Local SEO in plain terms

Ask “where do we rank for plumber?” and the only honest answer is: from where? Local queries produce different results street by street, and the business ranking #1 across town may be invisible from your office. Local SEO is normal SEO plus geography — and the geography changes both the tactics and the measurement.

Two contests, not one

A local query typically triggers two separate result sets:

1. The map pack — the boxed map with (usually) three business listings. This is powered largely by your Google Business Profile: category, reviews, completeness, and raw proximity to the searcher.
2. The organic results below it — regular web ranking, where your site competes on the usual merits: relevant content, solid technical foundations, links, and location signals in your pages.

They reward different work. A perfect website with a neglected Business Profile loses the map; a polished profile with a thin website loses the organic column. You want both.

What actually moves local rankings

• Category and completeness on the Business Profile — pick the most specific category, fill everything, keep hours current.
• Reviews, steadily. Volume, recency, and your responses. A trickle of genuine reviews every month beats a burst from your cousins in launch week.
• Consistent name/address/phone across your site and the directories that matter locally. Not the 200-directory spam packages — the handful people actually use.
• Location-relevant pages that would be useful to a human: service pages that name the areas you genuinely serve, with real information — not thirty auto-generated “plumber in {suburb}” clones, which is thin content wearing a trench coat.

Measuring without fooling yourself

Searching for yourself from the shop tells you your rank at the shop, personalized to you. Meaningful local tracking means checking from the searcher’s perspective: specified location, specified device, consistently over time. Track your city-qualified terms (“emergency plumber manchester”) as their own keyword set, mobile especially — local intent is overwhelmingly a phone activity, and mobile results differ anyway.

The pattern to watch is the same as all rank tracking: consistent measurements, weekly trend, wobble ignored. The map pack will churn; your job is to be the obvious, well-reviewed, well-described answer so the churn keeps landing on you.