Local search works differently from ordinary search, and the difference is worth understanding before doing any of the work: for local queries, the map pack and the ordinary blue links are two separate systems with different inputs.

Google Business Profile is the foundation

For anything with a physical location or a service area, your Google Business Profile matters more than your website does. It is what feeds the map pack, and for a lot of local queries the map pack is the whole visible result on a phone screen.

Claiming and verifying it is free. Completing it properly is the part people skip, and completeness is itself a factor:

• Categories. Your primary category carries the most weight of any single field. Choose the most specific one that fits, not the broadest.
• Hours, including special hours for holidays. Wrong hours produce the angriest reviews you will ever receive.
• Service area rather than an address, if you travel to customers and do not want your home address published.
• Photographs. Real ones, of the actual premises and work, added periodically rather than once.
• Products and services listed individually rather than summarised.

NAP consistency

Name, address and phone number need to be identical everywhere they appear: your site, your Business Profile, and every directory, association listing and social profile that mentions you.

Identical means identical. "Suite 4" and "Ste 4" are different strings, and inconsistency across sources reduces confidence that the listings describe the same business. The fix is unglamorous: pick a canonical format, write it down, and use exactly that everywhere.

This is also the one place where directory listings still do real, uncontroversial work. Citations, meaning mentions of your business details on other sites, are a recognised local ranking input, quite separate from the link-building question.

Reviews

Review quantity, recency and rating all feed local ranking, and reviews are also what a human actually reads before calling.

Ask for them, routinely, at the point the customer is happiest. Most people will leave one if asked directly and never think of it otherwise.

Respond to all of them, including the bad ones, briefly and without defensiveness. A measured reply to a harsh review is read by everyone who comes afterwards and is frequently more persuasive than the positive reviews.

Do not buy reviews. Platforms are reasonably good at detecting bought reviews now, the penalty is severe, and a cluster of five-star reviews in perfect English arriving in one week is obvious to customers as well as to algorithms.

On your own site

• Put the address and phone number in the HTML, as text, not inside an image. It is astonishing how often this is the actual problem.
• Add LocalBusiness structured data with your name, address, phone, hours and coordinates.
• Make one proper page per location if you have several, with genuinely different content on each. Templated pages with the town name swapped are a well-known pattern and are treated accordingly.
• Write about things specific to where you are. Local conditions, local regulations, work you have done in named areas. This is the content that cannot be copied by a competitor two counties away.

Proximity is the factor you cannot change

A large part of local ranking is simply how close the searcher is to you, and no amount of optimisation overcomes distance. Businesses frequently conclude something is wrong because they do not appear for searches conducted across town. Usually nothing is wrong. Checking your own ranking from your own office also gives a flattering and inaccurate picture, for the same reason.