Local SEO

Local SEO is the work of ranking for geographic searches: the searches people make when they want a product, a service or a business in a specific place. If you have a physical location, or you serve defined areas, this is where a large share of your commercial searches live.

Why local searches are worth the work

More than 40% of Google searches carry local intent. That share matters less than what sits behind it: someone searching for a service near them is usually much closer to buying than someone reading a general guide. Local searches convert.

Being visible on them is the digital equivalent of having your shop on the main street of every town you operate in. And the visibility compounds. Clear business information and a steady flow of reviews build credibility with people who have never heard of you, in the moment they are deciding between you and the business two streets over.

Local search comes in three shapes, and they behave differently:

1. The user is in an area and searches for a business in that same area. Google reads the location and matches accordingly.
2. The user searches for a business in an area they are not currently in. Google works out that the search location and the physical location differ, and prioritizes the place they asked about.
3. The user searches for something "near me" without naming a place. Google infers the location from the device.

Depending on the search, the result mixes Google Maps, business profiles and classic organic listings, and increasingly an AI-generated answer above all of it.

What actually moves local rankings

Claim and optimize your Google Business Profile

If you have an address, this is the single highest-return piece of local SEO. Claim the profile, and keep the information complete and current: name, address and phone number (NAP), opening hours, categories, services, photos. The profile also carries questions and answers, posts and product listings, and each filled-out section gives Google more to match against.

Keep NAP consistent everywhere

Name, address and phone number have to be identical across your site, your social profiles and every business directory you appear in. Inconsistency is the most common reason a business with a good profile still underperforms locally: conflicting data weakens the signal about where you actually are. Audit it once, fix it, and add it to the checklist whenever you move or change a number.

Understand the local pack

Searches with local relevance usually trigger a local pack showing three businesses above the organic results, with name, address, rating and a link to more information. The user gets what they need to decide right there, which is why a place in the pack is worth more than a position further down page one. Proximity, relevance and prominence drive the selection, and reviews and profile completeness feed prominence directly.

Collect reviews, and answer them

Ask customers for reviews on the platforms that matter in your market, Google first among them. Then answer them, the critical ones included. Replying shows both people and machines that the business is active and takes feedback seriously, and the review text itself becomes content that describes what you do and where.

Build local landing pages

Run a proper keyword research exercise on the local market and look at what people actually search for. If you operate in several places, give each location its own page rather than listing them all on one. A page that earns its place carries the address, the opening hours, the services offered there, directions, local photos with descriptive alt text, and reviews from that location. Thin pages that differ only by the city name in the heading do not work and never have.

Title tags, meta descriptions and headings on those pages should carry the location naturally. That is where the local signal lands hardest, and our guide to titles and meta descriptions covers how to write them without stuffing.

Mark it up with schema

Implement LocalBusiness structured data so search engines can read your address, hours, geo coordinates and service area without guessing. It improves how you are presented in results, and it is what lets an assistant answer "are they open now" correctly.

Earn local links and mentions

Links from credible local sources move local visibility in a way that generic links do not. Reach out to local organizations, associations, sponsorships, news outlets and bloggers with something worth covering. Content that is genuinely interesting to the area is what makes other local domains link back.

For businesses with many locations, all of the above has to be built as a system rather than page by page: templated location pages with real local content, a managed listings process, and a way to keep hundreds of profiles accurate at once.

Local search has changed with AI

Search no longer happens only on Google. AI assistants answer with one synthesized recommendation rather than a list of links, and that answer is assembled from data across the web: your site, your profiles, your reviews, directories, press. So a business can be recommended by an assistant without ranking at the top of Google, and the reverse is just as true.

Three consequences are worth planning for:

• Answers without clicks. Users increasingly accept an AI recommendation about their area without visiting the sites behind it. Being named in the answer can be worth as much as a high organic position, which is why measuring it belongs in your reporting. Our guide to LLM monitoring covers how.
• Aggregated data. Assistants pull from everywhere at once, so inconsistencies between your site, your listings and your reviews are more costly than they used to be. Coherent information across sources is now a visibility factor in its own right.
• Conversational intent. "SEO agency Copenhagen" is a classic keyword. In an assistant the same need sounds like "which SEO agencies in Copenhagen can help improve our local visibility". Cover the fuller questions in your content, with the specifics an answer would need to quote.

None of this replaces the local fundamentals. It raises the value of getting them right, because the same clean data feeds both the local pack and the AI answer.

We work with local optimization from three offices, in Copenhagen, Stockholm and Oslo, which is also how we see the differences between markets up close. If you want to know how visible you are in the areas you serve, our free SEO analysis covers local search alongside the rest, and local optimization is the service that takes it from there.