Local SEO and Google Business Profile

Business profile setup and categories, NAP consistency, local landing pages that are not doorway pages, review practice, and multi-location structure.

The business profile

Claim and verify the profile, then keep the handful of fields that matter accurate: name, address, phone, hours, website and primary category.
Choose the most specific primary category available. It is the single strongest lever on which local searches you can appear in.
Add the services, attributes and a short description using the words customers use, not internal product names.
Post opening hours for holidays explicitly. Wrong holiday hours generate negative reviews faster than almost anything else.
Add real photos of the premises, team and work - photos are a ranking-adjacent signal and they convert.
Set up questions and answers yourself, seeding the questions customers actually ask.

Field	Matters because	Common mistake
Business name	Match to the real-world name	Adding keywords to the name violates the guidelines
Primary category	Determines eligibility for local results	Choosing a broad category instead of the specific one
Address and service area	Defines where you can appear	Listing a virtual office as a location
Hours	Expectation setting and click-through	Unedited holiday hours
Website link	The page users and crawlers land on	Linking the homepage for a service query
Reviews	Strong influence on both rank and conversion	Asking only happy customers and never replying

NAP consistency and the website

Name, address and phone must be identical everywhere - the profile, the website, directories and any structured data. Inconsistency does not cause a penalty, it causes uncertainty, and an engine that is unsure which address is correct will be conservative about showing you for that area.

<!-- local business markup on the contact or location page -->
<!-- inside a script element with type application/ld+json -->
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "@id": "https://example.com/locations/leeds#business",
  "name": "Acme Plumbing Leeds",
  "url": "https://example.com/locations/leeds",
  "telephone": "+44 113 496 0000",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Kirkgate",
    "addressLocality": "Leeds",
    "postalCode": "LS1 6BY",
    "addressCountry": "GB"
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
    "opens": "08:00", "closes": "18:00"
  }]
}

Put the full address in plain text on the location page, not only inside an image or a map embed.
Use a real phone number that answers. A number that rings out costs conversions and review score.
Embed a map but do not rely on it for the address - crawlers read text.

Multi-location structure and reviews

Structure	URL example	Best for
Subdirectory per location	`/locations/leeds`	Most sites; inherits the main domain's authority
Subdomain per location	`leeds.example.com`	Separate brands or franchises with their own stacks
Country or city in a path	`/uk/leeds/`	Multi-country with the same language
One page listing all locations	`/locations`	A hub linking to each location page

Each location page needs, at minimum:
  - unique local content, not a template with the city swapped
  - the full address and a local phone number in text
  - the services offered at that location
  - staff, opening hours, parking or access notes
  - the local business markup above, with that location's @id
  - links to nearby locations, not to every location

Swapping a city name into an otherwise identical page is the textbook doorway page, and it is the most common way a multi-location rollout loses visibility instead of gaining it.

💡

Ask every customer, not only satisfied ones, and reply to every review - negative ones especially. A calm, specific reply to a bad review often reads better to a prospective customer than five generic five-star reviews. Never offer an incentive in exchange for a review.

FAQ

Do I need a physical address to rank locally?

You need a real location customers can visit, or a genuine service-area business that travels to customers. A virtual office in a city you do not serve is a guideline violation and the suspension is hard to reverse.

How long does local SEO take?

The profile and NAP fixes can show movement in weeks; review accumulation and local content are a sustained effort measured in months.

Structured data and rich results Site architecture, URLs and internal linking

Last refreshed 2026-09-18.

Local SEO and Google Business Profile

The business profile

NAP consistency and the website

Multi-location structure and reviews

FAQ

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