Local SEO, for businesses that serve a service area.

Regular SEO competes for general keywords ("plumbing tips"). Local SEO competes for location-based intent ("emergency plumber San Jose"). The ranking signals are different too — local SEO factors in Google Business Profile health, proximity, citations, and reviews on top of traditional SEO signals.

Google interprets "near me" as "near the searcher's current location." You can't target the phrase directly — instead, you optimize for the location signal: a fully built-out Google Business Profile, accurate NAP across the web, location-specific landing pages, and reviews that reference your city. Do those well and you appear automatically for "near me" queries.

Citations are mentions of your business name, address, and phone on directories like Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, BBB, industry-specific directories, and chambers of commerce. They're less powerful than they were 5 years ago — but inconsistencies still hurt rankings, so cleaning them up is table stakes.

Schema markup is structured data you add to your website code that tells search engines exactly what kind of business you are, your hours, address, services, and reviews. Local business schema is essentially a cheat sheet for Google — and it directly powers rich results in search.

If you serve multiple cities and want to rank in each, yes — you need a dedicated service-area page for each city, with genuinely localized content (not the same page with the city name swapped). Thin, duplicated city pages will get filtered or penalized.

Critical. The vast majority of "near me" and local-intent searches happen on mobile, and Google uses the mobile version of your site for ranking (mobile-first indexing). A site that's slow or broken on mobile won't rank locally no matter how well-optimized it is otherwise. We cover this in our SEO Services.

GMB optimization is one piece of local SEO. Local SEO is the bigger umbrella — it includes your website, content, citations, links, and reviews in addition to your Google Business Profile. We do both as part of one strategy. Full breakdown on our GMB Optimization FAQ.

Yes — service-area businesses (plumbers, mobile mechanics, cleaners, contractors) can rank locally without a storefront. You hide your address on Google Business Profile and define a service area instead. The rest of local SEO works the same. We've set this up for plenty of service-area clients.