SEO can be a make-or-break acquisition channel for a local business.
I came across several discussions on Reddit where business owners were asking the same question: How do you know who the best local SEO specialist or agency actually is?
So I thought I would explain how I would evaluate one.
And yes, almost everyone will tell you they are the best. I will obviously make my case too. But a necessary disclaimer: no local SEO specialist is an expert in every niche, market, and business model.
There are genuinely excellent people in Local SEO. There are also plenty of people selling the same checklist without really understanding why they are doing any of it.
Join enough sales calls and you will hear some variation of this:
- Optimize your Google Business Profile.
- Fix your citations.
- Create location pages.
- Publish local content.
- Build some backlinks.
- Write a few blogs every month.
Same checklist. Different logos.
The problem is that the checklist tells you almost nothing.
What matters is whether the person can explain the process required to achieve your specific business objective, why that process makes sense, and how they will know whether it is working.
Local SEO is not one universal playbook.
The strategy changes depending on the niche, competition, market, current authority, location, business model, resources, and most importantly, what the business is actually trying to accomplish.
One company may need more qualified calls from its immediate service area. Another may want to expand visibility across multiple cities. Another may already rank well but needs more positive customer sentiment and brand trust. A multi-location company may care more about scalable location visibility and entity consistency.
Those are different problems.
They should not automatically receive the same SEO strategy.
That is why you should evaluate a Local SEO specialist based on their ability to diagnose your situation and connect their actions to your objectives, rather than simply asking whether they offer citations, backlinks, GBP optimization, or monthly blogs.
Questions I would ask a Local SEO specialist
- Which niches have you worked in that are similar to mine?
- What competitive environments have you dealt with?
- Can you show me relevant case studies or actual results?
- What was the client’s objective in those cases?
- What problems did you identify before starting?
- What specific actions did you take, and why?
- What would you investigate before recommending a strategy for my business?
- What would you prioritize during the first 30, 60, and 90 days?
- What would you deliberately NOT do?
- What results would you measure?
- What factors could prevent or delay the desired outcome?
- What resources, access, content, approvals, or involvement would you need from us?
- How much time and effort would the strategy realistically require?
And while listening to their answers, ask yourself three more important questions:
- Does he/she know my business objectives?
- Does his/her process align with my objectives?
- Does his/her process seem realistic and truthful for achieving my business objectives?
- Does he/she understand my niche and how customers choose businesses like mine?
- Has he/she achieved similar objectives for businesses similar to mine?
- Can he/she clearly explain why the proposed strategy makes sense for my business?
- Are the expectations and timelines realistic, or am I being sold promises?
- Does he/she understand what success actually means for my business, not just rankings?
- Do I feel like I am getting a strategy built around my business, or the same package sold to everyone?
- Can he/she clearly tell me what they need from me for the strategy to succeed?
That distinction matters far more than how confidently someone calls themselves the “best Local SEO specialist.”
And this is also where my own approach to Local SEO becomes a little more specific.
I am not trying to generate traffic for the sake of traffic.
For most of the businesses I work with, the objective is much simpler:
More calls. More qualified leads. More bookings. More revenue from the areas they actually serve.
Once that is the objective, I look at Local SEO differently.
If somebody searches for a bail bonds company, plumber, lawn care company, lawyer, dentist, car rental company, or another local service, they are often already close to making a decision.
They are not necessarily looking to spend the next hour reading a website.
They want to know who is nearby, who provides the service they need, who looks trustworthy, what other customers are saying, and who they can call.
That is why, for the kind of Local SEO I do, Google Business Profile comes first.
Not because the website does not matter.
It does.
Not because every business on the internet should put GBP first.
They shouldn’t.
But if you are a local business and the objective is to generate calls and leads from people searching for your service in your market, I care first about the part of Google where those customers are actually choosing businesses.
For many local searches, that is Maps.
Plenty of firms rank on page one and still cannot crack the map pack. Those are two different systems, and strong organic rankings do not carry you into the pack.
So I don’t start by asking:
“How many blogs should we publish?”
I start by asking:
Where do you show up when someone in your market is ready to call?
How visible is the profile?
Which searches does it appear for?
How far does that visibility extend from the location?
Who is beating it?
Why are they beating it?
Does the business look like the obvious choice when someone sees it?
Are the reviews strong enough?
Are the right categories and services associated with the business?
Does Google clearly understand what the business does?
And then I look at what is stopping us from improving those things.
Sometimes the answer is the Google Business Profile itself.
Sometimes it is the website.
Sometimes it is reviewed.
Sometimes it is links and authority.
Sometimes it is citations or inconsistent business information.
Sometimes the business simply does not have enough relevance for the service it wants to rank for.
And sometimes the problem is physical location. You cannot SEO your way out of every proximity disadvantage.
That is where the nuance comes in.
GBP-first does not mean GBP-only.
It means the Google Business Profile is the commercial focus, and the rest of the Local SEO work is built around increasing the business’s ability to get discovered, trusted, and contacted by local customers.
The website has a very important job in that.
I want proper service pages.
I want proper location pages where they genuinely make sense.
I want the business name, address, phone number, services, locations, and other information to be consistent.
I want internal links that help Google understand the relationship between services and locations.
I want the website to build relevance and authority around the same business that Google is showing in Maps.
I want links and citations where they actually help.
I want reviews because they are not just an SEO signal. They influence whether the person looking at three businesses calls you or the competitor underneath you.
Everything connects back to the same objective.
Get the business in front of the right local customer and give that customer enough reason to call.
That is also why I am skeptical when I see Local SEO sold mainly as a list of monthly deliverables.
Four blogs.
Twenty citations.
Five backlinks.
Eight GBP posts.
Two new pages.
Okay.
But what problem are those things solving?
If the business already has plenty of citations, why are we building another twenty?
If nobody searches for the four blog topics, why are we writing them?
If the business is sitting outside the area it wants to dominate, why are we pretending another location page will somehow remove the proximity problem?
If competitors have stronger profiles, better reviews, more local authority, and much better relevance, why are we spending the first month redesigning the homepage?
That is the difference between doing Local SEO activities and having a Local SEO strategy.
The activities can change.
The objective does not.
For the businesses I specialize in, the objective is calls, leads, bookings, and revenue.
And because of that, I treat the Google Business Profile as the centre of the Local SEO strategy, with the website and everything around it helping that business become more relevant, more prominent, more trusted, and more visible where its customers are actually searching.
Umar Hassan
I run local SEO for multi-location brands, profile-first. Legal, lawn care, bail bonds, home services, car rental: the businesses where a customer taps the top map result and calls whoever shows up. Ten years of this, including rank-and-rent, where you build and rank a local site and then live off the leads, taught me not to hide behind “SEO takes time.” The phone rang or it did not. A bail bonds office three blocks from the county jail should own that search, and when it does not, the fix is almost always in the profile and the proximity signals, not a prettier home page.
My order of work is fixed. I built the Google Business Profile out first, and I mean properly. The categories, the services written in, the photos, every attribute Google gives me. Then I fix the site to back it up, a page per service and a page per location, each carrying the real NAP, a map embed, and schema wired to your genuine profiles. I link it so Google reads one coherent business, then adds the FAQ pages that pull the site into the click zone. I treat the profile as the revenue engine and the website as the thing that feeds it, which is the reverse of how most of this gets sold.
I am not for everyone. If you sell nationally or online with no real local footprint, you need a broader SEO team, not me. A five-dollar “post to my GBP” gig, also not me. Pure blog traffic and volume content, not what I do. I am for the local business that lives and dies in the map pack.
If you want me to look at your setup and tell you what is holding your map pack back, book a call.
The local SEO experts worth knowing
I am not the only good option, and the honest answer is that the right pick depends on what you actually need. These are the people who shaped local SEO, and each one is known for something specific.
Joy Hawkins
Joy Hawkins is who I read first when Google changes something in the Business Profile guidelines, because hers is usually the clearest explanation of what actually happened. She runs Sterling Sky and the Local Search Forum, and the agency is one of the most respected in the field, with a lot of that reputation built on spam-fighting and the deep profile work most agencies never touch. She is one of the loudest voices getting fake and spam listings pulled out of the map, which quietly helps every honest business ranking near them, and she has trained a lot of today’s local SEOs through the forum and LocalU. The studies her team publishes, real tests on real listings, are the closest thing local SEO has to peer review. If you want the most authoritative team in the room and you can get on their roster, that is close to the top of the field. The flip side of that reputation is demand, so a single-location shop may find it is more firepower, and more budget, than the job needs.
Darren Shaw
If you have ever cited the annual Local Search Ranking Factors study, you have quoted Darren Shaw. He founded Whitespark, and its citation finder and rank tracker sit in a lot of agency tool stacks, so he lives closer to the data-and-tools end of this world than the done-for-you end. For citations and for understanding what genuinely moves local rankings, very few people have contributed more. If what you need is someone to run your profile-first campaign week to week, Whitespark is more tooling and research than an account team, so you would pair it with someone who executes.
Greg Gifford
Greg Gifford is probably the most entertaining local SEO speaker you will catch at a conference, movie references and all, and the substance under the jokes is serious multi-location work. He is at SearchLab now and cut his teeth in automotive, which is about as competitive and multi-location as local search gets. If you run a dealership group, or any brand with a lot of locations fighting over the same map, he has spent years on exactly that problem. For a single neighborhood business the automotive-grade machinery is more than you need, and at his level he is more likely shaping strategy than logging into your profile himself.
Mike Blumenthal
Mike Blumenthal was writing about Google and local search before most agencies existed, which is roughly how he earned the “godfather of local SEO” name. He is at Near Media now and co-founded the review platform GatherUp, and his work leans toward analysis and reviews, and toward calling out Google in public when the profile system misbehaves. If you want the sharpest read on where local search and reviews are heading, he is one of a very small group I read closely. He is more industry analyst than a shop that will run your locations, so treat him as the person who tells you what is true, and hire the week-to-week work elsewhere.
Andrew Shotland
Andrew Shotland built LocalSEOGuide into an agency known for the technical, unglamorous side of local SEO at scale, the work that matters when you have hundreds or thousands of locations and a website quietly fighting itself. His team is known for large-scale local experiments and for treating local as a data problem, at a scale a solo specialist cannot match. If you are enterprise, or a franchise with a genuinely large footprint, that kind of technical local SEO is a specialty most people calling themselves specialists cannot deliver. For a five or ten location brand the horsepower is real but probably overkill, and engagements at that level get scoped and priced to match.
The one question that settles it
Whoever you shortlist, make them answer one question before you sign: what do you fix first, my Google Business Profile or my website? If they go vague on the profile and light up about a website redesign, you have found a generalist, and you already know what that costs you in the map pack. A specialist will not hesitate, because for a local business the profile is the point.