9 Local SEO Strategies That Work

Local SEO advice tends to drift into vague generalities. These nine are specific, tied to features and changes that existed in 2018, and worth doing in roughly this order.

1. Fully complete your Google My Business profile, not just the basics

Business name, address and phone number were table stakes. What differentiated listings in 2018 was completeness: accurate categories (primary and secondary), business hours including holiday hours, a written description and photos uploaded directly rather than left to whatever customers happened to post. Incomplete profiles were a common, easily fixed reason a business ranked below a competitor with a thinner offering but a fuller listing.

2. Use Google Posts to keep your listing active

Google rolled out Posts in 2017 and expanded it through 2018, letting businesses publish short updates, offers and events directly to their Google My Business listing, visible in search and Maps. Most businesses ignored it. The ones that used it regularly signaled an actively maintained listing, and it gave them a free way to surface time-sensitive offers directly in local search results.

3. Monitor and answer the Q&A feature on Google Maps

Google added a public Q&A section to Maps listings that let anyone, not just the business, post questions and answers. Left unmonitored, this became a place where inaccurate or unhelpful answers from strangers sat at the top of your listing. Businesses that checked it regularly and posted their own accurate answers to common questions controlled the narrative instead of leaving it to guesswork.

4. Respond to every review, not just the negative ones

Review response had become an expected signal by 2018, both to customers deciding whether to trust a listing and reportedly as a factor in how Google’s local algorithm weighed a business’s engagement. A short, specific reply to a positive review and a calm, non-defensive reply to a negative one did more for credibility than chasing a slightly higher star average.

5. Get your NAP consistent everywhere it appears

Name, address and phone number inconsistencies across directories (a suite number missing in one place, an old phone number lingering in another) quietly undermined local ranking signals. A single afternoon spent auditing the major directories against your Google My Business listing fixed a problem most competitors never bothered to check.

6. Fix mobile page speed before Google’s July 2018 update penalized you for it

Google’s mobile speed update, which began rolling out in July 2018, made page speed an explicit ranking factor for mobile search specifically. For local businesses, whose customers were disproportionately searching from a phone standing outside or in a car, a slow mobile site wasn’t just a conversion problem anymore, it was a visibility problem.

7. Build local citations that matter, not volume for its own sake

Listings on Yelp, industry-specific directories and local chamber of commerce sites carried more weight than a pile of low-quality directory submissions. A handful of accurate, relevant citations outperformed dozens of thin ones.

8. Add LocalBusiness schema markup to your site

Structured data telling search engines your address, hours and business type explicitly, rather than leaving them to infer it from page text, helped your listing display more completely in search results and gave you a small technical edge over competitors who skipped it entirely.

9. Write content that answers actual local questions

Generic “best of” blog posts rarely moved the needle. Content answering specific questions your actual customers asked (parking near your location, whether you served a particular neighborhood, what made your service different from the shop two blocks over) captured search intent competitors’ generic pages didn’t.

None of these nine require a large budget. They require someone on the team treating the Google My Business listing as a maintained asset rather than something set up once and forgotten.