Local SEO: the complete guide
Everything I know about ranking in the map pack, organised the way it should be learned rather than the order I happened to write it. Start at chapter one if you're new; jump straight to a chapter if you're not.
Google Business Profile optimisation: the complete 2026 guide
If you read one thing from this map, read this. It's the highest-leverage work in local SEO and the piece most businesses get wrong.
Read the guideFoundations
How local ranking actually works — relevance, distance and prominence — and what you can and can't influence.
Google Business Profile
The single highest-leverage asset in local SEO. Every field, in priority order.
- 2.1 Complete GBP optimisation guide
- 2.2 Choosing the right primary category
- 2.3 Secondary categories: when they help and when they hurt
- 2.4 Services and product listings
- 2.5 GBP posts: what they actually do
- 2.6 Photos, video and the 360 tour
- 2.7 Suspensions: causes and reinstatement
- 2.8 Handling spam and competitor edits
Citations & NAP consistency
Unglamorous, consistently underrated, and the thing most audits skip.
On-site local SEO
What has to exist on your own website for any of the above to work.
Reviews & reputation
Velocity beats volume. Here's how to build a system rather than a scramble.
Multi-location & scale
Everything changes past about five locations.
Measurement
Grid tracking, GBP Performance, and how to attribute what you changed.
All Local SEO articles
Every article in this silo, including ones not yet placed in a chapter.
Local SEO questions
Most local businesses see measurable movement in map pack rankings within 8 to 12 weeks, with compounding gains from month four onward. Competition density, profile condition and citation consistency all shift that timeline.
Yes — a single-location business can get most of the way with the guides on this page. Where outside help pays for itself is multi-location architecture, citation cleanup at scale, and suspension recovery.
More than before. AI answer engines lean heavily on structured business data and third-party corroboration when answering local queries, and those are exactly the assets local SEO builds. A clean, consistent, well-reviewed profile feeds both systems.
Want this done rather than read?
I take on a small number of local SEO clients each quarter — profile rebuilds, citation cleanups and multi-location architecture.