Local SEO That Still Works

Local search has stayed more stable than the rest of SEO. The fundamentals that worked five years ago still work: a complete business profile, consistent contact details, genuine reviews, and pages that actually answer local intent.

Your business profile is the highest-leverage asset and the most neglected. Fill every field, choose the most specific category, add real photos, keep opening hours accurate, and post updates occasionally. An incomplete profile loses to a complete one before any website is even considered.

Consistency of name, address and phone number across the web still matters. Directories, social profiles and your own site should all show the exact same details. Contradictory listings make it harder for search engines to trust any of them.

Reviews are a ranking signal and a conversion tool at once. Ask every satisfied client, make it a one-tap link, and reply to all of them, positive and negative. A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a burst followed by silence.

For websites, specificity wins. A page for each service, written for people who need that service in your area, outperforms a single page trying to rank for every service in every town. Generic areas-we-cover pages stuffed with place names do not work.

Write the pages for humans. Answer the questions a local customer actually asks, such as whether you cover their area, how soon you can come, what it costs and whether you are licensed, and the keywords take care of themselves. Content written for a crawler reads like it, and converts like it.

What stopped working: exact-match keyword domains, thin location pages generated at scale, bought links, and keyword-stuffed footer text. At best these do nothing now; at worst they hold a site back.

Local SEO is mostly maintenance. Keep the profile current, keep the reviews coming, keep the service pages accurate, and the rankings tend to look after themselves.