What a local SEO company actually does

The four jobs

The Google Business Profile. Claiming it, verifying it, choosing categories, setting the address or service area, filling every field, and keeping reviews, photos and posts current. This is the single largest lever in local search, and it is the one most businesses have half-done.

Listings elsewhere. The name, address and telephone number as they appear everywhere else on the web. Google reads those to decide how confident it is that a business exists and is where it says it is. When they disagree, confidence drops.

The website. Pages that name the place and the service, structured data that states the business details in a form a machine reads without guessing, and a site fast enough to be usable on a phone in the street.

Measurement. What position the business holds across its area rather than at one point, and how many calls and enquiries follow. Without this the other three are unfalsifiable.

What the work is trying to move

Google says local ranking rests on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well the business matches what was searched, which the profile and the website address. Distance is how far the business is from the searcher, which nothing can change. Prominence is how well known the business is, which listings, links and reviews address slowly.

That middle term is worth stating plainly, because it is the honest limit of the whole trade. A company in Tallaght cannot be made to appear for someone standing in Howth searching for a business nearby. Anyone who implies otherwise is selling something else.

What you could do yourself

The profile work is genuinely doable in-house, and the method is published in full on the handbook property, free, step by step. What most businesses lack is not the knowledge but the habit: the profile decays, the listings drift, the measurement stops. Paying someone is mostly paying for that not to happen.

The website work is harder to do yourself, not because the ideas are difficult but because it needs access to the site and a willingness to change templates.

What it is not

It is not advertising. A paid result is bought and stops the day the card is declined; a map position is earned and decays slowly. It is not a guarantee of a position, and no honest proposal contains one. And it is not a one-off project, which is why choosing a company is mostly a question about how they behave in month seven.