Local SEO for small business: what Google publishes, and what you can test yourself

Start from what Google says out loud

Local SEO is the work that decides whether nearby customers find you in the map results and the links under them. There is an enormous amount written about it, and very little of that writing separates published fact from folklore. So begin with the published part.

Google's help page for business owners says local results are based on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what was typed. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well known the business is. The same page says something owners rarely hear from agencies: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

That is roughly the whole of it. Google does not publish weights, thresholds, or a checklist that guarantees position three. Anyone who tells you a specific action moves you a specific number of places is describing their own experience or someone else's blog post. Some of that folklore is probably right. None of it is documented, and you should treat the two differently when you are spending your Saturday on this.

Distance is the factor you cannot argue with

Distance does more work than owners expect, and it is the one lever you do not have. Two people standing eight blocks apart get different map results for the same words. Which means your ranking is not one number. It is a different number at every point on the map, and asking "where do I rank for dentist near me" has no single answer.

The practical consequence is about where you spend effort. A studio on the east side is not going to out-rank the west-side studios for west-side searchers by writing more blog posts. What it can do is win its own catchment convincingly: be the obvious answer within the radius where distance is already on your side, and stop measuring yourself against a competitor whose real advantage is a postal code.

If you serve customers at their location rather than yours, set your service area on the profile and hide the street address. Google's guidelines for representing your business say to create the profile for your actual real-world location, that PO boxes and virtual offices are not acceptable, and that service-area businesses should hide a residential address. Owners break that rule constantly by renting a mailbox in a better neighbourhood. It is a listing-removal risk, not a shortcut.

Relevance is the part you write

Relevance is the factor where you actually get to say something, and most profiles say almost nothing. The primary category is the strongest statement of what the business is. Google's guidelines tell you to pick the fewest categories that fit and to choose ones that complete the sentence "this business is a", rather than describing something the business happens to have.

After the category comes the service list. You can add each service with a description and a price on the profile itself, which Google documents under managing your services. Fifteen minutes of typing here is the highest-value fifteen minutes in local SEO, and it is the field most often left empty. If someone searches for a specific treatment and your profile has never named that treatment anywhere, you have not given the relevance side anything to match.

The business description holds up to 750 characters and shows in the "From the business" section, per Google's page on editing your Business Profile. Write it the way you would answer a customer who asked what you do, not the way you would write a press release.

Prominence, and the sentence Google leaves vague on purpose

Prominence is the fuzzy one. Google's ranking page says prominence means how well known a business is, and adds one line about reviews: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." That is the entire published statement. No count, no cadence, no ratio.

An entire industry has been built on filling that silence in. You will read that a burst of reviews outperforms a slow trickle, or that a particular average beats a particular volume. Those are guesses dressed as findings. What you can act on without guessing is the documented part: keep genuine reviews coming in, from everyone, in a way that survives Google's policies. That is a different post, and the policy detail in it matters more than the tactics: how to get more Google reviews.

The other half of prominence is everything about you that exists off your own website. Being listed accurately in the directories your industry actually uses. Being mentioned by the neighbourhood association, the supplier who lists its stockists, the local paper that covered the opening. None of that is a trick and none of it is fast.

Read your own numbers before you change anything

Owners rewrite their profile and then have no idea whether it did anything, because they never wrote down the starting point. Google gives you the starting point for free. The Business Profile performance report shows views, calls, direction requests, website clicks, bookings, messages, and the search terms people used to reach you. The search-terms breakdown updates monthly, so it lags; the interaction counts do not.

Two things to do with that report before you touch anything else.

• Export or screenshot the last 90 days. Calls, direction requests, website clicks. That is your baseline, and without it every later conversation about whether this is working is an argument about vibes
• Read the search terms and look for what is missing. If you do a service every week and it has never once appeared in that list, the profile has never told Google you do it

Do the same on the website side with Search Console's performance report, which shows the queries your pages appear for, impressions, clicks and average position. Both tools are free, both are yours already, and between them they answer most of the questions people pay agencies to speculate about.

A two-week test you can run yourself

You can run a small honest experiment instead of trusting anyone, including us. It takes about twenty minutes to set up.

• Write down ten queries a real customer would type. Include the ones with a neighbourhood in them and the ones without
• Check them from one fixed place, on one device, signed out, and note where you appear in the map results. Personalised results and your own location will move things around, so keep the conditions identical each time
• Change one thing. The primary category, or the service list, or the description. One, not five, or you will never know which mattered
• Wait two weeks. Re-check the same ten queries from the same place, and pull the performance report for the same window
• Compare interactions, not positions. A position that moved without the phone ringing is a number, not a result

Two weeks is long enough to notice a profile change taking hold and far too short to judge anything on the website side. Search on the content side of this work moves on a scale of months, which is the honest and unwelcome part of the answer.

Make your details match, then leave them alone

Your name, address and phone number should read the same on Google, your own site, and every directory that lists you. Google's guidelines are explicit that the name should reflect the real-world name used on your storefront and signage, without taglines or extra keywords bolted on, and that the phone number should connect to that individual location rather than a call centre.

This is a one-afternoon job that people turn into a subscription. Make a list of every place your business is listed, fix them in one sitting, and then only touch them when something genuinely changes. There is no ongoing value in re-editing a correct listing.

The website half nobody wants to do

A profile can only carry you so far. The searches with money attached tend to be specific, and specific searches go to pages that discuss the specific thing. If every question a customer asks on the phone is answered on your website in plain language, you have a site worth ranking. If your site is five pages of adjectives, you do not.

Google publishes a set of self-assessment questions for exactly this in its guidance on creating helpful, people-first content. Two of them are worth pinning above your desk: "Does your content clearly demonstrate first-hand expertise and a depth of knowledge?" and "After reading your content, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough about a topic to help achieve their goal?" Read your own service page and answer honestly.

Write down the questions you answered on the phone this week. Parking. Whether you take a particular insurance. What it costs. How long it takes. Whether you see kids. Each of those is a page, and each of those pages is also what an AI assistant has to work from when someone asks it to find them a good one nearby. Prices in plain text, neighbourhoods named in plain text, no PDF, no image of a menu.

What to ignore

City pages for cities you do not serve. Directory bundles sold by the hundred. Anyone quoting you a position and a date in the same sentence. Also ignore the dashboard that reports your ranking as a single number, because as soon as you understand the distance factor you know that number is an average of a map, not a fact about your business.

And be suspicious of any plan whose first month is described in terms of results. The profile work shows up sooner than the website work, but neither is a switch. Expect about 90 days before search movement is worth discussing, and judge the early weeks on whether the work is actually being done.

How we handle this, and what it costs

Local SEO sits inside Organic Growth, which is $1,000 CAD a month. That covers your Google Business Profile and reviews, the content and the search work under it, and your website built and edited when you ask. Review requests and review replies are part of that line, not an add-on.

We sell four lines and they are separate, with no discount for taking more than one. Organic Growth is $1,000 a month. Paid Growth is $1,000 a month, with the ad budget separate and paid from your own account, a minimum of roughly $1,000 a month in spend before a campaign can learn anything, and coverage up to $10,000 a month. B2B Sales is $2,000 to set up and then $1,000 a month. Automation starts at $1,500 to build and $500 a month after that. All figures CAD.

The constraint that comes with this one: search takes about 90 days to move. Ads are the only line that changes a number inside a month. You will see the week's work before then, and you approve everything from your phone.