Core Topic
Local SEO Fundamentals
The foundational guide on how local search works, relevance, distance, and prominence, and the levers that move local rankings.
What is Local SEO?
Local SEO is the practice of optimizing a business to appear prominently when people search for products and services near them. Unlike traditional SEO, it revolves around geography: Google returns a localized “Map Pack” of nearby businesses ranked by how relevant, close, and prominent they are.
The three ranking factors
Google’s local algorithm weighs three broad factors:
- Relevance: how well your business matches what the searcher wants. Driven by your Google Business Profile categories, services, and website content.
- Distance: how close you are to the searcher. You can’t change your address, but you can build genuine local content and citations for the areas you serve.
- Prominence: how well-known and trusted your business is. Driven heavily by review quantity, quality, and velocity, plus citations and backlinks.
The core levers
- Google Business Profile optimization: the single most important local asset.
- Reviews: volume, rating, recency, and responses.
- Citations: consistent NAP across the web.
- On-page signals: local content, schema, and internal linking.
- Links: local and industry-relevant backlinks.
Where to go deeper
This core topic anchors more specific guides, including Google Business Profile Optimization, and is backed by our Local Search Ranking Factors Study 2024.