Local SEO and Google Business Profile

For a business people visit, or one that visits them, the map pack and the local results matter more than anything else on the page. Local visibility depends on three things agreeing with each other: your Google Business Profile, your website, and the rest of the web.

Profile, website, and citations, aligned

• Google Business Profile. The right primary and secondary categories, services and products, hours, attributes, photos, and a description written for people. Q&A and review responses managed consistently.
• Location pages. One strong page for each location, with its own address, hours, directions, staff, and services. Each profile links to its own location page, not the home page.
• Structured data. LocalBusiness schema for each location, connected to the parent organization.
• Name, address, and phone. The same everywhere: website, profiles, directories, and social accounts. Mismatches are among the most common causes of local trouble.
• Service areas. City and region pages that are genuinely about each place, not copies with the town name swapped.

Multi-location businesses

When a brand grows from one location to several, search engines often keep confusing the brand with its first location. I separate them: the organization as the parent, each location as a branch, each with its own page and profile. Town pages and profiles get clear jobs so they support each other instead of competing.

Hard cases

Suspended profiles, verification loops, duplicate listings, profiles stuck between live and pending, and ownership lost with a former employee or agency. These cases take investigation: reconstructing what happened, matching the profile to verifiable facts, and building an appeal where the strongest evidence comes first and nothing is claimed that the documents can't support.

Google decides these cases on its own timeline, and its support is slow and inconsistent. So hard cases start as a paid, written diagnostic: what happened, what Google will want to see, and whether there's a viable path. The appeal or remediation is scoped separately once that's clear.

Timing and caution

Some changes, such as editing a business name or switching primary categories, can trigger reverification or a suspension. I plan those changes deliberately, away from your busiest season, and document the before state so it can be restored.

Reviews

Review count, rating, recency, and the owner's replies all shape local visibility and, more importantly, whether someone calls. I help set up a steady, policy-compliant way to ask happy customers for reviews, write reply templates that sound human, and flag reviews that break Google's rules for removal requests.

Measuring local

Profile performance data, calls and direction requests, local pack positions measured on a grid around each location, and organic traffic to location pages. I set a baseline first so progress can be measured.

See a therapy practice's suspended profile reinstated and a multi-state brand untangled from its first showroom.

Updated October 6, 2026