Local SEOLocal SEO

The map pack is the search result

On 4 September 2026 I read the live UK results for the searches this studio cares about. A local pack — the map with three businesses on it — sat above the ordinary results on "web design manchester", "seo agency manchester", "google ads agency manchester" and "web design bolton", among others. The businesses in it were showing between 23 and 69 reviews at ratings of 4.9 to 5.0.

That is the whole argument. For a business that serves a place, three listings and a map occupy the space above everything a website can win, and the entry requirements are a complete profile and genuine reviews rather than a page of copy.

The scale is easy to underestimate. "Web designer near me" and "website designer near me" are searched 6,600 times a month each in the UK, and "web design near me" 2,900 — 18,280 across the family. No page ranks for "near me". A profile does.

What actually decides local ranking

In rough order of impact, from doing this on trade and service sites rather than from a checklist.

1. 01Proximity to the searcher. The single largest factor and the one nobody controls. It is also why a business with one address cannot rank across a whole county, and why honest expectations matter more here than anywhere else in search.
2. 02A complete, correctly categorised profile. The primary category does a disproportionate amount of work; the secondary ones fill in. Most profiles I look at have never had the category revisited since it was created.
3. 03Reviews: how many, how recent, how specific, and whether they are answered. A steady trickle beats a burst, and a review that names the job beats five that say "great service".
4. 04Consistency of name, address and phone number across the website, the profile, and every directory the business appears in. Contradictions are a genuine drag, and the old listings nobody remembers creating are usually where they live.
5. 05On-site signals: a page for each service and each area, the address in the markup, and a site that is fast on a phone.
6. 06Genuine local relevance — being mentioned, linked and reviewed by things that are themselves local.

Notice that four of the six happen outside your website. That is why this is a separate discipline from the rest of the SEO work, and why a growth block spent on it in month one often returns faster than anything else on the list.

Reviews, done legitimately

This needs saying plainly because the industry is full of people who will not say it. Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024, publishing or commissioning fake reviews, or presenting incentivised reviews as organic, is a banned practice with real penalties attached.

What works and is legitimate: asking every genuinely satisfied customer, at the moment the job is finished, with a direct link that takes two taps. Asking for specifics rather than praise — what the job was, what the problem had been — because a specific review is more persuasive to a human and more useful to the algorithm. Answering every review, including the poor ones, briefly and without defensiveness.

What this site will never do is display a rating or a review count it cannot show verbatim from its source. The previous version of this site carried an aggregate rating claiming 47 reviews against three testimonials in the code; it was removed along with the page it sat on, and the reasoning is written up on the measurement policy page.

Location pages that are not thin

The standard advice is to build a page for every town you serve. The standard result is twenty near-identical pages with the town name swapped, which Google has been discounting for a decade and which makes a site look worse rather than better.

A location page earns its place when it contains something that could only have been written about that place. On this site, the area pages publish the actual search data for their town — volume, difficulty and cost per click for every local term, with an honest read of which are winnable — because that is first-hand, different for every town, and impossible to fabricate. Where there is no client in a town, the page says so in the first screen.

For a client, the equivalent is usually the work itself: the jobs done there, the specific problems that area throws up, the reason a search in that town differs from the one next door. If a page cannot carry any of that, it should not exist, and the borough should be a line on the hub instead.

How local work gets measured

• Google Business Profile insights: profile views, searches that surfaced you, direction requests and calls — monthly, in full calendar months.
• Search Console, filtered to the queries that carry a place name, so local progress is separated from everything else.
• Phone taps tracked as events on the site, because for trades and services that is most of the enquiries and almost nobody counts them.
• Ranking checked from the right place. A local result is personalised by location, so a screenshot from your own laptop is not evidence of anything.

That last point catches people out constantly. If somebody shows you a rank-tracking screenshot for a local term with no statement of where it was measured from, it is decoration.