Local SEO, measured across the map rather than from my desk

The three things that decide the map pack

Google says it weighs relevance, distance and prominence. That is vague on purpose, but it is also true, and each one is a different kind of problem.

Relevance is the cheapest to fix and the most often wrong. The primary category on a Google Business Profile does more work than any other single field, and a surprising number of businesses have the wrong one, usually because they picked the closest match years ago and the list has changed since. Services, attributes and the description all feed it too.

Distance is fixed and should be treated as a constraint rather than a failure. If you are six kilometres out of town, you will not out-rank the same business at the crossroads for a searcher standing at the crossroads. Knowing that stops you spending money chasing an impossible result, and redirects it at the ring where you can win.

Prominence is the slow one: reviews, mentions of your name on other websites, consistent details everywhere, and a site that is actually about what you sell. This is where most of the durable advantage lives, and it is the part that cannot be bought in a week.

What a normal business actually looks like

Advice about reviews is usually given without a denominator, so here is one. In 2026 I counted every service business I could find competing in local search in one Ontario town, across twenty-two categories.

Two things follow. If you have fewer than ten reviews you are behind the median and it is worth a month of deliberate asking. If you have forty you are already ahead of most of your market and more reviews are not your bottleneck - something else is, and it is usually the profile or the site.

What the work involves

• A grid measurement of where you rank across your service area, repeated so you can see movement rather than a snapshot.
• The profile rebuilt properly: primary and secondary categories, services, attributes, hours, service area, photos that are yours.
• Name, address and phone number made consistent everywhere they appear, because contradictions dilute the thing Google is trying to be confident about.
• A review routine that fits how you actually work, usually a text at the right moment, because asking at the wrong moment gets ignored and asking badly gets a two star.
• Pages on your own site that are about the places you serve, with something specific in them. A page that names a town and says nothing about it is not a local page.

Two related pages: what this has produced, with dates attached, and the industry write-ups for dental practices, law firms and the rest, where the local problem takes a particular shape.

The limits

Local SEO cannot fix a business with a two star average and a reason for it. It cannot put a service area business at the centre of a city. It will not beat a competitor who has been collecting reviews weekly for six years inside one quarter. What it does reliably is stop you losing the searches you should already be winning, which is usually a bigger number than people expect once it is counted.

If you are weighing the fee against the return, what this work costs in Canada has the arithmetic. If you want the local work done rather than advised on, that runs through Georgian Bay SEO, which is my business and where the retainers live. If you want a second opinion on what somebody else is doing, that is advisory.