The work answers

Search engine optimisation for a business that serves people in a place. It has four parts: the Google Business Profile, consistent listings across other sites, a website that says where you are and what you do, and measurement. Google states that local ranking rests on relevance, distance and prominence.

The map of three businesses shown above the ordinary results for local searches. Entry comes from a claimed, verified, correctly categorised and complete Business Profile, consistent listings elsewhere, and recent reviews. Distance to the searcher also decides it and cannot be changed.

The free listing that places a business on Google Maps and in the local pack. It carries the name, address, hours, categories, services, photographs and reviews. It is the single largest lever in local search and the one most businesses leave half-finished.

Citations are mentions of your business name, address and telephone number on other sites. Consistency means they agree. Google reads them to decide how confident it is that a business exists at the address it claims, and disagreement lowers that confidence.

The work of making a site crawlable, indexable and usable: page speed, mobile rendering, correct redirects, clean internal linking, a working sitemap and no accidental blocking. It rarely wins a position on its own and it routinely prevents one.

Markup that states your business details in a form a machine reads without guessing. For a local business it names the organisation, address, hours and services. It does not cause a ranking, and it removes ambiguity about who you are, which matters more as answer engines resolve entities.

Yes, and less than the industry sells. In one dated reading of four Dublin SEO queries, pages with a domain rating of zero outranked pages rated 43, 54, 77 and 91 on three of the four. One snapshot is not proof, and it is a useful corrective to the thing most often sold.

There is no threshold. Recency and specificity do more than volume: five reviews from this quarter that describe actual jobs read better to a customer than two hundred old ones. Google's own guidance is to ask customers directly and never to buy them.

Pages that answer real questions do. A page per service, each naming the area served, does more than one page listing everything, because each is a separate search with a separate intention. Content written to contain a phrase rather than to answer a question does nothing.

A paid result is bought and stops when the budget does. An unpaid position is earned slowly and decays slowly. They answer different needs: ads for immediate visibility and testing, SEO for durable presence. Neither replaces the other.