Platforms we work in
Where local work happens. We connect review requests to whichever CRM or booking system already records completed jobs.
Google publishes what drives local results: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is fixed by where your customer is standing. Everything we do works on the other two — a complete, compliant profile, reviews earned the legitimate way, consistent citations, and location pages with something real on them.
If you sell online only, with no address customers can visit and no service area, local SEO is the wrong tool. Look at our Shopify and SEO work instead.
We audit every field against Google's guidelines for representing your business, which are stricter than most owners realize:
Then the parts that improve relevance: primary and secondary categories chosen against the competitors who actually show in your local pack, the full services list, special hours, attributes, current photos, booking links, and a website link tagged with UTM parameters so profile traffic is separable in GA4. If an old agency or ex-employee owns the profile, we handle the ownership recovery first.
Reviews are the prominence lever you control most, and the one where shortcuts carry the most risk. Google's Maps content policy prohibits offering incentives for reviews, discouraging negative reviews, and selectively soliciting positive ones — which rules out the familiar "rate us 1–5, and only the 5s get the Google link" funnel. It also says merchants shouldn't pressure customers to review while on the premises. Separately, the FTC's final rule on consumer reviews and testimonials bans fake reviews (including AI-generated ones), buying reviews, certain undisclosed insider reviews, and review suppression, and took effect on October 21, 2024 with civil penalties for knowing violations.
What works inside those rules is boring and effective: ask every customer, at the moment the job is done, through the system that already knows the job is done. We wire the request into your CRM as an automated text or email after a completed appointment, invoice or delivery, then set up a reply workflow so every review gets a response from a named person. The demand is real: BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey reports that 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses and 41% say they always do.
We inventory your name, address and phone number across the listings that matter for your category and region: Bing Places, Apple Business Connect (which controls your place card in Apple Maps), Yelp, industry directories and data aggregators. Then we merge duplicates and correct stale data. Phone numbers get a deliberate decision rather than a default: a call tracking number improves attribution but adds a second number to keep consistent everywhere.
One page per real location, each with things only that location has: the team, photos of the actual premises, parking and access details, services offered there, reviews from that location, and LocalBusiness structured data that matches the profile exactly. Service-area businesses get strong service pages and a clear service-area section, not two hundred city pages with the town name swapped. Google's spam policies describe that pattern as doorway abuse, and we have first-hand experience of where it ends: it's the template we tore out of ahmeego.com in 2026.
Profile performance (calls, direction requests, website clicks), UTM-separated profile traffic and conversions in GA4, call tracking where you've chosen it, and grid-based visibility checks across your service area. Grids are directional, not gospel; leads and booked jobs are the scoreboard.
Your profile, the businesses in your local pack, a citation sample and your location pages. You get a written list of what's wrong and what it would take to fix.
Ownership and verification, policy fixes, categories, NAP cleanup, duplicate merges. Risky items, such as a name that needs to change, are handled first, because edits to the name or address can trigger re-verification.
Request automation connected to your CRM or booking tool, reply templates written in your voice, and an escalation path for negative reviews.
Location and service pages built or rebuilt, with LocalBusiness markup that mirrors the profile, validated in Google's Rich Results Test.
Fresh photos and updates, review replies, citation monitoring, a visibility grid, and a short written report tied to leads rather than rankings.
Google's own help center says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity, and the same page explains the third factor as prominence. It is equally direct about the thing many agencies imply otherwise: there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
That gives a local program three jobs: make relevance unambiguous, measure visibility across the area you actually serve, and grow prominence through reviews, mentions and links that a real business earns.
The rules we check on day one, each taken from Google's published guidelines and help pages.
| Rule | What Google says | Source |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | Match the real-world name; extra keywords aren't permitted and can lead to suspension | Representation guidelines |
| Virtual offices | Not eligible; co-working only with signage, customer visits and your own staff | Representation guidelines |
| Service area size | About two hours' driving from the base, larger only for some businesses | Representation guidelines |
| Number of service areas | Up to 20 cities, postal codes or areas | Manage your service area |
| Service-area edits | May take up to 48 hours to appear once approved | Manage your service area |
| Review incentives | No payments, discounts or freebies for reviews or for removing negative ones | Maps content policy |
| Selective asking | Don't discourage negative reviews or ask only happy customers | Maps content policy |
| Paying for rank | Not possible; there is no way to request or pay for better local ranking | Local ranking help page |
Local work splits naturally into a setup project (foundations, review engine, pages) and an ongoing monthly cadence. Both are quoted as flat fees after the free review, sized by number of locations and how much repair the profiles need. No percentage-of-spend fees, no long contracts — the same terms as our published pricing.
If you only need hands-on profile management, our Google Business Profile page covers that service, and Local Business covers combined local SEO and paid search. Sites with indexing problems beyond the local layer should start with a technical SEO audit.
Where local work happens. We connect review requests to whichever CRM or booking system already records completed jobs.
During a two-site consolidation, NAP was kept identical to the Google Business Profile, Google reviews were routed into the CRM with the right tags, and a call-tracking workflow that had never fired was surfaced as a business decision — tracking number versus NAP consistency — instead of being silently "fixed."
Read the case study →Built with LocalBusiness structured data carrying full NAP, an embedded map, and profile-linked review markup across a 77-page site on Cloudflare.
Read the build story →The full account of auditing millions of templated location pages against Google's spam policies and replacing them, including the numbers that forced the decision.
Read the write-up →The workflow we use to draft LocalBusiness JSON-LD quickly and then check every property against the visible page and the profile.
Read the guide →John on a local service owner's idea for giving customers a reason to come back between visits, the kind of repeat contact that also produces reviews.
Watch the video →Tell us your business name, how many locations you have, and whether customers come to you or you go to them.
The primary sources, standards, research, and tools we rely on for this work. Every link was checked on 2026-10-11. We aren't affiliated with these publishers unless noted.
