Ranks a local service business in the Google map pack and local organic results by working the three local ranking factors - relevance, distance, and prominence - through service-page structure, honest city pages, citation consistency, and review velocity. Use when an owner asks "how do I rank in the map pack", "why does my competitor outrank me locally", "do I need a page for every service", or "should I make pages for every city near me". Do NOT use for hands-on Google Business Profile settings - use google-business-profile-optimizer instead. Do NOT use for general non-local website SEO - use seo-optimizer instead.
---
name: local-seo-playbook
description: Ranks a local service business in the Google map pack and local organic results by working the three local ranking factors - relevance, distance, and prominence - through service-page structure, honest city pages, citation consistency, and review velocity. Use when an owner asks "how do I rank in the map pack", "why does my competitor outrank me locally", "do I need a page for every service", or "should I make pages for every city near me". Do NOT use for hands-on Google Business Profile settings - use google-business-profile-optimizer instead. Do NOT use for general non-local website SEO - use seo-optimizer instead.
---
# Local SEO Playbook
Local ranking is not general SEO with a city name bolted on: Google ranks the
map pack on three factors - relevance, distance, and prominence - and only
two of them can be moved. The costly mistake this skill prevents is spending
months on tactics that move none of the three (blogging into the void,
doorway city pages) while the top competitor compounds reviews and citations.
Before starting, run local-unit-economics: for Summit Plumbing (4 techs, $450
average ticket, $75,000 a month, roughly $119 CAC on paid leads), every
organic customer displaces a paid one, which is the budget case for the hours
this playbook takes.
## The three factors and what actually moves each
- Relevance - how well the business matches the search. Moved by: the GBP
primary category and services (owned by google-business-profile-optimizer),
and the website's service and location pages built below.
- Distance - how far the business is from the searcher. Not movable by
optimization; it is why rankings differ across town and why chasing rank in
a distant suburb has a hard ceiling. Spend nothing trying to beat it.… install to load the full skill