Local SEO hasn't died — it's shifted. Google still drives foot traffic and service inquiries, but what signals matter has changed. Here's what to focus on and what to stop doing.
Every few years someone declares that SEO is over. It’s never true, and it’s not true now. What is true is that the signals that matter have shifted, and if you haven’t updated your approach since 2021, some of what you’re doing is wasted effort.
Local SEO was never the same as general SEO. People searching for “best Italian restaurant near me” or “plumber in Phoenix” have immediate intent. They want something close, they want it now, and they’re often ready to call or walk in. The game is getting your business in front of that search at the right moment, and then giving those people enough trust signals to choose you.
The Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business) is the single highest-leverage local SEO asset most businesses have. It drives the Map Pack rankings, surfaces your hours and phone number directly in search, and shows your reviews to anyone looking.
Most businesses set it up once and never touch it again. That’s a mistake. Google treats your profile like a signal of whether you’re an active, trustworthy business. Profiles that get updated regularly, respond to reviews, and post consistently rank better than neglected ones, even when the underlying business is comparable.
What “keeping it up” actually looks like: make sure every field is complete and accurate, including the business description, service areas, hours, and categories. Post an update at least once or twice a month. It doesn’t need to be marketing copy. A photo of a recent job, a note about a new service, a heads-up about holiday hours. Consistency matters more than polish here.
This hasn’t changed. Reviews are what converts a searcher into a caller. They’re also a ranking factor. Businesses with more recent, higher-rated reviews consistently outrank businesses that stopped accumulating reviews two years ago.
The challenge isn’t that people don’t want to leave reviews. It’s that they don’t think to do it unless you ask. The most effective thing you can do is ask immediately after a positive interaction, while the experience is fresh. Send a direct link to your Google review page. Make it one tap, not a journey.
Don’t be pushy and don’t offer incentives (Google’s policies prohibit it and it backfires anyway). Just ask clearly: “If you were happy with the work, would you mind leaving a quick review? It really helps.” That sentence, sent by text right after the job, is responsible for more review volume than any complex system most businesses spend money on.
Google’s AI Overviews, the summaries that appear above traditional results for many searches, are now showing up for some local and service-based queries. When they appear, they pull the answer up front and reduce clicks to the organic results below.
The honest answer on how to adapt is: you can’t fully control whether your content gets pulled into an overview, but the same signals that help you rank in traditional search tend to help you get cited in overviews too. Structured information, clear answers to common questions, and authoritative local signals all matter.
More practically, the businesses most protected from AI overview cannibalization are the ones that convert based on trust signals (reviews, photos, response rate) rather than informational clicks. If someone is looking for a local plumber, they’re not clicking to read your blog post. They’re clicking because your reviews are good and your profile looks active.
NAP consistency means your name, address, and phone number appear identically across every directory listing online. Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, the local chamber of commerce website, industry directories. When Google sees your business information listed consistently, it increases confidence in your listing. When it sees conflicting information, it doesn’t.
This is unglamorous work but it has a measurable effect. Do a search for your business name and audit the top 20 results. Fix any listings with outdated addresses, wrong phone numbers, or old business names. Tools like BrightLocal or Moz Local can automate much of this.
If you serve multiple locations or neighborhoods, dedicated location pages are worth having. Not thin pages that just swap the city name into a template. Pages with actual local content: who you serve in that area, what’s different about the work you do there, testimonials from local clients, landmarks or neighborhoods you know well.
Service area pages work similarly. If you’re a contractor who covers six zip codes, a page for each service area, written with specific local content, will outperform a single generic “we serve the greater metro area” page every time.
Exact-match domain names (“bestplumberphoenix.com”) don’t carry the weight they once did. If you have one, fine, but it’s not a reason to rebrand. Keyword stuffing in your business name or description is a violation of Google’s guidelines and can get your profile suspended. Don’t do it.
Building hundreds of low-quality directory links is also diminishing returns at this point. Quality and consistency in the major directories beats volume in directories that no one uses or trusts.
Ask for reviews immediately after a good interaction. Not in a batch email at the end of the month. Right after. The window where a happy customer will actually follow through is narrow. A text message with a direct link, sent within 24 hours, converts at a meaningfully higher rate than anything else.
Most businesses know they should ask for reviews. Almost none have a system for doing it consistently. The ones that do outrank the ones that don’t, almost regardless of other SEO factors.
If you want to go deeper, including how to rank in AI search tools like ChatGPT and Perplexity alongside traditional Google results, I put the full framework together in one guide.
Rank Everywhere: The Complete SEO and GEO Guide
covers both traditional local SEO and the newer generative engine optimization signals that are starting to matter. It’s $24.
Rank Everywhere: The Complete Guide to AI SEO and Generative Engine Optimization (GEO)
$24
