Local SEO

Local SEO is the work of making a business appear when someone searches for its kind of service in its area: in the map results, the local listings and the pages that rank for a place-qualified query. Its raw material is the business’s name, address, phone number and category, stated the same way everywhere they appear.

Where the signals live

In three places. The business profile held by the search engine, which feeds the map and the listing panel. The site itself, where the identity should be repeated on every page and marked up with the LocalBusiness type or one of its subtypes so a machine reads a business rather than a website. And other sites that mention the business, directories and reviews above all, where the same name, address and phone number should appear without variation. Consistency is the whole game, because the engine has to decide that the entity on the map, the entity on the site and the entity in the directory are one business.

What the audit found about identity

This site’s own crawl of 9,483 small-business sites read the homepage, the contact page and the about page of each. 43.1% were inconsistent about name, address or phone across those three pages. 36.9% published more than one phone number. 34.1% had no postal address a machine could parse anywhere. These are the signals local SEO is built on, and they were missing or contradictory on a third to nearly half of the sites. The full breakdown is in what 9,483 small business websites serve to an AI crawler.

Local SEO and an assistant’s recommendation

Ask an assistant who the best electrician in a town is and it writes a short list of businesses. In this site’s probe of 9,240 businesses against Claude with retrieval, 99.4% of the names returned were businesses and 0.6% were directories or aggregators, the reverse of what a search results page for the same question tends to show. The assistant is fed by the same identity data as local search, and adds one requirement: a passage on the site it can lift as the answer. The identity work is shared; the answer-shaped content is the extra step.

A common question

Does local SEO work also get a business named by an AI assistant?

Most of it carries over. An assistant is fed by the same identity data as local search, so the name, address, phone number and category stated the same way on the profile, the site and the directories still do their job. One requirement is added on top: a passage on the site that the assistant can lift as the answer. In this site's probe of 9,240 businesses against Claude with retrieval, 99.4% of the names returned were businesses rather than directories, which is the reverse of a results page for the same question.

Sources

The type and its properties: schema.org LocalBusiness. The audit and probe figures are this site’s own, computed from its audit records; the probe used one assistant and one question per business and is directional; sample drawn per metro and trade, not from a random frame.