Local SEO folklore is a whole industry: citation blast services, geo-tagged photo tricks, “secret” ranking buttons in the Business Profile. After auditing dozens of local profiles — and watching which changes actually moved grid rankings — the honest list is shorter and more boring. That’s good news: boring is repeatable.
1. Category discipline
Your primary category tells Google what search moments you belong in; the secondary categories refine it. Most profiles we audit have a primary category chosen at setup and never revisited — “Contractor” when “Roofing Contractor” is the money category, or a secondary list padded with services the profile can’t evidence. Map every category to real search demand, keep secondaries honest, and align the services list and description with what you actually sell.
2. Review velocity — recent beats total
A competitor with 140 stale reviews loses to you with 40 arriving steadily, answered within 24 hours and specific about the job. Install a post-job request flow (SMS + email, timed when the win is fresh), answer everything in your voice, and track velocity monthly. Reviews are also content: the words customers use become the words your pages should use.
3. Pages that prove service areas
“We serve the tri-state area” is a claim; a page per service × area with real jobs, local schema, directions and photos is evidence. Google (and every AI assistant reading your site) rewards evidence. Build the architecture honestly — no PO-box cities, no doorway pages with swapped nouns. Those get listings suspended.
4. Profile freshness
Photos, posts and Q&A signal a business that exists this month, not this decade. A ten-minute weekly touch — new job photos, one post, answered questions — outperforms a quarterly content blitz.
What didn’t make the list
Citation-blast services (consistency matters; volume beyond the major directories doesn’t), geo-tagging photos, embedding keywords in the business name (against the rules and enforced), and any tool promising to “hack the map pack.” None survived contact with real grid data.
The map pack is won by completeness, recency and evidence — maintained weekly. There is no trick, which is exactly why it works.
Run a grid scan of your service areas, fix the categories this week, install the review flow this month, and build the area pages next quarter. In six months the map looks different.
Comments (1)
Finally a local SEO article without the folklore. We fixed our primary category last week and the grid scan already looks different.