Local SEO and Google Business Profile

Most local service businesses put the website first and the Google Business Profile second. That order is backwards. Somewhere between 60 and 70 percent of organic local leads come through the map pack, which makes the profile the asset and the website the support structure.

What follows is the order I work in.

Start with the profile

Primary category decides more than any other field on the profile. Match whatever the top three competitors use for your target keyword. One wrong category costs real money every month, quietly, forever.

Pick one focus. A profile trying to be both roofing and general contracting ranks well for neither.

An exact-match business name backed by a real registered entity can outrank competitors with five times the reviews. Aged names carry extra weight through branded search volume.

Reviews are the ranking factor

• 200 reviews is the dominance threshold in most markets. New profiles need 20 to 100 before they capture meaningful ranking area.
• Reviews from Local Guides at level 3 and above carry roughly three times the weight of a standard review.
• The ideal review has photos, mentions the service naturally, and comes from a Local Guide.
• Respond to every review inside 24 hours, working location and service language into the response.

One asymmetry worth knowing: keyword-rich reviews help you. Keyword-rich review responses do not, and may hurt. Write responses like a person.

The 90-day window

Google weighs activity from the last 90 days far more heavily than anything older. Reviews, photos, posts, and Q&A responses past that line carry much less signal. Letting any of them go dark tells Google the business has no pulse.

Fill every field. Get the description close to its 750-character limit with the primary offer front-loaded. Upload fresh photos on a schedule. Keep hours accurate. Completeness compounds, and most competitors leave half of it blank.

Posts are internal links, not ads

This is the reframe that changes how you write them. Nobody buys a roof off a Google post. The value is the Learn More button: every post pointing at a page tells Google that page matters, and it gets that push again every week you post. Point everything at the homepage and nothing gets the benefit.

• Baseline twice a week. Then benchmark against the top three in your map pack and do 20 percent more than they do.
• Weekly posting pulls roughly three times the impressions of monthly.
• Rotate the keyword weekly across your money pages. Over a month that spreads crawl signal across four pages instead of hammering one.
• Each week's post links to the page matching that week's keyword. Rotation and link target move together.
• Daily posting with duplicate text can hurt you. Frequency without variation is a negative signal.

On copy: the limit is 1,500 characters and you should sit well under it. Four tight sentences beat a padded thousand. Plain language. No hashtags, no emojis, no phone numbers, no raw URLs in the body. The link belongs in the button.

On images: real photos or branded tiles, never stock. Put the keyword as visible text on the image, because Google reads it. Size them 540 by 405 so they don't crop. Across the whole profile aim for 85 percent real work and 15 percent branded material. If the profile looks like a marketing feed rather than proof of work, the mix is inverted.

Then the website

Target keyword in the meta title, H1, an H2, and the URL. 500 or more words on the main service page. Address in the footer sitewide. Verify Google has actually indexed every page that matters.

Location pages: build 8 to 15, not 50 to 200.Two hundred templated pages don't multiply reach. Google indexes five or ten and the rest dilute topical authority. Each page has to be genuinely different, with its own proof, service detail, landmarks, and testimonials. Identical pages with the city swapped will not rank, ever.

The real lever is the internal-linking graph rather than the page count. Top-three sites in competitive home-service markets average about 15 location pages wired together by more than 200 contextual internal links.

The pattern that builds that graph:

• On each service page, add a “where we offer this” section in the body listing every city you serve, each linked to its location page.
• On each location page, add a “services in this city” section listing every service, each linked to its service page.
• Anchor text is the full phrase, service plus city. Bare city names or bare service names are weaker.
• These links live in body content. Footer link blocks help crawling but carry much less ranking weight.

Expect map pack movement around 60 days after rewiring.

One thing to stop doing: blog content is largely useless for local service businesses. Location pages and service pages targeting buyer-intent keywords generate calls. Blogs generate impressions.

Backlinks, briefly

A site with DR 15 and ten backlinks ranks its profile significantly higher than a profile with no site at all. Beyond that, 30 good local links beat 300 bad ones.

Keep 90 percent of anchor text branded, naked URL, or generic. Only 10 percent should be keyword-matched. Build most links to the homepage. The five types that actually move local rankings are citations, local news, industry directories, local business partnerships, and guest posts on relevant sites.

The AI search layer

About 90 percent of what ranks in traditional search also ranks in LLM-powered search, so the work above is already most of the hedge. Google's AI Mode reads profile data directly, which means a complete profile is already positioned.

What's additive:

• Get named in listicles and roundups for your industry and city.
• Accumulate brand mentions on outside sites, including unlinked ones.
• Collect reviews on more than one platform.
• Keep name, address, and phone identical everywhere.
• Reddit, Yelp, and YouTube are becoming real signals for AI recommendations. Reddit is enough of a system to need its own writeup.

What determines difficulty

Below position 3 in the map pack you are effectively invisible. Clicks fall off a cliff at position 4.

Ranking difficulty tracks competitor investment rather than city size. A small market where two competitors are spending seriously is harder than a large one where nobody has bothered. High-ticket categories are often easier for the same reason.

This takes three to six months to show meaningful movement. Most owners quit at month three, which is right before the compounding starts.