No secrets, no tricks, and nothing here you need permission to do. This is the list in the order that matters, with the honest note on what each item is worth.
Local SEO comes down to four things: a complete Google Business Profile, a website search engines can reach and understand, business details that say the same thing everywhere, and real reviews. Work down this list in that order and you will have done more than most of your competitors.
There is nothing proprietary here. Everything on this page is something you could do yourself this week. The reason businesses pay for it is time and the fact that the diagnosis is harder than the fix: the item that is actually holding you back is usually not the one you would have guessed. See local SEO for how we approach the work.
Diagnosis before treatment. Most engagements turn up a surprise at this stage that changes the whole plan.
For a lot of local businesses the profile is doing more work than the website. It is also the part most often left half finished.
Your profile links to your site, and the site either backs it up or undermines it. See how the two work together.
The unglamorous half. It is also the half that separates businesses that show up from businesses that nearly show up.
Worth stating plainly, because this is where local marketing budgets go to die.
We treat this as diagnosis before treatment. The item holding you back is usually not the one you would have picked, and finding that out first is what stops the work being expensive guessing.
Claim and finish your Google Business Profile, then confirm your website is actually indexed. In that order. Those two cover most of the ground for a local business, and the second one is the check people skip: a site that is not in the index cannot rank for anything, and no amount of profile work fixes that. See website not showing on Google.
Yes. If you go to your customers rather than them coming to you, you can list as a service-area business and hide the address entirely. You still enter it during setup, because Google needs it, but you can set it not to display. A lot of home based owners do not know this and either publish their home address or skip the listing altogether. Both are avoidable. Our DFW page covers this in more detail for service-area businesses.
There is no threshold, and anyone quoting one is inventing it. Reviews influence both ranking and whether somebody clicks you over the business next to you, so more genuine ones is better than fewer. What matters more than the count is that they are real, recent, and that you reply to them. Never buy them: it violates Google policy and the pattern is not subtle.
Not unless you have something true and specific to say about each one. Six pages identical except for the town name are a doorway page pattern, search engines have targeted it for years, and it can hurt you rather than help. One honest page about your service area beats six thin ones. We took our own advice here: we publish one Dallas-Fort Worth page rather than a page per suburb, because there was nothing true and unique to say about each.
It varies, and a fixed number is a guess. Fixing something that blocked crawling can show up within days of a re-crawl. Building review history and local authority is months. Nobody can guarantee a position, because organic placement is not sold by anyone. What you can have is the work done properly and the results measured, so you can see what actually changed.
Get found by people searching for your service near you.
What each one does, and why most businesses need both.
How SolvenceHQ works with businesses across Dallas-Fort Worth.
See how Google actually crawls, indexes and ranks your pages.
The crawling, indexing and structure work search engines depend on.
Work out whether it is not indexed, not ranking, or not there at all.
Tell us the searches you expect to appear in and what you see instead. We will find what is actually in the way rather than guessing at it.