Local search collapses into a Map Pack of three, and position four might as well be page two. Proximity you can't change. Relevance and prominence you can — and that's where most local businesses leave the win on the table.
Three patterns account for most of the local SEO work we take on. If one of them is yours, the audit will confirm it in a fortnight.
We rank first at our office and nowhere else.
Map Pack results shift street by street. A grid scan shows where your visibility actually ends, which is usually much closer than owners expect.
Grid rank scanCompetitors with worse service outrank us.
They have more recent reviews, a completer profile and consistent citations. Prominence is measurable and it's largely mechanical to improve.
Prominence buildWe serve five suburbs with one page.
One page can't rank for five places. Genuinely distinct local pages can — but duplicated city pages with the name swapped are worse than nothing.
Local page buildSequenced deliberately — each phase depends on the one before it. Numbering here means order, not decoration.
Benchmarks, not promises. Your starting point decides how far and how fast — the audit gives you both numbers before you commit to anything.
Map Pack shows three. Fourth place is effectively invisible on mobile.
Every applicable field filled — it's free and most competitors don't bother.
Recency matters as much as total count for local prominence.
Benchmarks reflect the standards we work to, not guaranteed outcomes.
Faster than national SEO. Profile and citation fixes can move Map Pack position within four to eight weeks. Expanding visibility across a wider service area takes three to six months, because it depends on review volume and local links accumulating.
In the Map Pack, realistically no — proximity is a core factor and fake addresses get profiles suspended. You can rank organically below the pack with a strong local landing page, and that traffic still converts. We'll be straight about which is achievable.
No. Service-area businesses can rank in the Map Pack while hiding their address, provided the profile is verified and set up correctly. The setup differs from a storefront and getting it wrong is a common cause of suspension.
Ask everyone, incentivise nobody. Gating — only asking happy customers — violates the guidelines and gets reviews stripped. A simple, consistent ask at the right moment, sent to every customer, outperforms any scheme.
Local SEO rarely runs alone. These are the three we most often run alongside it.
Structured data that earns review stars, FAQ dropdowns and sitelinks — and feeds AI answers.
Explore →GrowthTopic clusters, content audits and E-E-A-T writing built to rank and to convert.
Explore →FoundationCrawlability, indexation, site architecture and the render path Google actually sees.
Explore →No obligation, no sales sequence. We'll show you what's actually holding your local SEO back and what it would take to fix it.