Local SEO for a service business: profile, city pages and reviews

How does Google’s local search work?

When a query has a local meaning, Google shows a map with a few businesses above the usual results, and web pages below it. The order in the map comes from three factors that Google describes in its Business Profile help.

Google also says plainly that you can’t pay or ask for a better local ranking, and that complete, up-to-date information improves your chances of showing up. That gives a simple order of work: first the data you control, then prominence, which grows over years.

Google Business Profile: what to set up first

The Business Profile is the first thing a customer sees in the map, so I start there. It has to follow Google’s guidelines and say the same thing as your website.

• Name as it is in the real world: on the sign, the website and the invoices. Google doesn’t allow unnecessary information, taglines or phone numbers in the name. Adding “office cleaning Kraków” to it breaks those guidelines.
• Primary category as specific as possible. Google recommends choosing the fewest categories it takes to describe your core business. Extra categories only for services you really provide.
• Address or service area. A business that travels to customers has one profile for its base and sets a service area. If you work from home, you hide the address. Google says the area generally shouldn’t extend farther than about 2 hours’ drive from your base. A virtual office where nobody works doesn’t qualify.
• Services and description in the words customers search with. If your description says “commercial premises hygiene maintenance” and customers type “office cleaning”, you’re making it harder for yourself.
• Hours, including holidays, photos from real jobs and a phone that someone answers.
• One profile per location. Duplicates muddle the data in Maps. A second location gets its own profile only if you really operate there.

City and service pages without junk duplicates

A city page helps when you really serve that city and have something to say about it: who works there, how fast you get there, what kinds of sites you look after, what it costs. A page that differs from ten others only by the district name does harm.

Google’s spam policies call this doorway abuse: pages created to rank for similar queries, including pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one place. Next to it sits scaled content abuse, mass-produced content with no value for the reader, AI tools included.

On reefa.pl I have URLs built from city and service, for example office cleaning in Kraków and in Katowice as separate pages. In July 2026 I cut the automatically generated district pages from 218 to 86. The simple rule I follow:

Every city and service page should show the business details (name, address or area, phone) in the same form as the Business Profile, LocalBusiness structured data that matches what’s visible on the page, and an answer to the customer’s question in the first paragraph. I build the company cards in the KtoSprząta.pl directory the same way: every profile carries LocalBusiness structured data.

Reviews: how to collect them within the rules

In my experience, reviews are the part of prominence you can influence most. Google says the number of reviews feeds prominence, and that replying to them shows customers their opinion matters. You can collect them, but under the Google Maps content policy.

Allowed:

• asking every customer for a review once the job is done, ideally with a link sent the same day;
• replying to every review, negative ones too, factually and without the customer’s personal details.

Not allowed:

• paying for reviews, or offering a discount, a freebie or any other benefit in exchange for a review, a change or a removal;
• asking only happy customers, or discouraging negative reviews;
• reviews from employees, former employees and anyone else with a conflict of interest;
• making staff collect a set number of reviews or reviews with specific content.

In practice a boring process works best: after every completed job the customer automatically gets one message with a review link. Nobody picks who gets it, and nobody chases the customer five times. That step is easy to add to a system that already closes jobs. I write about where to begin with automations like this in where to start with business automation.

How to measure map rankings: a grid of points

Your map ranking depends on where the searcher is. A check from the office shows the result for the office, and customers are spread across the whole city. So I measure with a grid: Google is asked the same query from many points spread over the map, for example 25 on a 5 × 5 grid, and the result is the ranking at each point.

For Reefa, my cleaning company, I measured “firma sprzątająca biura kraków” (office cleaning company Kraków) on 30 August 2026 on a 5 × 5 grid with 2.2 km spacing. The average position came out at 9.15, we were in the top three at 8 of 25 points and first at 2. In other words, in part of the city the company is right at the top, and at other points of the grid it drops lower, even though the query is the same. There’s more on this project in the case study organic growth for reefa.pl.

A worked example (made up, to show the method)

A plumbing firm measures “plumber Kraków” on a 5 × 5 grid. Points where the firm doesn’t appear in the top twenty count as position 21.

An average of 11.4 says little on its own. What matters more is that at 10 of 25 points the firm isn’t even in the top twenty. If those points are where most customers are, that’s where the work starts: a page for that part of the city if you really serve it, photos from jobs there and reviews from customers there. You repeat the measurement every month with the same query and the same grid, because only then are you comparing like with like.

Alongside the grid I track ordinary page rankings. In Reefa’s content routine the baseline from 14 October 2026 is 32 tracked queries in Kraków, 3 of them in the top three and 5 in the top ten. An AI agent runs that routine every day under fixed rules; I describe it in what is an AI agent.

Local links, directories and mentions

Once the profile and the website are in order, further growth comes from outside the site. Google lists links to your website as part of prominence, and for service businesses the most valuable ones come from places local customers actually read.

• Industry and local directories with the same name, address or area and phone as the Business Profile. Different versions of the address in different places are murky data for Google and for AI assistants.
• Round-ups of companies in your trade in your city. Customers read them, and the visibility review of reefa.pl flagged them as one of the missing signals.
• Local media, associations, chambers of commerce, partners and suppliers who can write about you.
• Your own data and tools that people want to link to, such as a price calculator or a dataset of norms.

On my own site, this is the layer that decides. In July 2026 I ran a full visibility review of reefa.pl, and it turned out the website itself was no longer the bottleneck. What held it back was off the site: reviews on the Business Profile, company round-ups, citations and links. I go into how the same signals shape answers in ChatGPT and AI Overviews in SEO when customers ask ChatGPT.

When local SEO isn’t enough

Local SEO won’t help if the problem is somewhere else. Before you invest in it, check these situations.

• The customer is far from your base. You can’t change distance. If you want jobs in a city where you have no people and no office, a profile there won’t help, and a fake address breaks Google’s guidelines.
• Your customers don’t search in Maps. A large manufacturer finds suppliers through tenders, referrals and requests for quotes. Then content for the buyer’s questions matters more than a map ranking.
• Competitors have several times more reviews. You only catch up with a steady review process over months, not with a one-off campaign.
• Nobody answers the phone. A better ranking with poor enquiry handling means more lost customers and worse reviews.

Local SEO is work measured in months. Nobody can promise first place in the map at every point in the city, because it depends on where the customer is standing.

Where to start in your company

Start with three things in this order: sort out the Business Profile against the guidelines, check that every city page has a reason to exist, and set up a steady, automatic request for a review after every job. After a month, measure with a grid and decide where to work next.

Scope and pricing for ongoing visibility work are on the SEO and organic growth page: it starts from PLN 7,000/month excl. VAT. If you’d rather go through your profile and website together, book a 30-⁠minute call. And to see what else in your company is worth automating besides review requests, take the AI readiness assessment.