SEO for Local Businesses: Start With Your Business Model

Which local business model are you?

Google’s guidelines for representing your business and its tips to improve your local ranking apply to every local business, but they play out differently by model. Before choosing keywords or writing pages, answer three questions. Do customers come to you, do you go to them, or both? How many real, staffed locations do you have? And are services delivered by the business as a whole, or by individual professionals within it?

Model	Address on the profile	Service area	Website structure
Storefront	Show the precise address, with permanent signage	Not needed	Product or service pages plus one location page
Service-area	Hide it if it’s residential	Yes, generally no more than about 2 hours’ drive	Service pages; area content only where genuinely specific
Hybrid	Show it, if staffed and receiving customers during stated hours	Yes	Location page plus service pages
Multi-location	One profile per real location	Per location, where staff and areas are separate	A locations hub with one page per location
Appointment-based	Show it if clients visit	Depends on the business	Service pages with a clear booking path
Practitioners	Own profile if public-facing and contactable at the location	Usually not	A bio page per practitioner, linked to the practice

Storefront businesses

Retailers, restaurants, gyms and offices that serve customers on site have the simplest setup and the most to lose from inaccuracy. The address must be the precise real-world location, with permanent signage if you show it. Hours should be your regular customer-facing hours, with seasonal and special hours kept current for holidays and closures. The name should be the one on your sign.

Retailers in the US, Canada, the UK and Ireland can show products on their Business Profile, following the Shopping ads policy, and Google lists in-store products among its local ranking tips for eligible retailers. If you also sell online, our Google Merchant Center service covers the product data side.

On the website, the location page (or the contact page, for a single location) should show the same name, address and phone number as the profile, plus directions, parking or access notes and hours. Product and service pages carry most of the relevance.

Service-area businesses

Plumbers, cleaners, mobile mechanics, landscapers and other businesses that travel to customers fall here. Google’s guidelines say a service-area business should have one profile for its central office or location, with a designated service area. If you operate from home, hide the address. You can’t list a virtual office unless it’s staffed during business hours. Service-area boundaries shouldn’t extend farther than about two hours’ driving time from where you’re based, although Google notes a larger area may be appropriate for some businesses.

Website structure is where service-area businesses most often go wrong. The temptation is a page for every town in the service area. Google’s spam policies describe doorway abuse as pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and give blocks of text listing cities as an example of keyword stuffing. Build strong service pages instead, and add area pages only where you have genuinely local content, such as jobs completed there, local conditions you deal with, or answers to questions customers there actually ask.

Distance is one of the three main local ranking factors, so a service-area business is less likely to appear for searchers far from where it’s based. Adding more city pages doesn’t change that, and inventing an address to get closer breaks Google’s guidelines.

Hybrid businesses

A hybrid has a location that receives customers and also serves customers elsewhere: a tire shop with mobile fitting, a flooring store that installs, a pet groomer with a van. Google lets hybrids show both the storefront address and a service area, as long as the location is staffed and receives customers during its stated hours. The website should present both clearly, with visit information on the location page and separate service pages where the on-site offering is different.

Multi-location businesses

Google allows one profile per business location and says not to create more than one page per location. Locations with separate service areas and separate staff each get their own profile. Each profile should use a phone number connected to that location, a local number rather than a central call center where possible, and one under the business’s direct control; redirecting or referral numbers aren’t allowed.

On the website, a locations hub linking to one page per real location is the clean structure. Each page should be genuinely about that location: who works there, services available there, directions, parking, photos of the actual premises and answers to local questions. If the only difference between pages is the address, they start to look like the substantially similar pages Google’s doorway policy describes. Keep the business name consistent too: store codes and location descriptors that aren’t part of the real-world name don’t belong in the name field.

Appointment-based businesses and practitioners

Salons, clinics, studios, consultants and advisors who see clients by appointment face two specific questions. The first is hours: Google’s guidelines say appointment-only businesses shouldn’t provide hours, so check whether that applies to you before listing hours you don’t keep.

The second is practitioners. Doctors, lawyers, real estate agents and similar professionals may have their own profile if they’re public-facing and contactable at the location, but not multiple profiles for different specializations. A practice website supports this with a bio page for each practitioner, linked from the relevant service pages.

Booking pages should load quickly, work well on a phone and make the next step obvious. If you use the services menu on your profile, it must list your complete set of services, and a third party managing the profile needs the owner’s consent for the menu URL.

How Google ranks local results

Google says local results are mainly based on three factors:

• Relevance: how well a profile matches what someone is searching for. Complete, accurate information, the right categories and a website that clearly describes your services all help.
• Distance: how far the business is from the searcher, or from the location Google infers they mean.
• Prominence: how well-known the business is, based on information such as how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. More reviews and positive ratings can help.

There is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and Google states that advertising with Google has no effect on organic presence. Categories should be as few and as specific as possible and describe what the business is (“this business IS a”), not what it has; they aren’t keywords. Google can also detect categories from your website and mentions elsewhere, so the site and the profile should agree.

Risks that apply to every model

• Keyword-stuffed names. Taglines, services, locations, all caps, phone numbers or URLs in the name field aren’t permitted and can lead to suspension. “1-800-Got-Junk” is acceptable only because it’s the real business name.
• Fake or ineligible addresses. P.O. boxes, remote mailboxes and virtual offices aren’t eligible; co-working spaces only qualify with signage, staff and customers received. False business information also falls under Google’s scam and fraud spam policy.
• Duplicate profiles. One profile per business, or per qualifying location.
• Descriptions. Useful information about services, mission and history; no links, and no focus on promotions, prices or sales. Promotions must link to their terms.
• Reviews. Respond to them, and ask customers consistently rather than only the ones you expect to be happy.
• Hiring help. Google reminds businesses that you’re responsible for the actions of companies you hire, and that you should never have to link to an SEO.

Can you do local SEO yourself?

Google’s own guidance on whether you need an SEO says a small local business can probably do much of this itself, starting with the SEO starter guide. Outside help makes sense when you have several locations, a redesign coming up, a profile with problems, or simply no time.

Our local SEO service covers Business Profile, on-page and technical work for any of these models. If you want to start smaller, a free manual on-page and technical SEO audit shows what your website needs first.

Sources

• Google Business Profile Help — Guidelines for representing your business on Google
• Google Business Profile Help — Tips to improve your local ranking on Google
• Google Search Central — Spam policies for Google web search
• Google Search Central — Do you need an SEO?