Local SEO is how Google decides which businesses to show when someone in your town searches for the service you sell. It is mostly site architecture, content, and your Google Business Profile. Here is how it actually works.
The three things Google uses to rank local results
Relevance. Does your website mention the service the searcher is looking for, in the town the searcher is in? If yes, you are eligible to rank. If no, you are not.
Distance. How close is your business to the searcher? Google weights this heavily for "near me" searches. The closer your address or service area is, the better.
Prominence. How well-established is your business online? This includes your Google Business Profile completeness, your review count and quality, citations on directory sites, and links from other local sites.
What you can control
You can fully control relevance through your website. You can fully control your Google Business Profile. You can mostly control prominence over time through review collection and content publishing. You cannot control distance. That is set by where you are based.
The two-part local SEO playbook
Part 1: Website architecture
A page for each service in each town you serve. This is the single biggest lever. Most contractor sites have one Service Area page that lists every town in a paragraph. That ranks for nothing. The site that has 50 individual service-by-town pages outranks the site that has 1.
Part 2: Google Business Profile
Claim it, verify it, fully complete it. Add every service category. Upload real photos every month. Collect reviews from happy customers. Respond to every review, good or bad. Add posts when you have news.
What is overrated
Blog posts full of generic "tips and tricks" content. Backlink-buying schemes. Schema markup without underlying content. Speed-optimization beyond the basics.
What is underrated
Internal linking between your service-by-town pages. Real photos on every service page. Asking for reviews after every job. Replying to every Google review within 24 hours.
How long until you see results
If you start from zero, plan on 3 to 6 months to see meaningful movement. The pages we publish today usually start showing up in search within 48 hours but do not rank well until Google has crawled them, watched user behavior, and built confidence in the site over time.
How Bindingstone does local SEO
We bake the page architecture into every WaaS site from day one. A page for each service in each town you cover, all properly internally linked, all in the sitemap. We set up and optimize the Google Business Profile. We do the monthly content updates. All bundled in the $497/month, no separate "SEO retainer".