Note the gap between the two sets of rules. Australia's regulator accepts a disclosed incentive offered regardless of the rating, while Google prohibits incentives for Google reviews outright. On each platform, follow the stricter rule.

Showing reviews on your own website

Publishing testimonials on your site is fine, with two limits. Google's review snippet guidelines make pages with LocalBusiness or Organization markup ineligible for review stars when the business controls the reviews about itself, including reviews pulled in through an embedded widget, so marking up your own reviews earns no stars. And in the UK, the CMA's short guide for businesses makes any business that publishes consumer reviews responsible for preventing and removing fake ones, including on its own website.

Build location pages that are not doorways

Every real location deserves its own page on your website, and every Business Profile should link to its page. A good location page answers what someone about to visit or call needs to know:

• The name, address and phone number exactly as on the profile, as text rather than an image.
• Opening hours, holiday hours and how to get there: parking, transit, the entrance, accessibility.
• An embedded map and a click-to-call link for visitors on phones.
• The services offered at that location, which may differ from the head office.
• Who works there, photos of the actual premises, and reviews or project notes from customers there, with their permission.
• A title and main heading that name the service and the place, such as "Family dentist in Calgary, AB".

That is most of what on-page SEO means for a local business: the page states plainly what you do and where, in the title, the heading, the body text and the structured data, so the relevance signal on your site matches the one on your profile.

A service-area business has one profile but can have a page for each area it genuinely serves. The Calgary plumber might have pages for Airdrie and Cochrane that say what is different there: the services offered, call-out terms, the kinds of jobs that come up in that housing stock, and work completed in the area. If nothing is different, one page covering the whole service area beats a set of thin ones.

What turns a location page into a doorway

Google's spam policies describe the pattern to avoid. Doorway abuse includes pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and substantially similar pages that sit closer to search results than to a clearly browsable site structure. Two neighbouring policies catch the same shortcut: scaled content abuse, which covers generating many pages with generative AI or similar tools without adding value, and keyword stuffing, which explicitly includes blocks of text listing the cities and regions a page is trying to rank for. A footer that lists every suburb in the region is keyword stuffing, not local SEO.

A simple test: delete the town's name from the page. If what remains is the same as every other location page, it is a doorway. A page for a town where you have no office and do no work should not exist at all.

If you serve more than one country

Local pages sit inside your international structure, not beside it. Google's guidance for multi-regional sites recommends locale-specific URLs (a country-code domain, a subdomain or a subdirectory) and hreflang annotations for language or regional variants, such as English and French versions of a Montreal page. To decide which country a page is for, Google also reads signals on the page itself: local addresses and phone numbers, the local language and currency, links from other local sites and your Business Profile. It ignores geographic meta tags such as geo.position, and it advises against changing content by the visitor's IP address, partly because most of its crawling comes from the US and would miss the variations.

Add LocalBusiness structured data

Structured data states, in a form machines read reliably, what the location page already says. With LocalBusiness markup you can tell Google about opening hours, departments and other details it may show in the knowledge panel for a business, though Google does not guarantee that any feature will appear. The rules that matter:

• Mark up each location on its own page, using the most specific schema.org subtype that fits (Dentist, Plumber, Electrician). If you need more than one type, list them in an array; Google does not support additionalType.
• name and address are required. Google recommends geo (latitude and longitude to at least five decimal places), openingHoursSpecification, telephone with the country and area code, url pointing at that location's own page, and priceRange under 100 characters.
• Leave out aggregateRating and review for your own business. Google recommends them only for sites that capture reviews about other businesses.
• Keep the markup identical to the visible page and to the profile. Google's guidance on its AI features repeats the point: structured data should match the visible text.

A storefront clinic in Calgary (example data) looks like this:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Dentist",
  "name": "Example Dental",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/locations/calgary/",
  "telephone": "+1-403-555-0142",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "100 Example Street SW, Suite 200",
    "addressLocality": "Calgary",
    "addressRegion": "AB",
    "postalCode": "T2P 0A1",
    "addressCountry": "CA"
  },
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": 51.04473,
    "longitude": -114.07186
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [
    {
      "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
      "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
      "opens": "08:00",
      "closes": "18:00"
    }
  ]
}

For a branch in another country, change addressCountry (GB for Manchester, AU for Melbourne) and write the address and phone the way that country does. Google asks for as many address properties as possible rather than all of them, so a service-area business that hides its street address on Google can limit the markup to what it shows publicly, such as the city, region and postal code. Schema.org's areaServed property describes the areas served, but Google's documentation does not list it among the properties it supports, so treat it as description rather than a lever. Test the page with the Rich Results Test and check how Google sees it with the URL Inspection tool in Search Console.

Earn local links and mentions

Links and mentions are the rest of prominence. Google says prominence is based partly on how many websites link to a business, and Bing counts how often a business is mentioned across the web. For a local business, the links worth having come from the place itself:

• Local news and community sites, when you have a genuine story: a new location, an event, data about the area that nobody else publishes.
• Associations and chambers of commerce whose member directories link to their members.
• Suppliers and manufacturers with dealer or installer locators.
• Partners you actually work with, such as the builder who recommends your electrician or the clinic that refers patients.
• Sponsorships of local teams, charities and events. If you pay for the placement, the link should carry rel="sponsored" or rel="nofollow": Google's spam policies accept paid links only when they are qualified this way.
• Local resources people link to because they are useful, such as a guide to permit rules in your city or answers to the questions your customers ask most.

The same spam policies list what not to do: buying or selling links, excessive link exchanges, partner pages that exist only for cross-linking, low-quality directory links and automated link building. A link that would embarrass you if a customer clicked it is not worth having.

Measure local SEO results

Do not measure local SEO by searching from your own office. Google's Search Console documentation notes that results depend on the time, place, device and recent history of the person searching, and in local search the searcher's location is itself a ranking factor. Use the data the platforms report instead:

A few details keep the numbers honest:

• Business Profile performance is available only for verified profiles, includes activity from both organic results and Google Ads, and counts a viewer at most once a day. The search-terms list updates at the start of each month and can take up to five days to appear. With several locations, you can download them all into one spreadsheet to compare.
• GA4 can receive profile data directly. In GA4, open Admin, then Product links, then Google Business Profile links; you need the Administrator or Editor role in GA4 and to be an owner or manager of the profile.
• In Search Console, filter the Performance report by page to see each location page, by query to find searches that include a place name, and switch to the Countries dimension if you serve more than one country.
• AI search needs nothing extra. Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode have no special requirements, lists an up-to-date Business Profile among the fundamentals that still matter, and counts traffic from those features in Search Console's totals.

Also tag the profile's website link with UTM parameters, so visits from it can be told apart from ordinary search clicks in GA4's traffic acquisition report. Google recommends always setting utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign, in consistent lowercase:

https://www.example.com/locations/calgary/?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=gbp-calgary

Review the figures monthly for each location, and compare against the same month last year where you can, because many local businesses are seasonal.

A local SEO checklist

Use this as the order of work for each location:

1. Confirm the business is eligible, then claim and verify its Google Business Profile.
2. Set the real-world name, the fewest specific categories, the address or up to 20 service areas, hours and a local phone number.
3. Publish the same name, address and phone on your website, then claim Apple Business and Bing Places.
4. Add the professional, trade and chamber directories that matter in each market, and nothing more.
5. Build one location page per storefront, and service-area pages only where the content genuinely differs.
6. Add LocalBusiness structured data that matches the page, and validate it.
7. Set up a review request that goes to every customer the same way, and reply to reviews.
8. Earn links through local press, associations, suppliers, partners and qualified sponsorships.
9. Link the profile to GA4, tag its website link, and review profile and Search Console data monthly.
10. When anything changes (address, phone, hours, name), update the profile first and every listing after it.

Local SEO is mostly operational discipline: the same correct facts in every place, and reviews and links earned rather than manufactured. Our SEO service covers local search for businesses that serve an area: Google Business Profile, consistent name, address and phone, location and service-area pages, and guidance on collecting reviews. If crawling, indexing and ranking are new territory, start with how the Google search engine works. An IT company that serves one region needs local search and more; our guide to SEO for IT companies and MSPs covers the service pages and proof its buyers look for.