Local SEO: a practical guide to being found locally
Reviews, your Google Business Profile and local pages all work together. And more local searches now start in AI tools.
An introduction to local search engine optimisation
Local SEO is the work of ranking higher for searches with a local angle: keywords such as “plumber Leeds”, but also broader searches where Google chooses to show local results based on where the searcher is. The aim is to appear in the map results, in your Google Business Profile and among the organic results when someone in your area looks for what you sell.
In this post we cover:
- What local SEO is and why it matters
- The practical factors you can work on to rank better locally
- How reviews, Google Business Profile and local pages fit together
- How local searches are starting to happen in AI tools, and what to do about it
Sunbird is a search agency with 14 years in search, and that includes local SEO for trades and service businesses. This guide sets out what we would look at first if your customers find you locally.
Key takeaways
- Local SEO is about ranking for searches with a local angle, such as “service + town” or “near me” searches.
- The foundation is an optimised Google Business Profile, consistent business details (NAP+W) and a landing page for each location.
- Reviews carry a lot of weight: how many you have, how recent they are and what they actually say.
- Every local page has to offer something of its own. Copying the same text between towns no longer works.
- Local searches increasingly happen in AI tools, which draw on much the same material as Google’s results.
The main factors, and how to optimise for local SEO
Local SEO rests on a handful of recurring tasks: dedicated local pages, consistent business details, a well-kept Google Business Profile and reviews. We go through them one at a time.
Create local landing pages
As with all SEO, you need landing pages built around the keyword and its search intent. Get the SEO basics in place first. Then add information specific to the location, for example:
- Local contact details, address and opening hours
- The people who work there
- Which services you provide there
The aim, as always, is to satisfy the visitor and make sure they find what they came for. Add whatever fits. Treat this as a starting point rather than a fixed checklist, and go with what feels natural. Look at what the pages ranking at the top are doing, too.
Local citations
Local citations are places where your business name, address, phone number and website (NAP+W) are listed on other websites. That could be a directory such as Yell or Thomson Local that lists every removal firm in your town. Bing Places for Business and Apple Business Connect deserve the same care, because they hold your details for Bing Maps and Apple Maps. Being listed in the right places helps your rankings for local searches.
This matters even when the listing gives you no followed link to your website.
Search for your old addresses and phone numbers
Every piece of information about your business should be the same wherever it appears.
It is common for websites to list your business without you knowing. Search Google for your business name, old addresses and old phone numbers, and you will find most of the places you are mentioned. Anywhere that holds incorrect details should be updated.
Google Business Profile
If you do not yet have a Google Business Profile, start by creating and verifying one. It is often quick and sometimes automatic. Otherwise Google offers one or more ways to verify, such as a phone call, text, email, a video or a postcard with a code sent to your address.
Once you have control of your Google Business Profile, you should fill in:
- Name: Add your business name.
- Description: Describe the business accurately and include relevant keywords where they fit naturally.
- Website: Link to your website.
- Photos: Add good photos, ideally of different kinds.
- Opening hours: These should match your website.
- Products and services: Add every relevant product and service.
- Areas: Add every area you serve. If you have several offices, you can verify more than one location.
- Manage reviews: Encourage customers to leave reviews and reply to every one, positive and negative.
- Questions and answers: Google now offers the Q&A section only for some business categories and regions. If your profile has it, answer the questions people ask.
Reviews and ratings
Reviews are among the most important factors in local SEO. They affect where you appear in the map results and whether someone chooses to click on you, and Google itself says that more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking.
Your Google Business Profile is the obvious place for reviews, but there are others, such as Trustpilot, or Checkatrade if you work in the trades. If you have reviews from customers in a particular town, show them on that town’s page.
The star rating is only part of it. These also count:
- Number of reviews: more reviews send a stronger signal.
- How recent they are: a steady flow of new reviews says more than a large number of old ones.
- What they say: reviews that mention the service and the town help Google understand what you are good at, and where.
- Whether you reply: reply to every review, positive and negative. It shows that you are active and take your customers seriously.
Ask happy customers to write a few lines about what you helped them with, not just leave a star rating. It gives Google and future customers more to go on, and it usually means more people choose you.
Local backlinks
Links from locally rooted websites can be part of a natural link profile.
Are you already in touch with a local organisation that could link to you?
You should not sponsor or support local organisations purely for SEO. But if you were planning to anyway, the benefit to your local SEO may tip the balance.
These links are usually less relevant to your services as such, but they anchor you locally. Point them straight at your local landing pages.
Every local page has to offer something of its own
Swapping the town name and publishing the same text on twenty location pages no longer works. Google has become better at recognising pages that exist only for search engines, and thin or near-identical location pages risk lowering trust in the whole website.
Each local page should therefore offer something of its own. That could be:
- Photos of that particular office, or of jobs you have done in the area
- The names of the people who work in that location
- Reviews from customers in that town
- Which services you offer there, and any differences from other locations
Some recurring sections will of course look the same across locations, and that is fine. But the more unique, location-specific content you add, the stronger the page. You get better rankings and a page that visitors feel was written for them.
A common mistake: just the town in the anchor text
Avoid anchor text that contains only the name of the town. Use more descriptive anchor text that includes both the service and the place, such as “plumber in Leeds” rather than just “Leeds”.
Local searches are moving into AI tools
More and more people skip Google’s search box and put their local question straight to an AI tool. If someone asks “who is the best plumber in York?”, a tool that searches the web draws on the same kind of material that the organic results are built on: Business Profiles, reviews and well-structured local pages.
For you, that means one thing: the groundwork you do for classic local SEO is also the groundwork for being mentioned in AI-generated answers. But a few things carry extra weight when an AI has to interpret and summarise your business:
- Clear and consistent business information. AI tools are more likely to trust details that match everywhere they find them. If your address or opening hours differ from one website to the next, you become harder to recommend.
- Reviews with text, not just ratings. An AI tool reads what customers write. Reviews that mention the service and the town give it more to go on when it decides whom to put forward.
- Content that answers the whole question. Pages that clearly describe what you do, where you do it and for whom are easier to cite than a thin page with a few lines of text.
So you do not need to overhaul your strategy. If you look after your Google Business Profile, your citations and your local pages properly, you are well placed in ordinary search and in AI answers alike. More customers find you, wherever they start looking.
Google recognises local intent
Once Google has decided that a search has local intent, the results vary with the searcher’s location, even when the keyword contains no town name. Someone searching for “pizzeria” in Manchester and someone in Bristol will each see the pizzerias nearest to where they are.
Structured data for local SEO
Structured data is code that helps Google understand the information on your website, such as your address, opening hours and ratings. The right markup can make you eligible for rich results and improve your visibility.
If you use WordPress, plugins such as Yoast and Rank Math handle much of this automatically.
You can test your website with Google’s Rich Results Test and see which types you already use. Where relevant ones are missing, we recommend adding them.
Add LocalBusiness schema
There is a specific type of schema markup called LocalBusiness, designed for local businesses. Adding it helps Google understand and display key information about your business in the search results.
- Address and phone number: Use schema markup to state your business address and phone number. This makes it easier for Google to confirm your location and contact details.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Your Company",
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "123 Your Street",
"addressLocality": "Your Town",
"postalCode": "AB1 2CD",
"addressCountry": "GB"
},
"telephone": "+441234567890"
}Add opening hours
Use schema markup to state your opening hours. This is particularly important for telling customers when they can visit you.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Your Company",
"openingHoursSpecification": [
{
"@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
"dayOfWeek": [
"Monday",
"Tuesday",
"Wednesday",
"Thursday",
"Friday"
],
"opens": "08:00",
"closes": "17:00"
}
],
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "123 Your Street",
"addressLocality": "Your Town",
"postalCode": "AB1 2CD",
"addressCountry": "GB"
},
"telephone": "+441234567890"
}Reviews and ratings in your markup
Reviews and ratings build trust in your business, and schema markup can describe them. Know Google’s rules before you add it, though. A business that marks up reviews about itself with LocalBusiness or Organization structured data is not eligible for star ratings in Google’s results. Ratings must also come directly from your own users: never copy in your Google reviews or ratings from other websites. If you add review markup, as in the example below, use only reviews collected on your own website and do not expect stars in the search results from it.
{
"@context": "https://schema.org",
"@type": "LocalBusiness",
"name": "Your Company",
"aggregateRating": {
"@type": "AggregateRating",
"ratingValue": "4.8",
"reviewCount": "24"
},
"review": {
"@type": "Review",
"author": {
"@type": "Person",
"name": "A Customer"
},
"datePublished": "2026-05-20",
"description": "Great service and very friendly staff!",
"name": "Excellent experience",
"reviewRating": {
"@type": "Rating",
"ratingValue": "5"
}
},
"address": {
"@type": "PostalAddress",
"streetAddress": "123 Your Street",
"addressLocality": "Your Town",
"postalCode": "AB1 2CD",
"addressCountry": "GB"
},
"telephone": "+441234567890"
}Keyword research for local SEO
Keyword research for local SEO maps out which local keywords you can rank for and what search intent sits behind them. Once you have done it for one town, it will most likely look the same for the others.
- Start with the largest town or city you operate in
- Combine every service using the pattern “keyword + town”
- Decide which keywords to group together (read about semantic SEO)
- Use a tool that combines every town with every service
- Target and track the keywords that have search volume
Don’t forget “near me” and voice search
Local searches do not always contain a town name. More and more people search for “[service] near me” or ask their phone out loud, and then the wording tends to be longer and more conversational. Include those searches in your research and make sure your pages answer the whole question, not just “service + town”. That way you reach customers at the very moment they are looking for someone nearby.
Don’t forget traditional SEO
Work on local SEO should be seen as an addition to the usual SEO techniques:
- Technical SEO – Improve the code and the user experience.
- On-page SEO – Established and newer techniques.
- Structured data – Become eligible for rich results and improve visibility.
- E-E-A-T – A broader concept for earning trust.
Can you rank in towns where you have no physical address?
Without a verified address in a town, you cannot appear there with a Google Business Profile. You can, however, rank landing pages written for that town. It is somewhat harder if you have no actual presence there, but it works.
Frequently asked questions about local SEO
What is local SEO?
Local SEO is the part of search engine optimisation that deals with ranking for searches with a local angle. It covers your Google Business Profile, local citations, reviews and dedicated pages for each location, all so that you are found when someone in your area searches for what you offer.
What is a local SEO package?
A local SEO package is a combined service in which an agency handles the work that drives local visibility. In practice it usually includes optimising the Google Business Profile, managing citations and reviews, local landing pages and ongoing reporting. If you would like to know what suits your business, get in touch and we will go through it with you.
How long does local SEO take to show results?
It depends on the competition for your keywords and how strong your website is today. A well-kept Google Business Profile and corrected citations can have an effect fairly quickly, while rankings for highly competitive town keywords take longer. Local SEO is long-term work, not a one-off job.
Is a Google Business Profile enough?
No. An optimised Google Business Profile is the foundation, but to rank consistently you also need your own local pages, consistent business details, reviews and a website with the ordinary SEO in order.
Conclusion
Local keywords usually carry strong buying intent. Even with so much now done online, a handshake still counts for a lot.
Any business with local roots should make local SEO a priority.
If you would like help with your local SEO, see how we work on SEO, or book a free search audit and Nils will go through where you stand today.
