Local SEO That Works (and the Directory Tax)

Local search is the one arena where a small practice only competes against its neighbours. Not the whole internet. Just the other accountants within driving distance. That makes it winnable in a way nothing else in marketing is.

It also makes it the arena with the most snake-oil per square metre. Because "rank locally" is what every practice wants, and almost nobody actually understands.

The honest mechanics are short. Local rank runs on four inputs. Your Google Business Profile — the dominant one. Your reviews. The consistency of your name, address, and phone number everywhere it appears. And whether your site actually mentions the places you serve. Proximity, where the searcher happens to be standing, you can't control. Everything else, you can.

The two inputs nobody explains

The profile and reviews already have their own guides. The other two deserve plain words.

Consistency means your business shows up identically everywhere. Same name. Same address format. Same phone. On your site, your profile, and the handful of places that matter. Search engines and AI assistants cross-reference all of this. Disagreement reads as unreliability. It isn't a monthly service. It's a one-time audit, plus a habit of updating everywhere the moment something changes. (The same consistency is also what AI reads about you elsewhere — one job, two payoffs.)

Location pages matter if you serve more than one area. A page that genuinely speaks to serving that specific place — not a template with the town name swapped out. Three real paragraphs about your actual work there will beat ten auto-generated pages that Google learned to ignore years ago.

The directory tax

Now the question every practice eventually asks. What about Yelp, Angi, Yellow Pages, and the fifty directories that keep emailing you?

Here's the honest verdict. For most professional practices, directories are a tax on demand that would have found you anyway. Their business model is simple: rank well for your category, stand between you and the searcher, then sell you back the introduction. Paying them rarely creates new demand. It just repositions who owns it.

There are narrow, real exceptions. Think a lawyer's provincial bar directory. Or a physio's association register. A free, accurate listing on the handful of directories that genuinely dominate your specific profession helps consistency. And occasionally sends a real referral. Industry-specific platforms with real user bases, like a Healthgrades or an Avvo, can be worth an accurate free presence too. But the paid tiers. The "featured" placements. The per-lead upsells. Measure those with one question before you renew anything. Would those clients have found you anyway?

Questions practices actually ask

An agency quoted me monthly "local SEO." What would that even be? Ask them to itemise it. If the list matches the four inputs above, most of it is one-time work, plus the review habit you can own yourself. Ongoing help earns its keep for multi-location practices, or genuinely competitive markets — as a defined project, not an open-ended retainer.

Do I need to be in the map pack to win? It's the biggest prize. It isn't the only path. A strong review reputation and a solid referral base can route around it entirely. If your market's map pack is locked up by bigger players, the warm-demand side of discovery is usually the better fight.

Yelp keeps calling about ads. Should I? Treat it like any ad spend. A bounded test, measured on booked work — not profile views. Go in expecting the directory tax. Let your own numbers overrule the sales script, whichever way they point.

Does posting on the profile weekly boost rank? Marginally, at best. Activity signals life. It doesn't outrank category, reviews, and consistency. Do the ten-minute monthly habit, and spend the difference on work that actually compounds.