For local businesses
Local SEO Services That Win Calls From the Map, Not Just Rankings
Most local SEO services sell you a position in the map pack. Google says plainly that nobody can buy one: local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence, and there is no way to pay for a better ranking. So we work on the two factors that can be moved, keep you clear of the mistakes that get a Business Profile suspended, collect reviews the way the FTC now requires, and measure the result in calls, direction requests and visits rather than a ranking screenshot taken from your own front door.
You own the profile. No fake reviews. No virtual offices. Reported in calls.
On this pageHow Google ranksProfile checkWhat is includedPricingFAQ
3
factors Google says decide local results: relevance, distance and prominence
0
ways to pay Google for a better local ranking, in Google's own words
2 hours
of driving time, the furthest a service area should reach under Google's guidelines
21 Oct 2024
the date the FTC's rule against fake and bought reviews took effect
Sources: Google Business Profile Help, how to improve your local ranking and the guidelines for representing your business; the FTC's consumer reviews and testimonials rule. All read November 2026.
In 30 seconds
- Nobody can buy a position. Google says local results rest on relevance, distance and prominence, and there is no way to pay for a better ranking.
- Shortcuts get profiles suspended. Virtual offices and fake reviews are what Google’s guidelines rule out, and a suspended profile costs you every call.
- We measure calls. From your own Business Profile and website, not a ranking screenshot from one desk.
- A flat monthly fee. Based on how many locations we cover and how competitive the area is, quoted after the free audit.
What decides the map pack
What Google says decides the map pack, and the one factor nobody can buy
Search for a local SEO company and most of what comes back is a list of agencies ranking each other. Almost none of them quote the one source that matters: Google's own help page on local ranking. It is short, it is public, and it explains why some promises in this industry cannot be kept.
| Factor | Google's definition | What the work can change | What it cannot |
|---|---|---|---|
| Relevance | "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for" | Your categories, services, description and the pages on your site that say what you do | Whether you actually offer what is searched for |
| Distance | "how far each business is from the customer who's searching" | Nothing directly. Strong relevance and prominence let you show up further out | Where you are, or where the searcher is standing |
| Prominence | "how well-known a business is"; "More reviews and positive ratings can help" | Reviews, replies, links, mentions and consistent listings across the web | Years of history a competitor already has, at least not quickly |
Quotes from Google Business Profile Help, tips to improve your local ranking on Google, read November 2026. The page also says: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."
Relevance is where most of the quick wins are
Relevance is the factor a business controls most directly, and the one most often left half done. A profile listed under a broad category, with no services entered and a description written years ago, is telling Google less than it could about what the business does. The primary category carries the most weight of any single field, so choosing it is the first decision we make with you, and the secondary categories follow from the work you actually want more of, not from everything you could conceivably do.
Relevance also lives on your website. The pages a profile links to, the services they name and the words customers use when they search all feed the same judgement. Local keyword research here is less about volume and more about phrasing: whether your customers search for a boiler repair or a furnace repair, a lawyer or an attorney, and which of those your profile and pages currently say.
Prominence is earned, and earned slowly
Google describes prominence as how well known a business is, and says more reviews and positive ratings can help. It also draws on what the rest of the web says about you: links from local organisations, mentions in the local press, and listings on the directories customers still use. None of it can be manufactured without risk, which is why the review section further down matters as much as any ranking tactic.
Distance is the factor nobody can buy
Distance is how far your business is from the person searching. It changes with every search, because every searcher stands somewhere different, and no amount of optimisation moves your premises closer to them. This is why a promise of the top three across a whole city is a promise to move a factor that cannot be moved. In a dense market, a well run profile wins its own neighbourhood first and widens its radius as relevance and prominence grow.
Understanding distance changes how you judge any provider, including us. The honest question is not “will you get me to number one” but “how far out from my location can we compete, for which searches, and what would it take to go further”. That is the conversation our audit starts.
Paid placement is a different product
The ads that sit above the map pack are bought, and they are clearly marked as ads. They can be a good investment, especially while the organic work builds, and we run them for clients, either as PPC management on its own or as organic search and paid campaigns run together. But buying ads does not change the organic local ranking underneath them. Google is explicit that there is no way to request or pay for that.
Interactive check
Is your Business Profile ready to rank?
Switch on everything that is true today. It is a checklist, not a benchmark, and the score shows where to start.
Your profile is leaving calls behind. Start with ownership, the category and the address rules.
Want the real answer? We will check it against the businesses ranking above you.
Get my free auditProximity
Why your ranking changes from one street to the next
Search your own business from your desk and you will often look fine. A customer three miles away, typing the same words, can see a different local pack entirely. Both are telling the truth.
Every search is made from a different point on the map
One ranking is not a ranking
Because distance is measured from the searcher, a business does not have one position in the map pack. It has a different position at every point in its service area. A report that shows a single ranking, checked from one address, tells you how you look from that address and nothing else. We check rankings from a grid of points across the area you serve, so you can see where you appear in the top three, where you sit just below it, and where you do not appear at all.
That picture changes what to do next. A profile that ranks well within a mile and disappears at three usually needs more prominence, not more keywords. A profile that ranks well for one service and not another usually needs relevance: the right secondary category, the service listed, a page on the site that covers it properly.
What a service area does, and what it does not
A service-area business lists the places it travels to. That list tells Google, and customers, where you work. It does not change your distance from anyone. Adding forty towns to the list will not make you appear forty towns away; it will make the profile describe an area you probably cannot rank across. Google’s guidelines say a service area should not extend further than about two hours of driving time from where the business is based.
Ranking in a neighbouring town is possible, and it is slower than ranking at home. It needs a genuine page about the work you do there, reviews from customers who live there, and the kind of local links that show you are part of that community. We would rather say that at the start than discover it in month four.
Avoiding a suspension
The setup mistakes that get a Business Profile suspended
A slow month in the map pack costs you some calls. A suspended profile costs you all of them, and getting it back takes far longer than getting it wrong. Most suspensions trace back to a handful of situations that Google's guidelines describe precisely.
| Your situation | What Google's guidelines say | What we do |
|---|---|---|
| You travel to customers and work from home | A service-area business "should hide your business address from customers" | Address hidden, service areas set to where you genuinely work |
| You want an address in a bigger city | A rented mailing address the business does not operate from is not eligible; P.O. boxes and remote mailboxes "aren't acceptable" | We decline. A profile built on a virtual office is a suspension waiting to happen |
| You rent a desk in a coworking space | Only eligible with clear signage, receiving customers and staffed by your business during business hours | We check all three before listing it, or set you up as a service-area business |
| You want to rank across a whole state | The service area "shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time" | Service areas you can serve, and pages for the wider region |
| You want keywords in the business name | Unnecessary information in the name "could result in the suspension of your Business Profile" | Your real world name, exactly as it appears on your signage and invoices |
| You are a practitioner with several specialisms | "A practitioner shouldn't have multiple Business Profiles to cover all of their specializations" | One profile, with the specialisms set out as services |
| You have several branches | One profile for each location with its own staff and service area | A profile, a page and a review flow per branch |
Quotes from Google's guidelines for representing your business on Google, read November 2026. A summary, not a guarantee of how any individual profile will be treated.
Eligibility comes before optimisation
The guidelines start with who is allowed a profile at all: a business that has a physical location customers can visit, or one that travels to its customers. A plumber, a mobile dog groomer or a cleaner who works from home is eligible as a service-area business. An online-only business with no in-person contact is not, however good its website is. We check eligibility first, because optimising a profile that should not exist only makes the eventual suspension more expensive.
The most common request we turn down is the virtual office: an address in a city centre, rented so the profile appears closer to customers there. It is the shortcut many local SEO packages still sell, and it is the one the guidelines rule out most clearly. Competitors report these listings, Google acts on reports, and a profile suspended for a fake address takes the reviews and the history with it.
Spam on the map, and what to do about it
You will sometimes find competitors who are breaking these rules and ranking for it: keyword stuffed names, addresses that turn out to be mailboxes, several profiles for one business. They can be reported to Google through its own channels, and in competitive markets that is part of the work. It is slower than it should be and it does not always succeed, so we treat it as a cleanup task alongside the real work, never as the strategy.
A service-area business hides its address and lists the places it travels to.
Reviews
Reviews that help you rank, within the FTC's rule
Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking. Since 21 October 2024 the FTC has also had a specific rule on how businesses may and may not get them. Both point in the same direction: ask every customer, never manufacture one.
The searcher reads your reviews before she calls
A request after the job, sent to every customer
What the rule prohibits
The FTC’s Rule on the Use of Consumer Reviews and Testimonials took effect on 21 October 2024. Its sections prohibit fake or false reviews and testimonials, buying positive or negative reviews, undisclosed reviews written by insiders such as staff and their families, company controlled review sites presented as independent, and review suppression. Incentives are not banned outright, but they cannot come with an express or implied requirement that the review be positive.
The FTC’s own guidance adds a point many review tools quietly ignore. General requests to customers to post a review are allowed. Asking only the customers you expect to be happy, sometimes called review gating, may still break the wider FTC Act, and Google’s Maps content policy forbids businesses to selectively solicit positive reviews or to offer incentives for any. A system that sends unhappy customers to a private form and happy ones to Google is exactly that, and we do not build them.
Source: FTC, Consumer Reviews and Testimonials Rule: Questions and Answers, read November 2026. Not legal advice.
What we do instead
Every customer gets the same short request once the job is finished, by text or email, with a direct link to your profile. The timing matters more than the wording: a request sent the evening the work is done gets far more replies than one sent a fortnight later. The flow runs from your job management software or CRM where it can, so nobody has to remember to send it.
Every review gets a reply, good and bad. Google notes that replying shows customers you value their feedback, and the next searcher reads the replies at least as closely as the reviews. A calm, specific reply to a one star review often does more for a profile than another five stars. The full process sits within our review requests and replies for local businesses, and it is part of every plan.
How many reviews you need
There is no number Google publishes. The useful comparison is the businesses already in the top three for your main searches, near your location: how many reviews they have, how recent they are and what they mention. If you are within reach of them, steady requests will close the gap. If they have ten times your count, reviews are a long project and the plan says so.
Are the businesses above you really better placed?
Send your website and we will check your profile against them, across your service area rather than from one point.
What is included
What our local SEO services include
Ten parts, each tied to the factor it moves. The audit decides the order, because it is rarely all ten equally and the first month should go on whatever is holding you back most.
01
Google Business Profile optimization and management
Every field completed and kept current: categories, services, description, hours including special hours, attributes, photos and posts. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that is the baseline we start from.
Ongoing Google Business Profile management means checking for suggested edits from the public, which can quietly change your hours or category, and answering questions before a stranger does.
Every fieldSuggested edits watchedPhotos and postsQ and A
02
Categories, chosen for the work you want
The primary category is the single most important relevance signal on the profile, and the most common one we change. We look at the categories the businesses ranking for your main searches use, then choose yours for the jobs you actually want more of.
Secondary categories are added sparingly. Each one should describe the business, not a service you might do once a year.
Primary categorySecondary categoriesCompetitor checkRelevance
03
Location and service area pages
A page for each location, and pages for the main towns you serve where you have something real to say about the work there: jobs done, the questions customers in that area ask, the reviews from people who live there.
No doorway pages. Google’s spam policies list pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page, and substantially similar pages, as doorway abuse.
Location pagesService area pagesNo doorwaysLocal proof
04
Local citations and NAP consistency
Your name, address and phone number (NAP) should read the same everywhere: the main directories, the data providers that feed them, industry sites, and the maps that are not Google, including Apple Maps and Bing Places.
Most of the gain comes from fixing the listings that are wrong, old addresses and old numbers especially, rather than from submitting to hundreds of new directories nobody visits.
Cleanup firstApple MapsBing PlacesData providers
05
Review requests and review responses
A request to every customer after the job, a reply to every review, and a monthly look at what customers are saying, so recurring complaints reach you rather than sitting on the profile.
Everything inside the FTC’s rule: no bought reviews, no staff reviews, no gating, no incentives that depend on the star rating.
Every customer askedEvery review answeredNo gatingFTC compliant
06
Local link building
Links from the places that genuinely know you: the chamber of commerce, local sponsorships, suppliers and trade associations, local news when there is a real story. These build the prominence Google describes and they are hard for a competitor to copy.
No bought links and no link networks. They are cheap for a reason, and the reason arrives later.
Local organisationsSponsorshipsTrade bodiesNo bought links
07
On-page and technical work
Pages that load quickly on a phone, because most local searches happen on one. LocalBusiness schema that matches the profile exactly. Titles, headings and internal links that tell Google which page answers which service in which place.
The on-page work is where relevance on the profile and relevance on the site are made to agree.
Mobile speedLocalBusiness schemaOn-pageInternal links
08
Local keyword research
How your customers actually phrase the search, by service and by place: the trade words and the everyday ones, the “near me” searches and the ones that name a neighbourhood.
The research decides which services get their own page, which categories matter, and which phrasing the profile uses.
Service termsPlace termsNear meCustomer language
09
Call tracking and local SEO reporting
Calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile, rankings checked across a grid of points rather than from one address, and calls tracked to the source that produced them, set up so that your listings still show one consistent number.
A local SEO report you can read in five minutes: what came in, what changed, what we do next.
CallsDirectionsGrid rankingsFive minute report
10
Profile protection
Monitoring for edits you did not make, owner access kept with you, and spam competitors reported where they break the guidelines. If something goes wrong, the paper trail of what was changed and when is already there.
Most profile emergencies are avoidable, and the rest are much easier to fix with that history to hand.
Edit monitoringYour ownershipSpam reportsChange log
How we measure it
Measured in calls, directions and visits
A ranking is a means. What a local business needs from its profile is people getting in touch, and the profile itself records most of that: calls made from the call button, requests for directions, clicks through to the website, and bookings and messages where those are switched on. Those numbers are the headline of every report we send, month against month and against the same month last year, because local demand is seasonal for almost everyone.
Rankings come second, and they are measured across your service area, not from one point. A grid of points shows where you are in the top three, where you are close and where you are absent, and it shows the edge of your radius moving outward over time. That moving edge is the clearest sign the work is building prominence.
Calls are tracked to their source where you want that, so you can see whether a booked job came from the profile, the website or an advert. The setup keeps your main number on every listing, because a citation trail of different numbers is one of the things that drags a profile down.
What we leave out of the headline: impressions on their own, and a ranking screenshot from your office. Both are easy to make look good and neither tells you whether the phone rang.
The number that matters most is the one that rings.
Check your numbers
What extra calls from your profile are worth
Use your own figures. Your current calls are in the Performance section of your Business Profile, and the rest you know better than anyone.
Every input is yours to set; nothing here is a forecast or a published average. Repeat customers and referrals are left out, so for most businesses the true figure is higher.
At these numbers, the work returns 2.4 dollars of revenue for every dollar spent.
These are your figures. The audit checks them against your real profile.
Get my free auditAI search
Local SEO and AI search: AI Overviews and ChatGPT
More customers now ask an AI system who to call. Several agencies in the search results sell a separate product for this. Our view is plainer, and it starts with what can actually be known.
What we know
Google describes its AI Mode as using a “query fan-out” technique: it breaks a question into subtopics and searches for each of them at once across several sources (Google Search Help). A question like “who should I call about a leaking boiler near me” fans out into questions about the service, the area, the price and the reputation of the businesses involved.
A business is easier for any of these systems to describe correctly when the facts about it agree everywhere they appear, when real customers have written about it in detail, and when its own pages answer the questions customers ask in plain sentences. That is the work done properly, which is why we treat AI visibility as an outcome of the work rather than a separate package.
What nobody knows yet
No AI provider publishes a ranking formula for local recommendations, and the answers change from week to week. Anyone selling guaranteed placement in ChatGPT or in AI Overviews is selling something they cannot see inside. We check how the main AI tools describe your business and your competitors, report what we find, and fix anything they get wrong at the source: a wrong address on an old directory, an out of date service list, a page that never answers the question.
For a local business, the Business Profile, the reviews and the website are still where the customer ends up, whichever system pointed them there. Those are what we are paid to improve.
Choosing a provider
How to choose a local SEO company: seven questions to ask
The lists of the best local SEO companies that rank in Google are mostly written by agencies, and several put themselves first. These questions work on any provider, a large local SEO agency or a single local SEO consultant, ourselves included.
Who will own the profile?
The answer should be you, with the agency added as a manager. A profile created and owned by the agency is theirs to keep when you leave, along with every review on it.
Do you guarantee a ranking?
Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. A local SEO expert can promise work, reporting and honesty. A guarantee of position is a red flag.
What address will you use?
If the plan involves a virtual office, a mailbox or a desk you never use, walk away. It is the setup Google's guidelines rule out most clearly.
How will you get reviews?
Ask whether every customer is asked, and whether unhappy customers are filtered out. Filtering is review gating, and the FTC's guidance says it can break the law.
What will the report show?
Calls, direction requests and website clicks from the profile, and rankings across your area. A screenshot of one ranking from your own office is not a report.
What is actually in the package?
Ask for the list of tasks and how each moves relevance or prominence. Many cheap local SEO packages are automated directory submissions and a monthly email.
The seventh question: who does the work?
Ask who will make the changes to your profile and your site, and who you talk to when something breaks. A local SEO specialist who knows your account is worth more than a large team you never meet. Ask, too, what happens in the first month: a good answer names the problems the provider has already found from the outside, before you have paid anything.
What the answers usually reveal
Most of the difference between providers shows up in the first three questions. Ownership, guarantees and addresses are where the shortcuts live, and a provider who takes them on those questions will take them everywhere. The best local SEO company for you is the one whose answers you would be comfortable reading back to Google.
See where you stand before you spend anything.
The audit is free and shows what is holding your profile back most.
Built for your trade
Local SEO for your trade, your state and your city
The rules on this page apply to everyone. What changes by trade is which of them bites hardest, and we have written up each one in full.
Home services
Several trades under one roof, and one profile that cannot carry them all. What one profile can carry across trades.
Heating and cooling
Emergency searches at night decide the year. Why the hours on an HVAC profile matter.
Dental practices
A practice profile and a profile for each dentist. Practice and dentist profiles, set up properly.
Law firms
Real offices decide the near me searches. Where virtual offices leave law firms.
Franchises
Every unit its own territory, and its own profile. Profiles that survive a franchise changing hands.
Landscaping
A profile that keeps working through the off season. Keeping a landscaping profile ranked all year.
Real estate
Agent profiles under Google's practitioner rules. Agent profiles and the farm area map.
Several locations
A profile, a page and a review flow per branch. Location pages that are not doorways.
Local SEO for small business is built from the customers you already serve.
By state
Local search behaves differently in a dense metro than across a rural county, and each state has its own licensing and advertising rules for the trades. Our state guides cover both: local search across Florida, local search across Texas, local search across California, local search across New York, local search across Georgia, local search across Ohio, local search across Colorado and local search across Maryland. Each links on to the cities we cover in that state, where the page is about that city’s own market rather than a template.
Local SEO vs SEO
One discipline, two sets of results: the map pack and organic search
A local search usually shows two sets of results: the map pack, driven by Business Profiles, and the organic results below it, driven by websites. The work covers both, with the profile first.
Where they overlap
The website feeds the profile. The pages it links to, the services those pages describe and the links pointing at the site all shape relevance and prominence in the map pack as well as in the organic results. A strong site with a weak profile wastes most of its local value, and a strong profile linked to a thin site leaves searches on the table that never show a map at all.
Where they part
Searches without local intent, research questions and comparisons, are won by websites alone, often against national publishers. That is broader SEO work, and for most local businesses it comes after the map pack, not before. A business that sells across the country rather than within a radius usually needs organic SEO more than local SEO, and we will say so in the audit.
Why Moha
Why local businesses choose Moha
We are a local SEO marketing company that starts from Google’s own rules rather than from a package. That sounds like a small difference. In practice it decides whether a profile is still standing in two years: no virtual offices, no keyword stuffed names, no bought reviews, no doorway pages, and nothing we would be uncomfortable explaining to Google or to the FTC.
It also decides what you see. Local business SEO services are easy to report in a flattering way, with a single ranking from a single address. We report the calls, the directions and the visits, the rankings across your whole area, and what we will change next month. When something does not work, the report says so.
And it decides who owns what. Your profile, your reviews, your website and your tracking stay in your accounts, with us added as a manager. If you leave, you take everything with you, because a profile you do not own is not an asset.
Google's rules first
Eligibility, addresses, names and service areas checked before anything is optimised.
Reviews within the law
Every customer asked, every review answered, nothing bought or gated.
Measured in calls
Calls, directions and visits first; rankings across your whole area second.
Yours to keep
Profile, reviews and data in your accounts, with us as a manager.
A report you can read in five minutes, between customers.
How it works
How our local SEO management works, month by month
Five stages. The first two are where most profiles gain the most, because they remove what is holding the business back before anything new is built.
01
Week 1
Local SEO audit
Eligibility, the profile, categories, citations, reviews, the site and the businesses ranking above you, with rankings checked across your area.
02
Month 1
Foundations
Profile completed, categories set, wrong listings fixed, tracking in place, review requests switched on.
03
Months 2 to 3
Pages and reviews
Service and location pages written, schema added, every review answered, the request flow tuned.
04
Ongoing
Prominence
Local links, mentions and photos, built steadily, and competitors' spam reported where it breaks the guidelines.
05
Monthly
Review
Calls, directions, visits and the ranking grid, in plain English, with what changes next.
Pricing
Local SEO pricing and packages
A flat monthly fee, based on how many locations we cover and how competitive the area is. A single location in a quiet market and five locations in a large city are genuinely different amounts of work, so we quote after the audit rather than from a price list.
What sets the local SEO cost
The number of locations and profiles, how strong the businesses ranking above you are, how much the website needs, and how many listings are wrong when we start. A market where the top three have hundreds of reviews each needs more months of prominence work than one where they have twenty.
Affordable local SEO, and what it leaves out
Affordable local SEO services exist and some are fine for a start. Ask what is left out. The cheapest local SEO packages are usually automated directory submissions and a ranking email: no category work, no pages, no review flow, and nobody checking for the suggested edit that changed your hours.
Local SEO for small business
Local SEO services for small business owners start with the fixes that cost least and return most: the profile, the categories and the wrong listings. For many single location businesses that first stage alone changes the calls, and we will tell you if that is all you need for now.
Local SEO for multiple locations
For a multi location business, each location is priced as its own market, because each one competes in its own radius. Groups get one report across all locations and one point of contact, and the fee per location falls as the shared work, such as templates and tracking, is reused.
Watch
How to improve your local ranking, from Google
Google's own short video on what decides local results: how well a profile matches the search, how far the business is from the searcher, and how well known it is. It is the same video Google embeds on its help page about local ranking, and every part of the service above works on one of those three.
Free audit
See where you stand across your area
Send your website and we will check your Business Profile, categories, listings, reviews and site against the businesses ranking above you, with rankings checked across your service area rather than from one point.
You get a written summary of what is holding the profile back and the order we would fix it in. No call required to get it.
Free
We reply from hello@gomoha.io, usually the same working day.
FAQ
Local SEO questions business owners ask
Taken from what owners ask in Google's Business Profile help community, on local search forums and in trade groups, and from the questions people type into a search box.
How much do local SEO services cost?
Ours are a flat monthly fee based on the number of locations and how competitive your area is, quoted after a free audit. Across the industry, published prices for local SEO run from a few hundred dollars a month to several thousand per location; the difference is mostly in how much real work is included.
Can I pay Google to rank higher on Maps?
No. Google says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. You can pay for ads that appear above the map pack, which are marked as ads, but they do not change the organic ranking.
How long does local SEO take?
Fixes to the profile, categories and wrong listings can show within weeks, because they remove something holding you back. Movement in a competitive map pack usually takes three to six months, and reviews build steadily rather than all at once.
Do you guarantee a top three ranking?
No, and be wary of anyone who does. Distance from the searcher is one of the three factors Google uses, and it changes with every search. We commit to the work, to honest reporting and to telling you where the limits are in your market.
Do I need a physical address to rank in the map pack?
You need a real place of business or a genuine service area. A business that travels to customers can be a service-area business with its address hidden. A virtual office or a mailbox rented to get an address is not eligible under Google's guidelines.
Why did my Business Profile get suspended?
The usual causes are an address the business does not operate from, keywords added to the name, duplicate profiles, or a sudden batch of changes that looks suspicious. The fix is to correct the cause first and then request reinstatement through Google with evidence that the business is real at that location.
How many Google reviews do I need?
Google does not publish a number. Compare yourself with the businesses in the top three for your main searches near you: their count, how recent the reviews are and what they mention. That gap is your target.
Can I offer customers something in return for a review?
The FTC's rule does not ban incentives outright, but they cannot depend on the review being positive, and the incentive should be disclosed. Google's own Maps content policy is stricter: businesses may not offer incentives for reviews at all, so we never do.
Who owns the Business Profile if we stop working together?
You do. We are added as a manager on a profile you own, so the profile, its reviews and its history stay with you.
What is the difference between local SEO and SEO?
Local SEO vs SEO is mostly a question of which results you are trying to win. Local SEO focuses on the map pack and the searches with local intent, starting with the Business Profile. Organic SEO works on the website for searches with or without a location. Local businesses usually need the map pack first.
Can I rank in a town where I do not have an office?
Often, yes, but more slowly than at home, because distance counts against you. It takes a genuine page about your work there, reviews from customers there and local links. Adding the town to your service area alone does not change your distance.
Does adding more service areas help me rank?
It tells Google and customers where you work, which is useful. It does not move you closer to anyone, and Google's guidelines say a service area should stay within about two hours of driving time from your base.
Do geotagged photos help local rankings?
Adding location data to photo files is a widely sold tactic. Google's own help page on local ranking does not mention it, and there is no published evidence that it works. Real photos of your work, premises and team are worth posting regularly, because customers look at them.
Do AI Overviews and ChatGPT change local search?
They add another place customers ask for recommendations. Nobody can guarantee placement in them. Consistent details everywhere, detailed real reviews and pages that answer questions plainly make any system more likely to describe you correctly.
What is included in a local SEO audit?
Our local SEO audit checks eligibility and the profile, categories, listings and citations, reviews, the website's local pages and speed, and the businesses ranking above you, with rankings measured across your service area. You get the order we would fix things in.
Do Apple Maps and Bing Places matter?
Yes, more than most businesses assume, because some phones and assistants use them by default. Both are part of our citation work, and both should show the same name, address and phone number as your Google profile.
Is there a long contract?
No. A start long enough to judge the work fairly, then no notice period holding you after that.
Do I need a website to rank in the map pack?
You can appear in the map pack with a profile alone, and for some trades that is a reasonable start. But the site is where relevance gets depth, and it wins the searches that never show a map, so most businesses outgrow a profile without one quickly.
Ready when you are
Find out how far your profile can reach
Tell us your website and the searches that matter to you. We will show you where you appear across your area today, what is holding you back, and what our local SEO services would change first, before you commit to anything.
Photographs via Pexels, each cropped with the Moha logo added: an open sign by Ketut Subiyanto, a pin on a map by GeoJango Maps, a van in a driveway by Tima Miroshnichenko, a search outdoors by Greta Hoffman, a phone in hand by Kaboompics, a call at the counter by Pavel Danilyuk, an owner at a laptop by Kampus Production and a baker by Gustavo Fring.