TL;DR: What is local SEO? It’s how nearby customers find you on Google when they search for what you do.
Below are the real search queries that brought customers to one of our local clients, what actually drove the enquiries, and an honest look at a viral claim doing the rounds (that Google now reads your shopfront signs to rank you).
Spoiler: the basics matter far more than the hype. Get your Google Business Profile, consistency and reviews right, and you win locally.
Most articles explaining what local SEO is start with a textbook definition. This one starts with real data, because we would rather show you how local search actually behaves than tell you.
What follows is a real, anonymised look at one of our clients’ Search Console data: the actual searches people use, where the business ranks, and one finding that catches a lot of established businesses out. Then we will deal honestly with a claim that has been spreading lately, that Google has started reading physical road signs and shopfronts to decide who ranks. We checked it against the actual evidence. The answer is more useful than the myth.
The real searches that found a local business
Let us start with a real example. The client is a hospitality business in a village just outside a larger town. We manage their website, so we can see exactly how people find them in Google. The business is anonymised, but every figure below is real, taken straight from Google Search Console over a recent 28-day period.
In that month, the site drew 937 clicks from 3,326 impressions in Google Search. A healthy return for a small single-location business. But the interesting part is not the totals. It is the split between two kinds of search, and what that split reveals about where the business is already strong and where it has room to grow.
| Type of search | What it looks like | Share of clicks | Share of impressions | Typical rank |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Branded (knew the name) | "[business name]", "[business name] [village]" | 95% | 58% | 1 to 2 |
| Non-branded local | "pub in [village]", "restaurant [town]" | About 5% | 32% | 3 to 4 |
| Non-branded wider area | "[town] restaurants", "best places to eat [town]" | Under 1% | 9% | 18 and below |
| "Near me" | "pubs near me", "restaurants near me" | Under 1% | 1% | Varies |
A couple of other details worth pulling out, because they shape the advice later:
- Most traffic landed on one page. Over 80% of clicks went to the homepage. The deeper pages (menu, booking, about) ranked well, often position one or two, but pulled far fewer clicks. The site is essentially competing as a single page.
- Mobile dominated. Mobile drove roughly two thirds of clicks, and converted better than desktop. As ever with local search, this is a phone-first audience.
- The audience is overwhelmingly local. Around 98% of clicks came from within the UK, exactly what you want for a single-location business.
What that data actually tells us
This is where it gets useful, because the data tells a story that catches a lot of established businesses out. It is not the simple “local SEO is working brilliantly” story. It is more honest and more instructive than that.
The good news: the brand is strong. When people know this business by name, they find it instantly and click. It owns position one for its own name and converts those searches at a high rate. Years of reputation are doing exactly what reputation should. If you have built a name locally, this is what it looks like in the data.
The opportunity: there is headroom in discovery. Here is the interesting part. The business already appears in plenty of non-branded local searches, “a pub in the village”, “a restaurant in the town”, which make up 42% of its impressions. Right now most of those clicks still go to whoever ranks just above it. That is not a problem so much as untapped potential: the visibility is already there, waiting to be converted into clicks.
Where the room to grow is shows up in the rankings. For village-level searches the business sits around position three or four, genuinely close to the top, so nudging up a place or two would capture meaningfully more of those searchers. For wider town and city-level searches it currently ranks lower, which is exactly where focused local content can build its presence over time. So the pattern is encouraging: already strong where it is known, with clear, reachable room to grow where it is still being discovered.
That is the genuine opportunity in this data, and it is the one we are building on for this client: the branded searches already convert nicely, so the focus is on lifting the non-branded local rankings from “appears on page one” to “wins the click”, and steadily building presence for the wider-area terms. That distinction, between being looked up and being found, is what the rest of this post is really about.
So what is local SEO, plainly?
Local SEO is the practice of helping your business appear in local search results, the searches people make when they want something nearby. Think “plumber near me”, “coffee shop in Exeter”, or “best barber in Totnes”. It is how Google connects people with businesses that genuinely exist and operate in their area.
Traditionally, it rests on a handful of signals: your Google Business Profile, on-page optimisation of your website, online reviews, and consistent business information (your name, address and phone number) across the web. Get those aligned, and Google grows confident enough to show you to nearby customers. That is the whole game, and the data above is what it looks like when it works.
The road-sign myth: what the Google leak really shows
Now for the claim you may have seen, because it has been doing the rounds in local SEO circles, and it is worth addressing head on.
The story goes like this: a 2024 leak of Google’s internal Content Warehouse documentation revealed an attribute called GeostoreRoadSignProto, and from this, some have concluded that Google is now scanning your shopfront and the road signs around your premises via Street View, and using them to verify your location and rank you locally. The practical advice that follows is usually “put your town name on your sign” and “own your Street View presence”.
We dug into the actual leak documentation rather than repeating the claim. Here is the honest picture.
In other words, the claim takes a real attribute name and stretches it into a confirmed ranking factor it was never shown to be. It is a classic pattern in SEO: a plausible-sounding interpretation gets repeated until it hardens into “fact”. We see it constantly, and we try hard not to add to it.
Here is the irony, though, and why this is worth more than a simple debunk. The myth points at something genuinely true, it just gets the mechanism wrong. Google does care a great deal about whether your business is consistently and verifiably located where you say it is. It just establishes that through your Google Business Profile, your citations, your reviews and your website, the boring, checkable signals, not by reading the sign above your door. The instinct (“be consistently, verifiably local”) is right. The road-sign mechanism is not the thing to act on.
What actually moves the needle
Strip away the hype, and local SEO comes down to a short list of things that genuinely work. Notice how each one maps back to the real client data above, rather than to speculation about signage.
Your Google Business Profile is the single biggest lever for local discovery. It is what puts you in the map pack for those “in the village” and “near me” searches, the ones with the most room to grow in our example. Claim it, complete every field, keep your hours and contact details accurate, add real photos, and respond to reviews.
Consistency of your name, address and phone number across the web is what gives Google confidence about where you are. Mismatches, “St” in one place and “Street” in another, “Devon” on the site but “Torquay” on the profile, quietly undermine you. This is the real version of the road-sign instinct.
Reviews are both a ranking signal and a conversion one. Genuine, recent reviews, responded to promptly, tell Google and customers that you are active and trusted.
Locally relevant content on your website, pages about the areas you serve and the things local customers search for, helps you show up, and rank higher, for those “[service] in [town]” searches. This is exactly the opportunity in our example: the business already appears for those terms, and dedicated local pages are one of the best ways to climb into the top spots.
A fast, mobile-friendly website underpins all of it, because most local searches happen on a phone, and Google indexes the mobile version first.
Your local SEO priorities, in order
If you do nothing else, do these, and roughly in this order. The effort-to-payoff ratio is best at the top.
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile
Every field filled, accurate hours, real photos, correct categories. This is what gets you into the map pack for "near me" and "in the village" searches.
Fix your NAP consistency
Name, address and phone identical across website, profile and directories. The real version of "being verifiably local".
Earn and answer reviews
Ask happy customers, reply to every review promptly. A ranking signal and a trust signal at once.
Add locally relevant pages
Pages for the towns and services you cover, so you appear for "[service] in [town]" searches.
Make sure the site is fast and mobile-first
Most local searches are on a phone. Speed and mobile usability underpin everything above.
Notice what is not on that list: redesigning your signage for Google. Tidy signage is good for human customers walking past, and you should absolutely have it. Just do not mistake it for a search ranking tactic.
Doing it yourself, or getting help
Plenty of this you can do yourself. Claiming your Google Business Profile, tidying your contact details and asking for reviews cost nothing but time, and they are the highest-return jobs on the list. If you do only those, you will be ahead of most of your local competitors.
Where we tend to help is the part that takes judgment and consistency: auditing where your business information has drifted out of sync across the web, building the locally relevant pages that capture those “[service] in [town]” searches, and making sure the website underneath is fast enough to convert the visits into calls. We did exactly that for the anonymised client above, and the data in this post is the result.
If you would like to know how your business currently shows up in local search, we are happy to take a look and tell you where the quick wins are. Get in touch for a straight assessment, or see our website design packages if you are planning a build that gets the local foundations right from the start.
Sources
- Anonymised client Google Search Console data, recent 28-day period.
- Google Search Central: Google Business Profile and local search.
- On the 2024 Content Warehouse API leak being function references rather than confirmed ranking signals: Unpacking the Google Content Warehouse API Leak.
- On Google not confirming the operational significance of leaked attributes: Google responds to the leak (Search Engine Land).
- GeostoreRoadSignProto as part of the Geostore mapping schema, not the web-search ranking system: Content Warehouse API reference, GeostoreFeatureProto.
