Local SEO is the work of making your business show up when someone nearby searches for a service you offer, in the Google map pack, in regular results and in AI answers.
The Google Business Profile is the piece that matters most for most small businesses. It is the box with your rating, hours, photos and call button. People call straight from it without ever visiting your website. And most of the profiles we audit are missing half of what Google lets you fill in.
What Google looks at
Google has said publicly that local results are based on three things:
- Relevance. How well your profile and website match what the person searched.
- Distance. How far you are from the searcher, or from the location in their search.
- Prominence. How well known you are: reviews, links, mentions across the web.
You cannot move your shop closer to every customer. You can make your profile and site far more relevant, and you can build prominence steadily. That is the job.
The profile audit
We start with a line-by-line audit. These are the gaps we find most often:
- Wrong or too few categories. The primary category carries the most weight. A collision shop listed only as “Auto repair shop” is leaving searches on the table. Secondary categories should cover what you really do, and nothing you don’t.
- Empty services list. Google lets you list individual services with descriptions. Most businesses skip it.
- Stale photos. Old photos, or only the logo. Real photos of the work, the team and the space help people choose you.
- Hours that don’t match reality. Holiday hours missing, or a closed day showing as open. Customers who drive over to a locked door leave reviews.
- Website link to the home page. If the profile is for a specific service or location, the link should go to the page that matches it.
- Name, address and phone that don’t match other listings. Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing, Facebook and industry directories should all agree.
- Unanswered reviews and questions. Owners who respond show they are paying attention.
We fix what we find, document every change, and keep a before-and-after record.
Keeping the profile active
A finished profile still needs upkeep. On the monthly plan we:
- Publish regular Google posts about real work, offers or updates.
- Add new photos as you send them.
- Respond to reviews in your voice, or draft responses for you to approve.
- Watch for edits. Anyone can suggest a change to your profile, and Google sometimes accepts them without telling you. Wrong hours or a changed category can sit there for weeks.
- Keep the services list and categories current when your offering changes.
The website side of local SEO
The profile and the website work as a pair. When Google sees a profile for a roofing company in Boca Raton, it looks for a website that confirms it. That means:
- One page per core service, with plain answers to the questions customers ask.
- Area pages for the cities you actually serve, with real detail, not the same paragraph with the city name swapped.
- Consistent business name, phone and service area on every page.
- Structured data (schema) that tells search engines your business type, service area and FAQs.
- Two new guides a month on the Grow plan, written around questions your customers already ask.
At my own shop, Enthusiast Auto Works, I ran a full SEO audit and published seven guides with FAQ schema. That work, alongside a profile with 248 Google reviews at a 4.9 rating, is the same playbook we use for clients.
Listings and citations
Beyond Google, your business is listed in dozens of places. Some you created. Some were scraped and created for you. We find the important ones, fix the inconsistent ones and claim the ones you don’t control yet. This is tedious work. It is also the kind of thing that quietly holds a profile back.
What the monthly report shows
Every month you get a short report, not a 40-page export. It covers:
| Metric | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Calls from the profile | The most direct measure of local demand |
| Direction requests | Shows walk-in or drive-in intent |
| Website clicks from the profile | Shows people looking for more detail before buying |
| Search terms that triggered the profile | Tells us which services are pulling and which aren’t |
| New reviews and average rating | Prominence and trust over time |
| Website form leads | Leads that came through the site rather than the phone |
If a number drops, the report says so and says what we’re doing about it.
What we won’t do
We won’t create fake locations, virtual offices or keyword-stuffed business names. Google suspends those profiles, and getting a suspended profile back is slow and painful. We won’t promise a map-pack position. We will do the work Google rewards and show you what it produces.
Pricing
Google Business Profile management and local SEO are part of the monthly Grow plan, from $750 a month. That includes Google posts, the review system, two guides a month, AI-search upkeep and a monthly report. If you don’t have a website that can support local SEO, start with a new website, which includes a profile cleanup.
Book a call and we’ll pull up your profile together. Most owners see three or four fixable problems in the first ten minutes.