How Does Local SEO Work?
Under the bonnet, local SEO is simpler than it sounds. You feed Google clear signals about your business. Google weighs them against three factors to decide who to show for a local search. Get the signals right and you climb. Here is exactly how the machine works.
Local SEO works by feeding Google the signals it uses to rank local businesses. You optimise your Google Business Profile, build local content, earn reviews and keep your listings consistent. Google then weighs these against three factors, relevance, distance and prominence, to decide which businesses to show. You cannot change distance. You can, however, strongly influence the other two, which is exactly what local SEO does.
A system you can
actually influence
Ranking factors
Relevance, distance and prominence. These are the three things Google weighs for every local search.
You can influence
Distance is fixed. Relevance and prominence are firmly in your control through the right work.
Main signals
Your profile, content, reviews and citations are the four levers that feed the whole system.
Signals go in, a ranking comes out
Think of local search as a machine. On one side you feed in signals about your business. Inside, Google weighs those signals against what it knows about the searcher. Out the other side comes a ranking, the order businesses appear in for that search. Local SEO is the practice of feeding the machine the strongest possible signals so it ranks you higher.
The signals you feed in are mostly the same four things: your Google Business Profile, your website content and structure, your reviews and your citations across the web. Google takes these and judges them against three factors. Relevance is how well you match what was searched. Distance is how close you are to the person searching. Prominence is how well known and trusted your business is. Two of those three are firmly within your control.
That is the whole model. The diagram below shows it end to end, from the signals you control, through Google's three ranking factors, to your position in the results. Understand this and every other local SEO task starts to make sense.
What Google weighs
for every local search
How well you match
Relevance is how closely your business fits what someone searched. A complete profile, the right categories and clear local content all tell Google exactly what you do, raising your relevance for the searches that matter. This is firmly in your control.
How close you are
Distance is how near your business is to the searcher or the area they searched. It is the one factor you cannot change, since you cannot move. The answer is to be so strong on relevance and prominence that you appear across a wider area despite distance.
How well known you are
Prominence is how established and trusted your business appears. Genuine reviews, consistent citations and a solid web presence all build it. This is the factor with the most room to grow. It is where steady local SEO work pays off most over time.
The local ranking
machine
The signals you control feed Google's three ranking factors, which decide your position in local results.
Step 1 · the signals you control
You control this
Fixed
You control this
Five things that strengthen
your signals
Two businesses feeding
the same machine
Ranks well locally
- Complete, optimised profile
- Clear local content and categories
- Plenty of genuine, recent reviews
- Consistent citations everywhere
- High relevance and prominence
Struggles to appear
- Thin or unverified profile
- Vague content and wrong category
- Few reviews, none of them recent
- Mismatched listings across the web
- Low relevance and prominence
We strengthen every signal
that ranks you locally.
Profile, content, reviews and citations, all optimised to lift your relevance and prominence, which is what climbs the local results. We do the work, you get the customers. Free quote, from £350 per month.