Profile audit
Category, services, description, hours, attributes, photographs, and every field left empty. Most profiles are half-filled and the gaps are free wins.
SEO · Delhi NCR & remote
Three results. That is the whole prize.
For a local search the map pack shows three businesses. Being fourth is functionally the same as being fortieth, and the rules that decide those three places are not the rules that decide the blue links below them.
Short answer
Local SEO is the work of appearing in the map pack — the three local businesses shown above the ordinary results. It is decided mainly by proximity, relevance and prominence: how close you are to the searcher, how precisely your profile matches what they asked for, and how much corroboration exists across the web.
Google Business Profile
Reviews and responses
Citations and consistency
No doorway pages
Free local audit
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01 The premise
A different algorithm with different rules.
The map pack is not a shorter version of the organic results. It is scored separately, on largely different inputs, and a site can rank first for a term organically while being invisible in the local pack for the same search. That surprises people, and it means local work is genuinely a different job rather than ordinary SEO with a city name added.
The dominant factor is proximity, and it is the one you cannot change. A searcher in Rohini gets Rohini businesses. This is why “rank first in Delhi” is an incoherent target — there is no single Delhi result, there is a different result for every point on the map. What you can move is relevance and prominence, and for most businesses there is a lot of ground there.
What you must not do is manufacture proximity. Fake addresses, virtual offices used as locations and forty city landing pages are the standard shortcuts, and all three are explicitly against Google’s guidelines. They also work, briefly, which is exactly why they keep being sold.
02 Factors
What actually decides the three places.
Proximity is fixed. Everything else on this list is work you can do.
The ranking factors
- Proximity. How close you are to the searcher. Unchangeable, and the strongest single factor.
- Primary category. The single most under-optimised setting in local SEO. It must be the most specific category that genuinely describes you.
- Services and description. What the profile actually lists, in the words customers use rather than the words your industry uses.
- Review volume and recency. Both matter, and recency matters more than people expect. Forty reviews from 2021 read as a business that has stopped.
- Review responses. Replied to, including the bad ones. It is a visible signal to Google and a much stronger one to the person reading.
- Citation consistency. Name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear. Variations dilute the corroboration the algorithm relies on.
- Photographs. Regularly added, real, and of the actual premises. Profiles with current photographs consistently outperform neglected ones.
- Your website. A location page that matches the profile, with the same details and genuine local content.
03 Straight talk
Location pages: real, or doorway?
This is the line that decides whether local content helps you or gets you penalised.
A real location page
- A genuine presence. An address, staff, a service area you actually cover from there.
- Content specific to that place. Local projects, local landmarks, area-specific pricing or constraints.
- Its own contact route. A number that reaches that branch, and its own hours.
- Reason to exist. Someone searching for that area learns something they could not get from the main page.
A doorway page
- One template, forty cities. The same paragraph with the place name swapped. A named spam pattern.
- No presence there. Claiming to serve Gurgaon, Noida, Faridabad and Ghaziabad from one office with a page each.
- Nothing local in it. No local content, no local contact, nothing a resident would recognise.
- Built for the engine. Pages no human would ever want to read. That is the definition, and it is why they get penalised.
Free local audit
Where do you actually rank on the map?
Send me your business name and area. I will check where you appear from several points around your location, what your profile is missing, and where your citations disagree with each other.
- Checked from several points, not one
- You keep the findings either way
- No fake locations, ever
- Same-day reply, all 7 days
Free audit
Get a free quote
Four details, and a real reply today.
04 Process
How local work runs.
Fix the citations
Name, address and phone made identical across directories, and the duplicates that dilute you removed.
Reviews
A system for asking that fits how you actually work, plus responses to everything that arrives, good and bad.
Local pages
One genuine page per real location, with content a resident would recognise. Never one per pin code.
Track by location
Rankings checked from several points on the map, because a single city-wide number is meaningless.
— SEO
Related services.
These sit next to local SEO and are usually bought with it. Same person doing the work in each case.
SEO Services
Rankings that hold.
Read moreTechnical SEO
Crawl, index, speed, schema.
Read moreE-commerce SEO
Category and product pages.
Read moreEnterprise SEO
Thousands of URLs, many owners.
Read moreInternational SEO
hreflang done properly.
Read moreIndustry-Specific SEO
Your sector’s own search behaviour.
Read more— Questions
local SEO — your questions.
Straight answers, including the ones that cost me work. If yours is not here, ask it — I reply the same day.
Common causes: the profile is unverified, the primary category is wrong or too general, the address is inconsistent across the web, there are duplicate listings competing with each other, or the searcher is simply too far away. The first four are fixable and are usually the problem.
Ask, in a way that fits your workflow — a short link sent by WhatsApp after a job is completed works well in India. Do not incentivise them, do not gate them so only happy customers can leave one, and never buy them. Respond to every review, especially the critical ones.
Only where you have a genuine presence or genuinely distinct service in that place. One real page per real location is correct. Forty templated city pages is a doorway-page pattern, and it reliably ends in a penalty six to twelve months later.
Faster than general SEO. Profile and citation fixes can shift map visibility in weeks rather than months, because the local algorithm reacts more quickly to corroborating information. Review volume and recency take longer because they depend on your actual customer flow.
In the map pack, not really — it is built around physical proximity. You can rank organically for that city with genuinely useful content, and you can advertise there. What you cannot legitimately do is fabricate a location, and doing so risks the profile entirely.
Yes. The profile and the site corroborate each other: matching details, a location page, local content and correct LocalBusiness structured data. A strong profile pointing at a weak or inconsistent site underperforms noticeably.
Free consultation · No obligation
Win the three places that actually exist.
Tell me your business name and area. You will get a specific list of what your profile is missing and where your details disagree across the web — before you pay anything.
- Checked from several points on the map
- Profile, citations and reviews together
- No fake locations or doorway pages
- You keep the findings either way
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