Local SEO: the business listing and LocalBusiness markup

Local SEO is work so that a business is found by “near me” queries: a map listing, the same address and phone everywhere, and LocalBusiness markup.

“Near me”

If you are a land surveyor, a coffee shop or a workshop, your clients most often don’t search for “the best land surveyor in the world” but for “land surveyor near me” or “coffee on the waterfront”. For such queries a person wants to see a map, an address, hours and a phone, not an article. This part of search is called local, and the work on it is called local SEO.

What the person sees: above the ordinary results, and often instead of them, a map and a list of businesses. These aren’t pages of your site but business listings on mapping services. In English-speaking countries the main one is Google Business Profile (it shows on Google Search and Google Maps). Beside it are Apple Business Connect (Apple Maps), Bing Places and directories such as Yelp. Which features exist in your region changes, so check before spending time on one.

The Russian market. In Russia the main services are Yandex Maps (the listing is made in the Yandex Business service) and 2GIS, which began in 1999 in Novosibirsk. The principle is the same: a name, address, phone and category, checked and shown on a map.

Where it comes from. Paper directories such as the Yellow Pages worked on the same principle: a name, an address, a phone, a heading. The first electronic directories moved this onto the internet, and maps and mobile phones made such search ordinary: a person stands in the street and searches “pharmacy near me”.

Three factors of local search

Google’s help page names three factors by which it picks businesses for a “near me” query: relevance, distance and prominence. Other platforms use similar logic. The weights aren’t published, but what you can do is clear:

• Relevance. How well your listing matches the query: the right category, a complete description of services, hours, a site on which all of it is confirmed. This is where you work.
• Distance. From the person’s position to you. You can’t change it. You can only state the address or service area accurately.
• Prominence. How well known you are: reviews (their number, freshness and rating), mentions in directories and on sites, links to your site. It grows only by honest means.

NAP: the same everywhere

NAP is Name, Address, Phone. The main rule of local SEO is that they must be identical everywhere: on the site, in the listing, in directories, on social networks. If the site says “Alder Boundary Surveys, +1 000…” and the listing says “K. Alder Surveys LLC, 555…”, to a machine and to a person these can be two different businesses. A “+1” against no country code is enough to make them not match.

Open the diagram. In two columns are the same three facts: what the site says and what the listing says. Bring them to one form, then play with the three factors and see what affects what (the model is for teaching, the weights are invented).

The listing: what goes in it

Everything you thought about in the lessons on the brief is needed here in exact wording.

1. The name. As on the sign and on the site. Don’t add keywords to the name (“Cheap Land Surveyor Riverbend”): it breaks the platforms’ rules and counts as spam.
2. The address or the service area. If there is a place where you can be found, its address. If you travel or work remotely, you can say in the listing that you work without an office, and in which area. Don’t pass off someone else’s address or an apartment as an office: it breaks the rules and misleads people.
3. The phone, in one form, the same as on the site.
4. Opening hours. Including holidays and breaks. Wrong hours are worse than none.
5. Categories. Chosen from the platform’s list; a main one and a couple of extra ones. They decide which queries you answer.
6. Services and prices, if possible.
7. Photographs. Real ones: the entrance, the premises, the work. Other people’s pictures and stock photos mislead.
8. The description. What you do and for whom, in plain words, with no guarantees of results and no comparisons.
9. The site. A link to the page where everything is confirmed.

To create the listing you have to verify that the business is yours (a call, a code by mail or another way the platform offers).

Reviews, honestly

Reviews strongly affect choice: people believe them. And that is where the temptations are greatest.

• Ask. A happy client will gladly leave a review if you ask and show how.
• Don’t buy or invent them. Faking breaks the platforms’ rules (listings are suspended), and in the US the FTC’s rule on consumer reviews and testimonials (16 CFR Part 465, in force since October 2024) bans fake reviews and paying for reviews of a set sentiment. In the UK the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 bans fake reviews too, and EU rules require businesses to say how they check reviews.
• Don’t make it conditional. “A discount for a positive review” is buying a review, and Google’s policy names incentives for reviews as prohibited.
• Answer all of them, bad ones included: calmly, to the point, without accusing. Everyone who comes to the page later reads the answer.
• Remember confidentiality. An expert, attorney or doctor doesn’t discuss a client’s case in public, even when defending against a bad review.

Limits for regulated professions

If you are an expert, an attorney, a doctor or a notary, extra limits apply to the description and the reviews: advertising law bans misleading claims and unfair comparisons (“best”, “number one”, “most experienced”), and professional rules restrict advertising even further. For attorneys in the US, the state bar rules are based on ABA Model Rule 7.1, which forbids false or misleading communications about a lawyer’s services, and many states add disclaimers; for solicitors in England and Wales the Solicitors Regulation Authority has its own rules. You talked about this in the lesson on expert texts and ethics. This is a guideline, not legal advice: show the text of the listing to a lawyer, your licensing body or your professional association before publishing. No guarantees of results, no “we win 100% of cases”, and no reviews that disclose another person’s case.

LocalBusiness markup

The facts from the listing have to be repeated on the site: in visible words (a Contact page) and in markup in the head. You already know how to write JSON-LD. For a place the type is LocalBusiness or its more exact subtype (ProfessionalService, Store, CafeOrCoffeeShop and so on: the list is on schema.org). The minimum looks like this:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Name",
  "url": "https://riverbend.example/",
  "telephone": "+1 000 000 0000",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "0 Bank Street",
    "addressLocality": "Riverbend",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": {
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
    "opens": "10:00",
    "closes": "18:00"
  },
  "areaServed": "Riverbend and the surrounding area"
}

Three rules to remember:

1. The markup restates what is visible on the page and in the listing. The hours in the markup and on the page must match.
2. For a project without an office, give a service area (areaServed) and a town in place of an exact address; don’t invent addresses.
3. The days of the week in markup are in English (Monday and so on) in any language: that is schema.org’s vocabulary, not text for a person.

Practice

Prepare the listing and the markup.

1. The listing. The name, address and phone from the brief word for word, the hours, one to three categories, a list of services (from the brief), the service area and a description without guarantees or comparisons.
2. The markup. JSON-LD with the type LocalBusiness (or a subtype): name, address, phone, hours, service area.

The check compares the listing and the markup with the brief and looks for words of promise. Whether your listing is accurate is for you to decide: call the number given and walk the path of a person who is looking for you nearby.