What Is Local SEO? How the Map Pack Actually Works

Local SEO is the work that gets your business into the map pack — the three-result block with a map that appears for searches with local intent. It runs on a different ranking system to organic results, and understanding that difference determines what is achievable.

The three ranking factors

Google states three factors for local results:

Relevance. How well your profile matches the query. Driven mostly by category selection, services listed and profile completeness. This is the factor you have most control over and it is the one most commonly left half-configured.

Distance. How far you are from the searcher, or from the location in the query. You cannot optimise this. It is the single most important fact in local SEO and the one most proposals avoid mentioning.

Prominence. How well known the business is — review volume and recency, citations, links, and general web presence.

What proximity means in practice

If your business is in Croydon, you will not rank in the Camden map pack. No amount of optimisation changes that, because distance is a primary factor and you cannot move.

What you can do is own your own catchment completely, and rank organically below the map pack for wider terms with genuinely useful content.

Any agency promising map pack rankings in areas where you have no physical presence is describing something that does not work. This is the clearest test of whether a local SEO proposal is honest.

Google Business Profile

For most local businesses the profile drives more enquiries than the website. Priorities, in order:

1. Primary category. The highest-leverage field on the entire profile and frequently wrong. Check what your best-ranking competitors use.
2. Secondary categories. Add every genuinely applicable one, but not ones that are a stretch — irrelevant categories dilute relevance.
3. Services and products. List them all, with descriptions. Most profiles leave this empty.
4. Attributes. Accessibility, payment methods, amenities. Some are used as filters in search.
5. Hours, including bank holidays. Wrong hours generate one-star reviews.
6. Photographs. Added regularly, not once at setup.

Citations and NAP

Your name, address and phone number should match everywhere they appear. Established UK businesses typically carry years of drift — an old address on Yell, a previous number on Thomson Local, a slightly different trading name somewhere else.

Each inconsistency is a small confidence penalty, invisible unless you audit for it. The work is corrective rather than accumulative: fix what is wrong, keep the format documented, stop.

Reviews

Volume and recency affect ranking. Rating and content affect conversion. Velocity matters more than total — forty reviews earned steadily beats forty earned in one month and none since, and the second pattern can trigger filtering.

Build the request into how you deliver work so reviews arrive continuously. Do not incentivise, gate by rating, or write them. Filtered reviews cost more than they gain.

Local landing pages

Build one only where you have something true of that location to say — the areas you cover, the local sectors you serve, work you have done there. A page per town with the name swapped in is a doorway page, has been classified as such for over a decade, and dilutes internal link equity across near-duplicates.

If you cannot write three genuinely location-specific paragraphs, cover that area within your main service page instead.

Service-area businesses

If you travel to customers rather than serving them at your premises, hide the address and define the service area. Displaying an unstaffed or residential address risks suspension. Note that ranking is still anchored to your registered location whatever the service area says — overstating it does not extend reach, it just makes you less relevant everywhere.