Local SEO

When someone searches for something with a location attached — explicitly ("dentist in Kolkata") or implicitly ("dentist near me") — search engines produce a different kind of result, drawing on a separate set of signals. Local SEO is the work of competing there.

Local results typically appear as a map with a small set of businesses listed beside it, above the ordinary organic results. Getting into that set is a distinct problem from ranking a web page, because it draws primarily on a business listing rather than on your website.

The practical consequence: a business can have a mediocre website and still appear prominently in local results, and a business with an excellent website can be absent from them entirely. They are separate systems that happen to appear on the same page.

This is the foundation. It is a free listing that controls what appears in the map results and in the panel that shows beside a search for your business name. Without one, you are largely absent from local results regardless of your website.

What to get right:

• Complete every field. Category, address, phone, hours, website, description, services. Incomplete listings compete poorly against complete ones.
• Pick the most specific primary category that genuinely fits. "Laptop repair service" is better than "Electronics store" if that is what you do.
• Add real photos. Of the actual premises, staff, and work — not stock imagery.
• Keep hours accurate, including holidays. Wrong hours produce a very specific kind of unhappy customer.
• Verify the listing. Usually by postcard, phone, or email depending on the business type.

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone — and the point is that these should be written identically everywhere they appear: your website, your Business Profile, directories, social profiles, and any listing site.

Inconsistencies are usually accidental and small — "Street" in one place and "St." in another, an old phone number left on a directory from years ago, a suite number present in some listings and missing in others. Search engines use these details to work out whether listings refer to the same business, and conflicting information makes that harder to establish.

Reviews influence both whether people choose you and how prominently you appear. The sustainable approach is straightforward: do work worth reviewing, ask satisfied customers to leave one, make it easy by sending the direct link, and reply to reviews — including negative ones, where a calm and specific response is read by far more people than the reviewer.

• Put the full address and phone number in the HTML, as text — not inside an image, where nothing can read it.
• Add LocalBusiness structured data with address, hours, and phone, as covered in the structured data lesson.
• Create a page per location if there is more than one, each with its own address and details, rather than one page listing them all.
• Write genuinely local content where it makes sense. Pages about the area you serve are useful to real visitors and reinforce location relevance — but only if they say something. A page repeating a service name against a list of neighbourhoods is a well-known low-quality pattern.