Rank for the things people near you actually type.

Local search has two surfaces and they are ranked differently. There is the map with its handful of business results, which weighs how relevant you are, how close you are to whoever is searching, and how well known you look across the web. And there are the ordinary blue links underneath, which are won with pages — real ones, about a specific service in a specific place. Most businesses have neither. They have a homepage that says Welcome and lists everything they do in one paragraph.

So the work is unglamorous and it is mostly writing. A page for each service you actually sell, written in the words customers use rather than the words on your invoice. Pages for the towns and neighborhoods you genuinely work in. Your Google profile kept lined up with those pages, your name, address and phone made consistent across the directories that feed the search engines, and the technical parts — schema, titles, internal links, page speed — fixed so nothing you wrote is being wasted.

Two things I will tell you before you buy it. This is slow. The first month is foundation and the compounding shows up later, so if you need the phone to ring this week, put the money into ads instead and come back to this. And proximity is a real ceiling: a searcher standing across town is shown businesses across town. You can win the area you can realistically serve, and nobody honest will promise you a position beyond it.