Local SEO: how different kinds of local business get found in search

Local SEO is the work of getting a business found by people searching for something nearby. What that work involves depends on the business. A café wants people through the door, an electrician wants the phone to ring, a hotel wants bookings, a hardware shop wants people to order online and collect, and a site built to sell enquiries to local firms wants leads it can pass on. Some of these win almost entirely through Google Business Profile and the map, some through the website and the ordinary results, and some through features built for one sector, such as hotel booking links or local inventory.

The ranking model, the profile rules and the review policies apply to nearly everyone. The chapters on business types and sectors come first, because they decide where the effort should go.

When somebody searches for a service with local intent, such as "emergency electrician" or "dentist near me", Google usually shows two kinds of result. The first is the map pack: a map with a short list of businesses beneath it, drawn from Google Business Profiles. The second is the ordinary list of web pages, which for these searches tends to be filled with local businesses' own sites, directories and review platforms. A business can do well in one and badly in the other, because they are ranked on different signals and fixed by different work. Some sectors get extra features on top, such as Local Services Ads for trades or a booking module for hotels, covered in the sector chapter.

For businesses that have a profile, much of the activity happens in the map pack, often without a website visit. Somebody looks at the photos, the rating, the opening hours and the two most recent reviews, and taps call. I have written about why the profile often does more work than the website for exactly this reason. For businesses that cannot have a profile, the organic results are the whole game.

What counts as a result depends on the business model:

• A shop, restaurant or gym wants visits, so direction requests and calls matter most, and the till is the final measure.
• A trade or service business wants enquiries: calls, form submissions and quote requests.
• A hotel, a restaurant that takes reservations or a clinic wants completed bookings.
• A retailer with stock on the shelves wants sales, including orders placed online and collected in store.
• A lead generation or rank and rent site wants enquiries it can sell, so lead volume and what each lead is worth are the measures.

Business Profile performance reporting counts several of these: calls, direction requests, website clicks, bookings and message conversations.¹ A local SEO programme that reports rankings and sessions but cannot say how many visits, enquiries, bookings or sales came in is measuring the wrong end of the process.

A lot of local SEO advice assumes one kind of business: a single office with a phone number, chasing enquiries. Plenty of local businesses look nothing like that. The question to answer first is how much of the work the Business Profile can do and how much falls to the website. That depends on whether the business is eligible for a profile at all, and on whether customers come to it, it goes to them, or nobody meets in person.

The profile eligibility rules settle a lot of this. To qualify for a profile, a business must make in-person contact with customers during its stated hours.² Businesses that are not eligible include rental or for-sale properties such as holiday homes, model homes or vacant flats, lead generation agents or companies, and brands, organisations, artists and other online-only businesses. Sales or leasing offices, on the other hand, are eligible.²

Storefront and walk-in businesses

For a shop, café, gym or salon, the profile is the main event. People choose between businesses on the map by photos, rating, hours and distance, and many never open the website. The website still matters for relevance and for searches that name a product, a dish or a class, but the priorities are the profile fields, reviews and accurate hours. Most of the guidance on profiles and reviews further down was written with this kind of business in mind.

Service area businesses

Trades, cleaners, mobile services and anyone who works at the customer's address hide the address on the profile and set a service area.³ The profile is still ranked from where the business is based, so the website carries more weight than it does for a shop: a proper page for each service, and evidence of work across the area. There is a full chapter on service area businesses below.

Multi-location brands and franchises

A chain needs a profile for every location, a store locator that lets people and crawlers reach every location page, and a process that keeps hundreds of listings accurate. All locations in the same country should use the same name, unless some locations consistently trade under a different one on their storefront, website or stationery.³ Bing Places asks chains for consistent names across locations too.⁴ The multi-location chapter covers governance, franchises and reporting.

Practitioners within a practice

Doctors, dentists, lawyers, financial planners and insurance or estate agents count as individual practitioners in the profile guidelines. A public-facing practitioner can have a profile of their own if they can be contacted directly at the verified location during stated hours.³ Where several practitioners work at one location, the organisation should have its own profile for that location, and each practitioner's profile title should contain only their name, without the organisation's.³ A solo practitioner who trades under a brand gets a single profile, named in the format "Brand: Practitioner name".³ Sales associates and lead generation agents working for a corporation are not practitioners and are not eligible.³

Departments within businesses, universities, hospitals and government institutions can also have their own profiles where they operate as distinct public-facing entities, each with a name different from the main business.³ In my view, practitioner profiles are worth having where clients choose a person, such as a consultant, a solicitor or a GP patients ask for by name. They become a liability where staff turnover is high, because a profile left behind when someone leaves keeps collecting searches and calls for a person who is no longer there.

Destination and hospitality businesses

Hotels, attractions and restaurants compete for a booking as much as a visit. For hotels, Google shows a booking module in which hotels and booking sites can show rates. Free booking links are unpaid links in that module, shown alongside paid hotel ads and ranked on signals that include consumer preference, value to the user, landing page experience and the historical accuracy of prices.⁵ A hotel that never connects its own rates leaves that space to the online travel agencies.

Hotels and motels should not list opening hours on their profiles, and a restaurant, café or bar inside a hotel should have its own profile.³ A holiday let is a rental property, which the eligibility rules exclude, so it relies on its own site and on booking platforms.² For attractions and holiday lets, travel and ticketing sites usually rank above the business's own site for the broad searches, so being listed well on them is part of local SEO.

Local retail, click and collect and local inventory

A shop can show what it has in stock to people nearby. Merchant Center's local inventory ads and free local listings show products and store information to nearby shoppers,⁶ and free local listings appear on Search, Maps, the Products tab and the Business Profile.⁷ A retailer whose own website does not show store stock can still take part through a Google-hosted page for its store.⁶ Products can carry a "pickup today" label if the retailer offers same-day or next-day collection from the time the order is placed.⁸

For a shop whose range is its draw, this is where local and ecommerce SEO meet. The product data side is covered in the ecommerce SEO guide.

Businesses that rely on the website alone

Some businesses serve a local market without being able to use a profile, and some choose to compete without one. All of them depend on the organic results and on the sources AI assistants read.

• Online-only businesses serving an area, such as a tutoring service run entirely over video or an online accountant marketing to one city. Online-only businesses are on Google's ineligible list.²
• Businesses whose only presence in the area they want is a virtual office or mailing address, which the guidelines exclude.³
• Lead generation sites, including rank and rent sites, covered next.
• Directories and comparison sites, which rank for "best X in Y" searches by listing many businesses on one page.
• Local publishers: news sites, what's-on guides and community sites.

Rank and rent and other lead generation sites

Rank and rent is a model in which someone builds a website to rank for a service in an area, such as emergency locksmiths in one town, then earns from it in one of two ways: selling the enquiries it generates to a local business, or renting the whole site to one business for a monthly fee. Larger lead generation sites do the same across many trades and areas and pass each lead to whoever pays for it. Google's rules shape how this works in practice.

• No profile of its own. Lead generation agents or companies are not eligible for a Business Profile,² so these sites cannot appear in the map pack in their own right. They compete in the organic results below it, and in AI answers that draw on those results.
• The tenant's profile is a separate question. If the business renting the site links its own profile to it, the website is expected to represent that business, and URLs or numbers that redirect users to anybody other than the business itself are prohibited.³ A site that carries a different brand and a number forwarding elsewhere fits that badly.
• The spam policies apply to the pages. Doorway abuse covers sites or pages created to rank for specific, similar search queries, and one listed example is multiple domains or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users.⁹ Scaled content abuse covers generating many pages mainly to manipulate rankings, including with generative AI tools without adding value, and buying an expired domain to repurpose it mainly for ranking counts as expired domain abuse.⁹ Bing's guidelines warn against the same patterns: substantially similar content across many URLs, and large-scale content generated without editorial review, which may be excluded from its index.¹⁰

The documented risk is the policy one: pages that match those descriptions can lose their rankings. The rest is my judgement. Where the map pack fills most of the screen, an organic-only site starts below every business in the pack. A site with no named business behind it has no reviews of its own and little to show who does the work, which matters to customers and to assistants deciding who to name. The income depends on one tenant or a few lead buyers, and on rankings that a single update can move. The sites that last tend to read like a real guide to the service in that area, with pages specific enough to be useful and a clear statement of which business will do the job.

The ranking model is the same in every sector. The surfaces, the rules and the usual mistakes differ, and copying advice from a different sector is a common way to break a guideline. The table gives the short version, with notes below on the sectors that have their own products or regulations.

Trades and home services: Local Services Ads above the map

Many trade searches also show Local Services Ads. They are a separate ad product: the business pays only for leads related to its services, and the unit is shown prominently in search results.¹¹ In the UK, general categories such as electricians, plumbers, carpenters, cleaning services and HVAC contractors are available nationwide.¹¹ Google has also moved advertisers to a single Google Verified badge and is discontinuing the Money Back Guarantee that went with the Google Guarantee badge,¹² so articles describing the older badges need checking against the current help pages.

Local Services Ads are paid, so they sit outside SEO, but they matter to it. They compete for the same clicks as the map pack and the organic results, and the onboarding asks for things good local SEO produces anyway, including a licence or business registration and reviews.¹¹

Healthcare, legal and financial services: content held to a higher standard

Topics that could significantly affect people's health, financial stability or safety are what Google calls "Your Money or Your Life" topics. By Google's own account, its systems give more weight to content with strong E-E-A-T on these topics, and such content must be highly accurate and consistent with established expert consensus.¹³ For a clinic, a law firm or a financial adviser, that means service pages written or reviewed by a qualified person, with their name and credentials on the page.

In UK Local Services Ads, legal categories such as family and property law are currently limited to Greater London.¹¹ Review replies are the other sector risk. For doctors in the UK the rule is written down: the GMC's guidance on responding to criticism, which covers social media, says a doctor must not put information learned in confidence about a patient in the public domain without explicit consent, and should usually limit a public response to an explanation of the duty of confidentiality.¹⁷ In my view the same caution suits a law firm or any other regulated practice: a reply should never confirm that the reviewer was a client or discuss their case, and it is worth checking what your own regulator says before replying to something specific.

Hospitality and food: menus, bookings and orders

Restaurants get several profile features of their own: a menu editor with sections, dishes, descriptions and prices, online food ordering through the profile, and booking and waitlist management through supported providers.¹⁸ A profile can show one menu or services link and up to 10 links per transaction category, such as making a reservation or placing a food order.¹⁴ Links from third-party providers can appear on the profile automatically, and the business can remove them, so check which ones are live.¹⁴

Automotive and real estate

Car dealers that sell several brands at one location should pick one brand name per profile, and where the brands operate independently each can have its own profile there.³ Vehicle ads cover new and used stock from dealers, marketplaces and manufacturers.¹⁵ For estate and letting agents, portals usually take the broad property searches, so an agency's own site tends to win on area guides, valuation pages and the agents themselves.

Local results on Google are based mainly on three things: relevance, meaning how well a profile matches what someone searched for; distance, meaning how far each business is from the person searching; and prominence, meaning how well known the business is.¹⁹ That is the whole of the official model. It gives no weights, and the weighting clearly varies by sector and by query. It describes the map pack and Maps. The organic results under the pack are ranked much like any other web search, which is why a site with no profile can still rank there.

Bing's help for Bing Places uses almost the same model: relevance, distance and popularity. Popularity is estimated from web signals, including positive reviews and ratings on sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor and how often the business is mentioned across the web, and Bing adds that website SEO plays an important role in local ranking.²⁰ Neither search engine publishes weights.

Practitioners have tried to fill the gap. Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report asked 47 local search specialists to score 187 factors, and the panel put the primary category, proximity to the point of search and keywords in the business name at the top for the map pack.²¹ It is a survey of expert opinion, not a measurement, and the third of those is something the profile rules forbid, covered in the section on names below. Still, it is useful as a picture of what experienced people see working.

Because distance is measured from the searcher, a single rank check from the office is close to meaningless. The business looks strongest at its own front door, and customers are rarely standing there. Checking visibility across a grid that covers the real catchment is the first thing I would do, and it is the first item in the five checks I run at the start of an audit.

There is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.¹⁹ Ads can appear in and around the map, but the organic order is not for sale. I have gone through each factor and what the model leaves out in how the map pack is put together.

For every business that can have one, the Business Profile is the most important asset in local search, and Google sets out what it may contain in its guidelines for representing a business. They are worth reading in full once. These are the parts that cause the most trouble.

Eligibility

A profile is for a business that makes in-person contact with customers, either at its own premises or by travelling to them. A rented mailing address the business does not operate from, which the guidelines call a virtual office, is not eligible. An office in a co-working space only qualifies if it has clear signage, receives customers during business hours and is staffed by the business during those hours.³ Sales associates and lead generation agents for a corporation are not eligible either.³

The business name

The name should be the one used consistently in the real world, on signage, stationery and other branding. Marketing taglines, service or product information, location information, phone numbers and URLs must not be added to it.³ Bing Places has a similar rule against descriptors such as "best" or "cheap" unless they are legally part of the name.⁴ "Smith & Co Plumbing" is fine if that is the name on the van. "Smith & Co Emergency Plumber Croydon 24/7" is a guideline breach, and competitors report it.

The breach is common because it works. Whitespark and Sterling Sky have both published tests in which adding a keyword to a profile's name lifted its rankings quickly, and taking it out again reversed the gain.²² That is a reason to take the rule seriously, not to ignore it: the gain lasts only until a competitor suggests an edit or the profile is suspended. The compliant route is a genuine change to the name the business trades under, on its signage, website and paperwork.

Categories

Every profile has one primary category and can add up to nine more.²³ The rule is to use as few categories as possible to describe the core business, to choose categories that complete the sentence "this business IS a", and not to use categories as keywords or to describe attributes.³

The primary category does more work for relevance than almost any other field. Whitespark's panel ranked it first for the map pack,²¹ and in my experience it is the field most often wrong. The practical test is to look at what the businesses already ranking for your core searches are categorised as. If they share a category and you do not, that is the first thing to look at. Change one thing at a time and note the date, because category changes can move rankings in either direction.

The services list deserves the same care. Sterling Sky found no ranking effect from adding Google's predefined services when it tested them in 2019, but a newer test of predefined services, including one added for a law firm in New Jersey, showed a measurable lift for related searches. It notes that the effect varies by industry and market.²⁴

Phone, website and hours

• Phone: a local number instead of a central call centre number where possible, under the direct control of the business.³ A profile can carry a primary number and up to two additional numbers.²³
• Website: it should represent the individual business location, and numbers or URLs that redirect users to landing pages or numbers other than the actual business's own are prohibited.³ Bing Places asks multi-location businesses for a location-specific website where one exists.⁴
• Hours: the regular hours customers can use, with special hours for holidays and closures. A profile that shows open when the door is locked produces exactly the review you do not want.

What gets a profile suspended

Google reserves the right to suspend Business Profiles that break the guidelines.³ A suspended or disabled profile cannot be seen by the public and cannot be managed by its owners until an appeal succeeds. Appeals go through an appeals tool, and accepted evidence includes business registration, a business licence, tax certificates and utility bills.²⁵ Bing Places works the same way: listings that do not follow its data quality guidelines can be suspended, and a mailing address the business does not operate from cannot be used.⁴

The patterns that put profiles at risk follow directly from the guidelines:

• An address the business does not operate from: a virtual office, a mail forwarding address, or a desk in somebody else's premises in the town you want to rank in.
• Keywords or locations added to the business name.
• Several profiles for one business at one address, with no genuine separate department or practitioner to justify them.
• A phone number or website that redirects to somebody else, which is common in lead generation schemes.

Reviews matter twice. Review count and positive ratings count towards prominence on Google,¹⁹ and Bing treats reviews and ratings on sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor as evidence of popularity,²⁰ so they feed ranking. They also do most of the persuading once somebody is looking at the profile. I look at three things when I assess them: how many there are, how recent they are, and whether anybody replies.

Recency matters to customers and probably to ranking. In BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey of 1,002 US adults, 74% said they look for reviews written in the last three months, and 31% said they would only use a business rated 4.5 stars or higher.²⁶ Sterling Sky's 2025 study of 8,186 map pack listings for five home service searches in 200 US cities found that reviews gained recently mattered more to ranking than the total count, and that reviews with text had a stronger effect than star ratings alone.²⁷ Those are correlations from one set of sectors, but they match what I see: a steady flow of reviews beats a large, old total.

The rules: Google's review policy and UK law

The rules sit in Google Maps' prohibited and restricted content policy, which applies to user contributions including reviews. Three parts of it matter most to businesses:

• Merchants must not offer incentives, such as payment, discounts or free goods and services, in exchange for posting a review or for revising or removing a negative one.²⁸
• Merchants must not discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers. This is what the industry calls review gating: sending a "how did we do?" survey and only pointing the happy customers at Google.²⁸
• Reviews must not be based on a conflict of interest, which may include current or former employment, contractual relationships and other professional or personal affiliations. Staff reviewing their own employer, or a business reviewing a competitor, both fall inside it.²⁸

The incentives rule is repeated in the tips for getting more reviews, so a "leave a review and get 10% off" card at the till is a breach, however common it is.²⁹ Buying reviews outright is the same breach with more risk attached.

In the UK, the law now covers some of the same ground. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, writing or commissioning a fake review, or a review that hides the fact it was incentivised, is banned. The CMA's guidance gives a trader asking a member of staff to review its product as an example of commissioning, and says a trader that publishes reviews may break the law by cherry-picking them, including by encouraging only satisfied customers to leave one.³⁰ The law does not ban incentivised reviews outright if the incentive is disclosed and the review is genuine, but the same guidance says that where a platform does not allow them, as Google does not, submitting one is likely to be misleading.³⁰

Getting reviews without breaking the rules

Replying

Replying shows customers you value their feedback, and helpful replies can help a business stand out.¹⁹ A good reply is professional and polite, short and personalised, acknowledges mistakes in a negative review, and does not push offers.²⁹ Replies can only be posted once the profile is verified, and Google checks them before they appear.³¹

Customers notice. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey, 80% of respondents said they were likely to use a business that responds to all of its reviews, and 50% said generic or templated replies put them off.²⁶

The person reading a reply is usually the next prospective customer. A calm, specific answer to a bad review often reassures them more than another five-star rating would. Unanswered negative reviews are the clearest sign there is of a business that has stopped paying attention.

A local business appears in more places than it remembers: the profile, its own site, Apple Maps (managed through Apple Business³²) and Bing, sector directories, the chamber of commerce, an old listing created by a previous agency, review sites and local press. Each one states a name, address, phone number and usually opening hours. When those disagree, every system reading them has to decide which is true, and the easy decision is to trust the business less.

There is no published figure for how much consistency counts for ranking, and I would not claim one. The case for it rests on how the information is used. Customers ring the wrong number or turn up at the old address. AI assistants, which assemble answers from several sources at once, have every reason to name a business whose details agree over one whose details conflict. Both search engines ask chains to keep names consistent across locations,³⁴ and Bing's ranking help tells businesses to list themselves on trusted sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor.²⁰

The profile handles the map. The website handles the organic results, the questions the profile cannot answer, and a good share of relevance for the profile itself. For a business with no profile, the website is all there is. A local site needs two kinds of page that many do not have.

Service pages

One proper page for each service that makes meaningful money. A homepage that lists "boilers, bathrooms, heating and drainage" in a single sentence gives nothing to rank with for any of them. A real service page states what the service involves, what it costs or what it starts at, how long it takes, which areas are covered, what happens after somebody gets in touch, and who it is not for.

Location pages

A business with premises should have a page per location, and the profile for each location should link to its own page instead of the homepage. Each location can be marked up on its own page as a LocalBusiness, or a more specific schema.org type such as Dentist,³³ with its own name, address, phone and opening hours.³⁴ That markup describes the page. It is no substitute for content.

A location page must not be a copy of every other location page with the town name swapped. Multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page are one of the listed examples of doorway abuse in Google's spam policies,⁹ and Bing's guidelines count substantially similar content across multiple URLs among the practices that reduce visibility.¹⁰ Besides the policy risk, template pages give no individual market anything to rank on. Sterling Sky's study also found a slight correlation between the number of substantive words on the page a listing links to and its map pack ranking.²⁷ The same applies with more force to lead generation sites, which depend on town pages more than anyone. I have written up how to build location pages that are not doorways, including how to audit an existing set.

• The team or practitioners at that site, and what they specialise in.
• Directions, parking, public transport and accessibility for that building.
• The services that site actually offers, which are rarely identical across a group.
• Opening hours for that site, including any that differ from the rest.
• Reviews and photos from that location.

Volume of content is rarely the constraint. Most local businesses need ten good service and location pages before they need a blog, which is the argument in most local businesses do not need more content.

A service area business serves customers at their location: trades, mobile services, cleaners, anyone working from home or from a unit customers never visit. On Google, a service area business should have one profile for its central office or location, with a designated service area, and should hide its business address from customers.³ Bing Places offers the same option to businesses that bring services to the customer, such as locksmiths, plumbers and tutors.³⁵ A hybrid business that both receives customers and visits them, such as a garage that also offers roadside recovery, can show its address and a service area together.³⁶

Service areas are set by city, postal code or another type of area, a profile can list up to 20, and the overall area should not extend beyond about two hours' driving time from where the business is based.³⁶ Businesses selling products or services with a minimum customer age, such as alcohol, cannabis or weapons, are not permitted as service area businesses without a storefront.²

There is a tension practitioners have documented. In a test Sterling Sky published, hiding the address on a home services profile was followed by a sharp fall in rankings and calls, and both recovered when the address was shown again a month later.³⁸ Its 2025 study also found a negative correlation between being a service area business and ranking in the map pack for "near me" searches.²⁷ That is a small test and a correlation, and the guideline has not changed. A business that customers cannot visit should still hide its address, because showing it breaks the guidelines and puts the profile at risk.

I have covered who should use the setting, and the address mistake that gets these profiles suspended, in service area businesses, and when to be one.

A group with many sites runs the same local SEO as a single business, once per location, plus a layer of process that a single business never needs. Every location competes in its own market against its own rivals, so the work and the reporting both have to happen at location level.

Setup and governance

• Names and categories kept consistent across all locations.³
• Bulk verification through Business Profile Manager, available to a business with 10 or more profiles. Agencies holding several different businesses in one account cannot bulk verify.¹⁶
• Central ownership of every profile in one organisation account, with local managers added as managers and not as owners. Profiles created by a branch manager on a personal account are a recurring problem when that person leaves.
• A store locator that links to every location page with ordinary HTML links, which is how search engines expect to discover important URLs,¹⁰ and a location page for each profile, linked from that profile, with the per-site details described above.
• A process for openings, closures, moves and rebrands, so listings are updated the same week the change happens.

Franchises

Franchises add the question of who controls what. The franchisee usually runs the location and receives the reviews; the franchisor usually owns the brand, the website and the standards. In my view the profile should sit in an account the brand can always reach, with the franchisee given manager access, and the franchise agreement should say so. Otherwise a franchisee who leaves can take the profile, its reviews and its history with them, or leave it orphaned.

Reporting per location

Group reporting that averages visibility across the estate hides exactly the locations that need attention: strong flagship sites carry the mean while a tail of branches falls out of the map. Report the distribution instead, by location, sorted, with the worst performers named. I set out the full argument in why group reporting hides the branches that are failing.

Each business model needs a different count. By default the profile and the website report in different places and neither sees the whole picture, so some setup is needed whichever model applies.

What the profile reports

Business Profile performance shows calls, direction requests, website clicks, bookings and messages, and, depending on the business, booking clicks, menus and products. Calls are counted as the number of times somebody clicked the call button on the profile, which is not the same as an answered call, and the data includes activity from both organic results and Google Ads.¹ Treat these figures as useful trend lines and not as lead counts. Google previously offered a call history feature in profiles, and it was withdrawn on 31 July 2024.³⁹

Call tracking and the profile

Call tracking puts a dedicated number on a source so that calls from it can be counted and recorded. It sits awkwardly with the profile. The number must be under the direct control of the business, should be local where possible, and must not redirect users to anybody other than the actual business.³ The profile allows a primary number plus two additional numbers.²³ I could not find current Google documentation that addresses call tracking numbers directly, so any setup here is practitioner judgement.

The common setup is a local-format tracking number, owned by the business and forwarding to its own line, as the primary number on the profile, with the main business number added as an additional number. That keeps the main number associated with the profile for consistency. This carries risk. A tracking number owned by a provider, or one that appears nowhere else on the web, works against the consistency described earlier. If you use one, make sure the business owns it outright and that it will survive a change of agency.

A lead generation site with no profile has none of these constraints. Tracking numbers on the site are the normal way to count its calls, and the thing to get right is being able to show each buyer where every lead came from.

UTM tags on the profile's website link

Without tags, visits from the profile tend to be reported in analytics as ordinary Google organic traffic, mixed in with the website's own rankings. Adding UTM parameters to the website link on the profile separates them. Always include utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign when tagging a URL; the results appear in the traffic acquisition report.⁴⁰

People increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google's AI features for a recommendation instead of scanning the map. In BrightLocal's 2026 survey of US consumers, 45% reported using ChatGPT or other generative AI tools for local recommendations, up from 6% a year earlier.²⁶ For anything local, assistants retrieve sources before they answer: the business's site, its profile, directories, review sites and press. A business is named if it appears in what gets retrieved and if what those sources say agrees. I have set out a working model of how an assistant decides which businesses to name. Nobody outside the companies building them knows the weights.

For its own AI features, Google's position is that there are no additional requirements and no special optimisations needed to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode. Pages need to be indexed and eligible to show a snippet, and keeping Business Profile information up to date is mentioned specifically.⁴¹ Bing makes a similar point about Copilot, whose answers rely on the same crawling, indexing and ranking foundation as its traditional search.¹⁰

Whitespark's 2026 survey scored factors for AI search visibility for the first time, and its panel put presence on expert-curated "best of" lists first, ahead of a dedicated page for each service and prominence on the key domains in the industry.²¹ That is opinion, not measurement, but it points the same way as the advice below.

Most of the work is ordinary local SEO done more strictly: details consistent everywhere, pages specific enough to quote, reviews that describe the business in customers' own words, and presence in the directories and publications your sector is discussed in. For a business with no profile, those directories and publications carry even more of the weight. The one addition is a monthly habit of asking assistants the questions customers ask and noting which sources they cite. What AI search changes for a local business goes through this, and the wider subject is covered in the AI search topic.

The order matters more than the list. The early steps are cheap and they decide whether anything later can work. This is the sequence I would follow for a single location; for a group, run it per location after the governance work in the multi-location section.

If a business has limited time, the first four steps are where most of the return usually sits. A content programme built on a business filed under the wrong category, or a lead generation site built on pages Google would class as doorways, is money spent in the wrong order.