Local SEO

Local SEO comes down to one question: do people in your area find you when they search for something you offer? For a hair salon in Cambridge, a garage in Preston or a law firm in York, most customers come from within a few miles. You don't need to rank across the whole country, but you do need to be visible when someone nearby is searching.

Local SEO combines work on your own website with work outside it. Your business profile, listings in online directories, reviews and local links all count. You see the result in the map results, the regular search results and, increasingly, in the answers of AI assistants.

The great thing about local SEO is that you don't have to be the biggest to win. A small business that carefully maintains its details, reviews and pages can often be more visible in its own area than a national chain with a generic website.

What does local SEO consist of?

You can roughly divide local SEO into four building blocks:

• Your business profile: a complete and up-to-date Google Business Profile is the gateway to the local pack.
• Consistent details: your name, address and phone number are listed the same way everywhere.
• Local content: pages that make clear which services you offer and which towns you work in.
• Reputation: reviews, mentions in local media and links from associations or partners in your area.

A real-world example

A heat pump installer in Norfolk mainly gets calls from Norwich and Dereham, but also wants customers in King's Lynn and Great Yarmouth. His website has one general "Services" page. By creating a page for each town with real projects, photos of installations in that area and practical information about grants, he gives both visitors and search engines clarity. Important: each of those pages needs to say something of its own. Twenty near-identical pages where only the town name changes mainly produce duplicate content.

Common mistakes

1. Leaving an old address or phone number on outdated directories and social profiles.
2. Ignoring reviews or never replying to them.
3. Not stating clearly anywhere on your website where you operate.
4. Listing a home address as your business location when you don't receive customers there, without hiding the address as Google allows for service-area businesses.
5. Generating location pages at scale without real content.

Local SEO and AI assistants

If you ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini "which bike shop in Cambridge also repairs e-bikes?", you get an answer based on what can be found online about local businesses. Exactly how these systems choose their sources isn't fully known. But it stands to reason that clear, consistent information on your site and on trustworthy external platforms helps. A concrete description of what you do and where is therefore good not only for Google, but also for your AI visibility.

Handling local pages at scale

If you work in lots of towns or have several branches, maintaining local pages by hand quickly becomes a burden. With programmatic SEO for local landing pages, you build a template that is filled with real, unique data for each location, so every landing page offers value instead of being a copy.