1. You do not control the most important part
With classic SEO, you optimise a website. It sits on a server you have access to, changes only when someone changes it, and does what you tell it to. The most important part of local visibility is the Google Business Profile, and that belongs to Google. You have administrator rights on it, nothing more.
In practice, that means the profile can change without anyone on your side doing anything. Google makes changes based on its own signals, users can suggest edits, and data partners supply information that can be out of date. A profile you set up neatly in January can look demonstrably different by July — unless someone checks it every month.
2. The factors that count are different factors
In the local pack — the map with three businesses shown above the organic results — proximity plays a leading role. After that comes the profile's primary category, how complete it is, and its review signals. Backlinks play a part, but a smaller one than in organic results, and the website's load time plays no direct role at all in the local pack.
That takes some adjustment for anyone used to starting with a technical audit. A business with a mediocre site and an excellently maintained profile regularly beats a business with an excellent site and a neglected profile in the local pack.
3. There is no such thing as "a position" — there are positions
An organic position is reasonably stable to measure: you measure from one point and you get a number. A local position depends on where the searcher happens to be standing. In a city such as Amsterdam, the top three in the Jordaan is a different top three from the one on the Zuidas, and the gap is bigger than people expect.
Anyone measuring from a single central coordinate is therefore reporting something no visitor ever actually sees. We measure per location from multiple points across the service area, and in the larger cities per district. That makes the reporting less tidy, and far more useful.
4. The work has a frequency, not a delivery
A technical SEO project gets finished. A migration gets finished. A content calendar runs its course. Profile management and review responses are never finished: a review that arrives on Sunday needs an answer by Monday, opening hours change around every public holiday, and changes made by third parties arrive unannounced.
That is the main reason local SEO keeps getting deprioritised at agencies. Per location, it is too little work to bill and too much attention to fit in between other things. As long as no one owns it, it does not get done.
5. Multiple locations do not make it bigger, they make it different
Twelve locations does not mean twelve times the same work. It means the locations can crowd each other out: twelve pages built from the same template with a different place name swapped in do not produce twelve rankings — they produce one page that Google picks for itself, or none. It also means the profiles' primary categories can drift apart without anyone noticing, and that the NAP format ends up recorded differently at every location.
That is exactly why we work, and charge, per location. See the pricing and how we work for how that runs in practice.
What this means for an agency
You have two realistic options. The first is to hire, or free up, someone who keeps up with this discipline — and the discipline changes every quarter, so that comes with ongoing time to learn. The second is to outsource it to a party that does this for dozens of clients at once, and deliver it under your own name. How that second route works with us is on the page about white label local SEO.
Bronnen
- Google, documentation on how local results are ranked (relevance, distance and prominence) — support.google.com/business.
- Our own measurements from multiple measurement points per city, ongoing since 2024.