Local SEO, explained.

Not the fines. The sequence: the reviews go, the rating collapses, and then you are blocked from earning new ones for months. That order is the punishment.

The field most businesses fill with adjectives. What it is actually read by, the four things worth spending the characters on, and a structure that works.

A second listing you never created is splitting your reviews and your rankings between two versions of you. Six places to look, and what to do with what you find.

It works, which is the problem. Why the tactic that lifts you for a year is the one that removes you in a week, and what to do if you are already doing it.

The survey that asks how happy you are before deciding whether to show you the Google link. It is against Google's policy, it is a regulatory problem in several countries, and it does not even work.

Profile, website, content, citations, reviews, links, tracking. Every check that decides whether a nearby customer finds you, in the order to do them.

The most boring field on your listing, and one of the few that can both filter you out of results and get your profile suspended. Four mistakes and how to fix them.

Every guide to this is written by a web designer, so every answer is a design answer. The homepage's real job is disambiguation, and that is facts rather than messaging.

Of the three factors Google names, one is decided by where the customer is standing. Here is what that means for your strategy, and where the actual leverage is.

The lists name fifty platforms and put lead marketplaces alongside review sites. There is a two minute test that tells you whether any of them deserve your afternoon.

You compete on a factor you cannot change: how far you are from the person searching. Here is the strategy that works around it, and the one that does not.

Most businesses upload the wrong ten photos. Which types exist, which one Google actually shows, and the five shots worth taking this week.

Start with the date, not the theory. A sequence that separates a real fall from a measurement artefact, and finds the cause of the ones that are real.

Forty reviews in a fortnight and forty over a year are not the same asset. What the pattern signals, why campaigns underperform habits, and what to do after a quiet spell.

Four things a report must have, four that are filler, and three questions to ask about the one sitting in your inbox. Written by an agency, conflict included.

The blue line in the search results is the only sentence most people will read about your business. Six rewrites, and the reasoning behind each one.

The ask that works is short, specific and badly timed by most businesses. Wording you can use today, the moment to send it, and the two sentences that ruin it.

Links between your own pages are the cheapest ranking work available and the most commonly skipped. What they do, the three rules, and what we found on our own site.

Six fields do the work, two of them are barely discussed, and one field commonly included in example code is a manual action waiting to happen.

Four tiers of work, what each one includes, and the arithmetic that tells you which one you can afford. Including the case where the answer is none of them.

The honest answer depends entirely on where you are starting from. Four positions, what moves first from each, and the two things that are genuinely fast.

Most location pages are one page with the town name swapped. Here is what has to differ before a second page earns its place, and the test that settles it.

You are not writing to the reviewer. You are writing to the next hundred people who read it. Four situations, four replies, and the three-sentence shape that works.

Most SEO reports are a wall of numbers that answer no question. Five that do, where each one lives, and what a change in it should make you do.

Eight listings that do real work, then the ones nobody can sell you in bulk, then stop. Written against the 150-directory lists, not from one.

Eight reasons a business does not appear in the three map results, ordered by how often we find each one. Work down the list and stop at the first that applies.

Three setups, one right answer for your business, and a rule that catches out most tradespeople working from home. Plus what the twenty area limit really means.

What suspension actually is, the four causes behind almost all of them, and the order to do things in. Including the one action that makes recovery much harder.

Seven sources of links that already exist in your business, none of which involve emailing strangers. Plus the two that will get you into trouble.

Three letters that mean name, address, phone. Why a disagreement between them costs you, which disagreements actually matter, and which ones are fine to ignore.

Stop looking for topics. Three places in your own business already hold every idea you need, and one exercise produces a year of them in twenty minutes.

A record of your business already exists on Apple Maps and it is probably wrong. It is what Siri reads from, and you can place the pin yourself.

You need to know where calls come from. You also need one phone number everywhere. Both are achievable, and the way most businesses do it sacrifices the second for the first.

Three measurements, three numbers to beat, and an honest answer about how much they matter for a local business. No jargon, no lab scores.

Removal depends on which policy the review breaches, not on whether it is unfair. The six grounds that work, the argument that never does, and the plan B that matters more.

Your primary category decides which searches you are eligible for at all. Here is how to pick it, how many to add, and the mistake that quietly costs the most.

Not all backlinks help local rankings equally. Here's which channels actually move the needle for a local business, and which ones are a waste of time.

Google Maps, organic search, social, and AI assistants all send local traffic today. Here's which channel actually converts, and how to prioritize your time.

Paid ads get you in front of customers today. Local SEO gets you found for years. Here's how to actually split your budget between the two.

ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google's AI Overviews are becoming a real local discovery channel. Here's what actually changes, and what doesn't.

Relevance, distance, and prominence get all the attention, but they're not equally within your control. Here's what actually moves the needle.

Your Google Business Profile is the highest-leverage asset in local SEO. Work through this checklist to turn a half-finished listing into a lead engine.

There's no magic review count. Here's what actually matters more than the total number, and why chasing volume alone is the wrong goal.

Citations feel old-school, but consistent business listings across the web remain a core local ranking signal. Here's what to build, where, and how to keep it clean.

Directory submissions feel like a relic of 2015 SEO. Here's whether they still do anything, and where your time is better spent instead.