Question 1

What is local SEO, and how is it different?

Accepted Answer

Optimising to appear for searches with **local intent** — where the searcher wants a business near them — and it is genuinely a different discipline, because the ranking factors and the results themselves differ from ordinary search.

**What makes it different.** A local search returns a **map pack** — a small group of business listings with a map, appearing above the ordinary results. Those listings are drawn not from web pages but from **business profiles**, so the optimisation targets are different objects entirely.

There are effectively two competitions running: one for the map pack, and one for the organic results beneath it.

**The main factors, as generally understood:**

**Relevance** — how well the business matches the query, driven by categories, services and profile content.

**Distance** — proximity to the searcher or the searched location. **This is the factor that cannot be optimised**, and it is why the same business ranks differently for users a mile apart, and why local rank tracking must be location-specific to mean anything.

**Prominence** — how well known the business is, from reviews, links, citations and general web presence.

**What actually matters practically:**

**A complete, accurate Google Business Profile**, with correct categories — the primary category is unusually influential — hours, services, and current photographs.

**NAP consistency.** Name, address and phone number identical across the web. Inconsistencies dilute confidence, and old listings with a former address are a common and invisible problem.

**Reviews.** Volume, recency, rating and — increasingly — whether they are responded to. Review content mentioning services appears to help relevance.

**Local citations** in directories, and links from local organisations, which are far more valuable here than generic links.

**Location pages** for multi-site businesses, with genuinely distinct content rather than templated pages with the town name swapped.

**Structured data** for local business details.

**What is against the rules:** fake addresses, virtual offices presented as premises, keyword-stuffed business names — which is widespread and is a recognised problem — and incentivised reviews.

**Service-area businesses** without premises have their own profile type and rules.

Question 2

What is international SEO, and what does hreflang do?

Accepted Answer

Making a site work for multiple countries or languages so that search engines serve the right version to the right user — and hreflang is the mechanism telling them which version is which. The first

Question 3

Does structured data actually help SEO?

Accepted Answer

Structured data is standardised markup added to a page's HTML describing what its content means — that this string is a price, that one is an author, this is a recipe's cooking time. The vocabulary

Question 4

What is search intent and why does it matter more than keyword volume?

Accepted Answer

Search intent is what someone is actually trying to accomplish when they type a query. It matters more than search volume because a page that ranks for a high-volume keyword while misreading the

Question 5

What is a customer journey map and is it actually useful?

Accepted Answer

A customer journey map is a visual representation of the stages a person goes through when interacting with a business — what they do, think and feel at each point, across every channel. What a map

Question 6

What is positioning, and how is it different from a value proposition?

Accepted Answer

Positioning is the place you occupy in a customer's mind relative to alternatives; a value proposition is what you say you deliver. Positioning is comparative and strategic; a value proposition is

Question 7

What is topical authority in SEO?

Accepted Answer

The idea that covering a subject comprehensively makes a site more likely to rank for queries within it — because depth across a topic signals expertise in a way that a single page cannot. The

Related Questions