Local SEO That Works (and the Directory Tax)

Local search is the one arena where a small practice competes only against its neighbours — not the 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 few understand.

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-phone everywhere it appears, and whether your site actually mentions the places you serve. Proximity — where the searcher is standing — you can't control. Everything else you can.

The two inputs nobody explains

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

Consistency means your business appears identically — 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 these; disagreement reads as unreliability. This isn't a monthly service, it's a one-time audit and a habit of updating everywhere when something changes. (The same consistency is what AI reads about you elsewhere — one job, two payoffs.)

Location pages matter when you serve multiple areas: a page that genuinely speaks to serving each place — not a template with the town name swapped. Three real paragraphs about your work in that area beat ten auto-generated pages 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 email you?

The honest verdict: for most professional practices, directories are a tax on demand that would have found you anyway. Their business model is ranking well for your category, standing between you and the searcher, and selling the introduction back to you. Paying them rarely creates demand; it repositions who owns it.

The exceptions are narrow and real: a free, accurate listing on the handful of directories that dominate your specific profession (a lawyer's provincial bar directory, a physio's association register) helps consistency and occasionally sends genuine referrals — and industry-specific platforms with real user bases (a Healthgrades, an Avvo) can be worth an accurate free presence. The paid tiers, the "featured" placements, the per-lead upsells: measure them with the one question — would those clients have found you anyway? — before renewing anything.

Questions practices actually ask

An agency quoted me monthly "local SEO." What would that even be? Ask them to itemise. If the list is the four inputs above, most of it is one-time work plus the review habit you can own. 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 but not the only path — a strong review reputation and referral base routes around it. 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, and let your own numbers overrule the sales script in either direction.

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 compounds.

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Part of Get Found — the discovery system.