Glossary
Local SEO
Local SEO is the work of getting your business to appear when somebody nearby searches for what you sell.
It is a different job from ordinary search work. National SEO competes on authority; local SEO competes mostly on relevance, distance and prominence, which is why a small business with a well-kept listing can outrank a much larger competitor a few miles further away.
Why it matters to you
For anything urgent — a plumber, a dentist, a locksmith — the map results appear above everything else and take most of the clicks. If you are not in them, the size of your website barely matters.
An example
A salon three streets away outranks one in the town centre because its Google Business Profile lists the right categories, its hours are current, and it has eleven reviews from this year rather than forty from 2019.
Where this comes up: local visibility & lead generation .