Chapter 8: Local and Mobile SEO

Google Business Profile launch and monthly upkeep SOP

1. Set the profile up as the entity it is. Exact business name as it appears on the storefront — keyword stuffing in the name is both a violation and an obvious signal of desperation. Precise address, local phone number, real hours. Complete the video verification in one unbroken take: street sign, permanent signage, unlock the door, walk to the counter, show the workspace or the badge.
2. Match the category to the winner, not to your aspiration. Use a category-scraping extension to read the primary and secondary categories of the three businesses currently in the local pack, then choose the closest truthful match. Category is one of the strongest local ranking inputs and the most commonly mis-set.
3. Fill every field. The description, the full attribute list, services with prices, products, accessibility options, payment methods, the lot. Empty fields are free relevance you are declining.
4. Feed it photographs regularly. Fifteen to twenty real photos at launch — exterior, interior, team, work in progress, before and after — then a steady trickle of new ones. Add posts for offers and news; a profile that never changes reads as abandoned, to both users and the ranking system.
5. Seed the questions. Ask the five questions your customers actually phone in to the Q&A section, then answer them from the business account with specific, useful text. Do not wait for strangers to phrase your own FAQ badly.
6. Build the review loop. A short link or QR code at the point of service, a request timed to the moment the work is delivered, and a reply to every review within a day. Volume, recency, rating and response rate all matter, and none of them can be bought honestly.
7. Keep citations consistent. Name, address and phone identical across the directories your market actually uses. Inconsistency is the most common cause of a local pack that will not move.
8. Review monthly. Insights for calls, direction requests and searches; category performance; photo views; competitor movement in the pack. Change one variable at a time.

Interview questions and answer frameworks

Q1: A dental clinic with five locations in Los Angeles hires you. How do you structure the site and the local presence?

Framework: One brand hub, five local ecosystems, and say why the obvious shortcut fails. Architecture: a locations index page plus five genuinely distinct location pages — never five addresses crammed into one contact page. Service pages link to the relevant locations and back, so both hierarchies are crawlable. Differentiation: each location page carries its own title with the neighbourhood, an embedded map for that address, the dentist who actually works there with their credentials, parking and transit notes, and that location’s own reviews. Each gets its own LocalBusiness markup with its own coordinates and hours. Off-site: five separately verified profiles, each pointing at its own location page rather than at the homepage, each with its own local number, and consistent citations for all five addresses. Then the honest part: five locations means five sets of reviews and five sets of photos, and the budget has to reflect that — a single shared profile is the mistake that makes the whole plan collapse.

Q2: Why is a business not showing in the local pack even though it ranks organically?

Framework: Two different systems. Organic ranking looks at the page; the local pack looks at the entity, the distance between the searcher and the address, and the profile’s signals. So diagnose the profile first: is the primary category right, is the address verified, is the name consistent with citations, are there reviews and are they recent. Then proximity — a business in the next city simply cannot win a “near me” query in this one, and no amount of on-page work changes that. Then prominence: authority and review volume relative to the competitors in that pack. The answer that signals experience is that you check the pack manually from the actual location, because results differ by a few hundred metres and the client’s own laptop is rarely where their customers are.

Q3: How do reviews affect ranking, and how do you get more of them without violating policy?

Framework: Reviews influence local ranking through volume, velocity, rating and keyword content, and they influence conversion even more strongly than they influence rank. Get them by making the ask part of the service process — at handover, by QR code or short link, from a person the customer already trusts. Never gate by sentiment (asking only happy customers), never offer an incentive, never buy them. Those three are the fastest way to lose the profile entirely, and a suspended profile costs more than every review it bought.

Q4: What actually matters for mobile SEO beyond “it works on a phone”?

Framework: Three layers. Indexing — the mobile version of the page is the version that gets indexed, so anything missing on mobile is missing from the index, including structured data and internal links. Interaction — tap target size, no horizontal scroll, forms that do not require zooming, and content that does not shift as it loads. Intent — mobile searchers are often mid-task, so the answer, the phone number and the address belong near the top, not after three paragraphs of brand story. Measure with field data per template, and test on a real device; a resized desktop window tells you almost nothing.