Local SEO Services

Primary category is the single heaviest ranking field on a profile because Google uses it to decide which queries your listing is even eligible for — it functions as a gate before relevance, distance and prominence get weighed. We reverse-engineer it rather than guess: we run your priority queries, pull the categories on the listings actually ranking in the top three, and look for the narrowest category that still covers your core revenue service. Business owners almost always default to something broader because it feels more inclusive, but a broad category dilutes eligibility across queries you do not care about and loses to an exactly-matched narrower one. Secondary categories then extend reach without diluting the primary signal, which is why we treat them as a completely separate decision rather than a list to fill up.

Proximity-radius decay is the way your local pack position falls off as the searcher moves further from your registered address, and it is the hard ceiling most local SEO promises quietly ignore. The distance you can hold depends on category competitiveness and market density: a specialised B2B service in a mid-size market might rank across an entire metro, while a competitive consumer category in a dense urban market can decay within two or three miles. We measure yours with grid tracking before setting any expectation, so you get a real radius rather than an aspiration. Crucially, the fix for the area outside that radius is not more profile optimisation — it is genuinely differentiated website pages that can rank organically where your listing cannot, and any agency that conflates the two is selling you the wrong work.

A storefront listing shows your address publicly and can rank in the map pack around it; a service-area business hides the address and declares the regions you travel to. You cannot have both for the same location, and the choice has real consequences: storefront listings generally hold stronger local pack positions because Google has a verified physical point to anchor proximity to, while service-area listings trade some of that strength for legitimate coverage of a wider territory. If customers genuinely come to your premises, keep the storefront — hiding a real address to appear broader is a common and costly mistake. If they never do, a storefront listing at a residential or virtual address is a guidelines violation that risks suspension, and the service-area configuration is both safer and more accurate.

Total review count is a trust signal for the human reading your listing, but velocity and recency are what indicate to Google that a business is currently operating and currently being chosen. A profile with two hundred reviews where the most recent is fourteen months old reads as a business winding down; one with sixty reviews arriving steadily reads as active. This is why businesses often see a slow, unexplained ranking slide after a burst-then-stop review campaign — nothing was penalised, the freshness signal simply expired. We build the ask into an existing moment in your customer flow so the trickle is continuous and sustainable, because a process that depends on someone remembering to send requests will always decay back to zero.

A duplicate splits everything that makes a listing rank — reviews, photos, engagement history, citation references — across two entities that each look weaker than the single combined profile would. It also creates genuine ambiguity for Google about which record is authoritative, which can suppress both. Duplicates usually originate from a business move, a former employee's claim, or a data aggregator generating a record from an old dataset, and that last case is why deletion alone rarely works: the aggregator regenerates it. We identify which listing carries the real equity, merge or suppress the other through the correct support channel, then correct the upstream aggregator data so it stops coming back. Doing this before any signal-building work matters because otherwise you are strengthening two halves of a split profile.

AI-generated local results currently surface roughly 68% fewer businesses than a classic three-pack, which is the most consequential change in local search in years — the number of visibility slots is shrinking while the number of businesses competing for them is not. Practically, this raises the value of being unambiguously the best-documented answer rather than merely present: complete structured data, a profile with genuine detail in every field, review content that mentions specific services, and website pages that state plainly what you do and where. Thin, templated local pages fare especially badly here, because a generative system summarising options has nothing distinctive to extract from them. We build for both surfaces at once, since the classic pack has not disappeared and will not for some time.