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Glossary

Local SEO

By Sergey Sulimko, Founder1 min read

Local SEO is the industry name for work aimed at the results a search engine shows when a query is tied to a place: results assembled from a business listing rather than from a website, and ordered by how relevant, how near and how prominent the business appears to be.

Google publishes no document under this name. The phrase belongs to the trade, not to Google,1 and the nearest official text is a support page listing what a business owner controls: verification, accurate details, replies to reviews, photos.2 What those controls are actually for is the subject of ranking higher with local SEO. Treat anyone quoting a fixed weighting for those factors as reporting a private measurement, because no published one exists.

The label is also wider than the surface it is usually used about. It covers the listing, the pages a crawler reads, and increasingly the answers assistants generate, which is three different mechanics under one shorthand.

Sources

  1. The term itself has no owner; this definition is Maps Agent's, written against the Google documentation above.

  2. Google: "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google": https://support.google.com/business/answer/7091?hl=en (read 2026-08-23)

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