Local audit
Your Google Business Profile, your site, your map pack position, your citations, and your top three competitors — all reviewed before a single deliverable is scoped. You see the baseline, I see what needs fixing first.
Be the first name
they find in
your county.
Local SEO is the discipline of making your business the obvious answer when someone nearby searches for what you do. Not just on Google — on every platform a potential customer might ask, including the AI models that are increasingly where those searches begin.
Local search is a zero-sum game. Every position you hold is a position your competitor doesn't have. The question is whether you're working at it or hoping they aren't.
Southern Indiana is a different market than Indianapolis. The trade area is smaller, the search volumes are lower, and the competition is a mix of local businesses who've been around forever and national chains with big marketing budgets. You don't beat them with more spend — you beat them with better structure, more consistent signals, and faster execution on the things that actually move rank.
The three pillars
Local search rank
comes from three places.
Google uses relevance, distance and prominence. You can't move your building, so the work lives in the other two. And increasingly, a fourth factor: whether AI models can find and quote you at all.
Relevance
01
Your website
Fast, clean, structured. Pages for the services you actually offer, written in the language people search for them. Schema that tells Google and AI models exactly what they're reading. A clear next step on every page so a visit turns into a call.
Proximity
02
Your Google listing
The map pack is where most local buying decisions happen. Right primary category, complete services, real recent photos, a steady stream of new reviews, and a service area that maps to where you actually work. Maintained, not set up once and forgotten.
Prominence
03
Your authority
How the rest of the web talks about you: citations, directories, local news mentions, and the third-party sources that AI models use to verify a business is real. Consistency across all of them is what makes Google and the models comfortable putting you at the top.
What Google actually weighs
The signals that
move local rank.
These aren't guesses. They're the factors Google's documentation, patent filings and third-party studies consistently point to as meaningful for local pack and local organic results.
Primary category
The single biggest lever on a Google Business Profile. Most businesses pick the wrong one and never test it against what's actually ranking nearby.
Review velocity & recency
A steady stream of current reviews outranks a large pile of old ones. Volume matters, but so does recency — and so do the responses.
NAP consistency
Name, address and phone number identical everywhere Google looks: your site, your listing, every directory and citation. Inconsistency leaks trust.
Behavioral signals
Click-through rate, calls from the listing, requests for directions. Google watches what people do when they see your listing.
On-page local signals
City and region mentioned in headings and body text, not just the footer. LocalBusiness schema. A contact page with a real address.
Link authority
Links from local news, trade associations, chambers and relevant directories carry more local weight than generic links from high-DA sites.
Photos & posts
Real photos of real work, added regularly. Posts that mention your services and location by name. Both signal an active, well-run listing.
Entity definition
The newer factor. AI models and Google's own knowledge graph want to know your business is a real, distinct entity — not just a domain with some keywords.
Want to know which signals your business is missing?
Get your free audit →What's included
The full local
search stack.
Every engagement starts with an audit. Then the work is scoped to what the business actually needs — not a fixed package with deliverables you don't want.
Citation & NAP cleanup
Your name, address and phone number audited across the directories Google relies on, then corrected and made consistent everywhere. A foundational step most businesses skip.
Local landing pages
Real pages for the towns you serve — not doorway spam, but genuinely useful pages with the services you offer there, the areas you cover, and the schema that makes it retrievable. Each town you want to rank in needs a page.
Google Business Profile
Full category, service, attribute and photo rebuild. Review generation system. Monthly posts. Spam fighting. Geo-grid rank tracking. The listing treated as a living asset, not a set-and-forget checkbox.
Schema & entity work
LocalBusiness, Service, FAQ and Review schema on every relevant page. Your business defined as a distinct entity across your site, your listing and your key citations — which is what both Google and AI models need to trust a recommendation.
Monthly tracking & reporting
Geo-grid rank scans, organic traffic, GBP insights, citation coverage and AI engine citations — all in one plain report. You see what moved and what didn't, and I explain the ones that didn't.
Service area
Southern Indiana
and the counties
around it.
Washington
Jasper
Loogootee
Odon
Vincennes
Petersburg
Bicknell
Princeton
Huntingburg
Shoals
Bloomfield
Linton
Montgomery
Elnora
Oakland City
The Midwest is a different search market than a city. Lower competition doesn't always mean easier ranking — it means the businesses that do the work tend to dominate for a long time, and the ones that don't are invisible.
Knowing the area matters for real decisions: which towns need their own page, how wide to set a service-area boundary, and which local directories are actually indexed by Google versus the ones that just take your money.
If you're outside this area and the fit is right, I work remotely too. The local knowledge helps but the technical work travels.
Each town you want to rank in should have its own dedicated landing page. That's not a template trick — it's how Google understands service area. We build them properly: unique content, accurate service information, and the schema to make them retrievable.
Local vs. national SEO
Different game,
different rules.
A lot of SEO advice online is written for e-commerce sites or national brands. Local search works differently — here's what actually changes.
| Factor | National SEO | Local SEO |
|---|---|---|
| Primary goal | Rank for keywords nationally | Rank for keywords + map pack in a service area |
| Google Business Profile | Rarely a factor | Central — the map pack is often where calls come from |
| Content strategy | Volume and topical authority at scale | Service pages + town pages, done well, beat volume |
| Citation building | Low priority | High priority — NAP consistency is a direct ranking factor |
| Link building | High-DA sites across any geography | Local news, trade orgs, chambers — geography matters |
| Reviews | Nice to have | Direct ranking signal for map pack position |
| AI citations | Broad topic authority | Named entity with clear location, services and pricing |
| Time to results | Often 6–18 months | GBP fixes often visible in weeks; organic in 2–4 months |
Every engagement covers
The signals that
actually count.
Google Business Profile audit & rebuildCategories, services, attributes, photos — the full picture.
NAP consistency across directoriesYour name, address and phone, identical everywhere.
Geo-grid rank trackingYour map pack position across your full service radius.
LocalBusiness & Service schemaStructured data on every page that matters.
Review generation systemA process your team will actually use.
Local landing pagesReal pages for the towns you want to rank in.
Spam listing reportingFake competitors filed and followed up.
Monthly plain-English reportWhat moved, what didn't, what's next.
Questions
Straight answers.
Marked up with FAQ schema — the same technique we build into every client site so answer engines can lift it cleanly.
Local SEO targets visibility within a geographic area — your service radius rather than a national or global audience. It adds the Google Business Profile and map pack as a second ranking surface, puts more weight on review velocity, NAP consistency and local citations, and means that town-specific landing pages matter more than broad topical authority at scale.
Google Business Profile fixes — categories, services, attributes — can move map pack position within a few weeks because the signals are direct. Organic ranking improvements from content and technical work typically take two to four months. Citation cleanup and review velocity build over time and compound across both surfaces.
Not always, but often. Google tends to rank the most locally relevant page for a query — so if someone in Jasper searches for a plumber, a page that specifically mentions Jasper, the services offered there, and the surrounding area will usually outrank a generic "we serve all of southern Indiana" paragraph buried on the homepage. The pages have to be genuine, not thin templates with a town name swapped in.
Service-area businesses — contractors, mobile services, anyone who goes to the customer rather than the other way around — can rank without a public address. Google supports this setup directly. The listing is configured as a service-area business and the address is hidden, but the ranking signals (categories, reviews, citations, schema) work the same way.
Depends on what you have. If the site is reasonably fast and the content is editable, we can add the local landing pages, schema and on-page signals without rebuilding. If it's slow, locked in a page builder, or the content lives inside images, rebuilding the foundation first usually makes everything else more effective and cheaper in the long run.
Find out where you actually stand locally.
We'll run your business through Google, the map pack and your primary search terms, then show you exactly where you're visible and where your competitors are taking calls that should be yours.
Request your free local audit →Usually back within two business days.