Local SEO, Written for The Market You Sell In
Ranking in Kansas City is a different job from ranking in London. Competition, map pack behaviour and the searches people actually use all shift by market. Each page below covers one of them properly rather than repeating the same advice with the place name swapped.
Book a Free CallLocal Results Are Local Fights
The same business, with the same site and the same budget, will take three months to rank in one city and a year in another. The difference is who is already there, how well they have covered the searches, and whether the map pack in that area is dominated by directories or by real businesses.
Advice that ignores this is comfortable to write and useless to act on, so these pages are written per market with the competitive picture in front of us.
Chasing the Metro Instead of the Neighbourhood
Most small businesses aim at the biggest search term in the region and lose to companies with ten times the budget. The ones that win start with the area they genuinely serve, own it, and expand outward from a position of strength.
It is slower to describe and considerably faster in practice, and it is the approach every page in this index takes.
The Same Programme in Every Market
The competitive picture changes by city.
The work that moves the needle does not, and it runs in the same order everywhere.
Google Business Profile
Categories, service areas and posts set up properly, because the map pack is where most local intent lands first.
The searches that convert
Targeting the terms with buying intent in your area rather than the vanity term with the biggest number next to it.
A page worth ranking
On-page work so the page a searcher lands on actually answers the query it was found for.
Citations and local links
Consistent listings and links from sources that genuinely relate to your area and your trade.
Content built around questions
The things customers ask before they buy, answered on pages that can rank for those questions.
Monthly reporting
Rankings, calls and enquiries reported against the baseline, so progress is visible rather than asserted.
Markets We Run Local SEO In
Each page covers the competitive picture in that city, the searches worth chasing there, and a realistic timeline for a small business starting from scratch.
West and Mountain
Competitive metros where the neighbourhood-first approach matters most.
Central and South
Markets where a properly built service-area structure still moves quickly.
UK and Canada
Different map pack behaviour and a different set of local directories.
Why the timeline differs by city
Two identical businesses starting on the same day in different markets will not arrive at the same place in six months. In a market where the top results are directories and half-finished profiles, a properly built page and a maintained Business Profile can move quickly. In a market where established firms have covered every service and area page for years, the same work takes considerably longer and the early progress shows up in less glamorous places: impressions rising, positions moving from the sixties into the thirties, calls before rankings. The city pages set out which of those two situations you are walking into, because the honest answer changes what a reasonable first quarter looks like.
- ✓Thin competition: movement within a quarter is realistic
- ✓Established competition: expect impressions before positions
- ✓Either way, the neighbourhood comes before the metro
What the first ninety days actually involve
The first month is unglamorous and largely invisible from the outside: fixing the Business Profile, correcting listings, and making sure the pages that already exist are not competing with each other for the same term. The second month is where the structure gets built, with a real page for each service and each area rather than one page trying to cover everything. The third month is when content and links start compounding on top of that structure. Skipping straight to the third step is the most common way small businesses waste a budget, because links pointed at a page that is not built to convert simply move a weak page up the list.
How the price works
Local SEO starts from $499 a month, and there is no lock-in contract. The reason it is monthly rather than a project fee is that the work is cumulative: the pages written in month two are what the links in month four are pointing at. A one-off audit tells you what is wrong and changes nothing on its own, which is why we would rather do the work than sell the document. If a market turns out to need more than the base programme to be competitive, we say so before starting rather than quietly under-serving it and reporting activity instead of results.
Structure First, Then Volume
The order matters more than the effort.
Building the pages before chasing the links is what separates a programme that compounds from one that just accumulates activity.
The neighbourhood first
Own the area you genuinely serve before spending anything chasing the whole metro.
Real pages, not thin ones
A page is built when there is something true to say about that service in that place.
Reported against a baseline
Progress measured from where you started, including the months where impressions move before positions do.
No lock-in
From $499 a month, month to month, because the work should be worth renewing on its merits.
What our clients say
Our buyers can tell a real capability from a landing page in seconds. We got 216 pages across four content types, and nothing on them looks like filler.
We sell to four very different buyers and did not want four microsites. We ended up with one brand whose navigation asks who you are at the first click, across 167 pages.
We went past three hundred and ninety pages without the site becoming unbrowsable. The structure was settled before anyone wrote a page, and that is the only reason it still navigates cleanly.
Local SEO: Your Questions Answered
How long before I see results?
What does it cost?
Should I target my whole metro area?
Do I need a new website as well?
My city is not listed. Do you still work there?
What happens in the first month?
Is the reporting just rankings?
Want to Know What Your Market Looks Like?
Tell us your city and your trade and we will tell you honestly whether the competition there is thin or entrenched, and what a realistic first quarter looks like.
Book a Free Call