Definition
Also written: local SEO, map pack, local pack
Local search covers the results Google shows when a query has geographic intent — most visibly the map pack of three business listings above the organic results. Ranking there depends heavily on proximity, a verified business profile and consistent location data, none of which a remote business can supply.
Two distinct surfaces get conflated. The map pack requires a Google Business Profile tied to a real address or a defined service area. Organic results for location-qualified queries do not, and are reachable with genuinely market-specific content.
For a remote or distributed business, the honest strategy targets the second surface and says so.
The usual error
Where this goes wrong in practice
Creating a page per city with the city name swapped in and nothing else changed. These are doorway pages, they are recognised as such, and they can drag down the pages that were working.
Related terms
Google Business Profile (GBP)
Google Business Profile is the free listing that makes a business eligible for the map pack and the knowledge panel in local results. It requires verification, and it requires either a physical address customers can visit or a declared service area for businesses that travel to customers.
DefinitionNAP consistency
NAP consistency means a business’s name, address and phone number appear identically everywhere they are published — the website, the Google Business Profile, directories and data aggregators. Inconsistent records make it harder for search engines to resolve them to one entity.
DefinitionInternational SEO
International SEO is the work of making a site discoverable across multiple countries or languages: choosing a URL structure, signalling language and region, researching demand in each market’s own vocabulary, and adapting content to local buying behaviour and regulation.
DefinitionBreadcrumbList schema
BreadcrumbList markup describes a page’s position in the site hierarchy as an ordered list. Google uses it to replace the raw URL in a result with a readable trail, which is one of the few rich results that still reliably renders.
DefinitionCanonical URL
A canonical URL is the address a site nominates as the authoritative version of a page when several URLs serve equivalent content. It is declared with a rel="canonical" link element, and it is a strong hint to search engines rather than a directive they are obliged to follow.
DefinitionCrawl budget
Crawl budget is the number of URLs a search engine will fetch from a site in a given period, set by how much load the server can absorb and how much demand the engine has for the site’s content. It becomes a practical constraint mainly on large sites.
DefinitionE-E-A-T
E-E-A-T stands for experience, expertise, authoritativeness and trustworthiness — the framework Google’s human quality raters use to assess page and site quality. Google states it is not itself a ranking factor; it describes what the systems are being tuned to approximate, and it matters most on topics that affect money or wellbeing.
DefinitionFAQ schema
FAQ schema (schema.org FAQPage) marks up question-and-answer content so machines can read the pairs. It is still a valid schema type, but Google discontinued the FAQ rich result for nearly all sites starting in May 2026, with phased removal from Search Console tooling through that August.
DefinitionFeatured snippet
A featured snippet is a short extract Google promotes above the standard results to answer a query directly, drawn from a page already ranking for it. Formats include a paragraph, an ordered or unordered list, and a table, and the format Google chooses follows the shape of the query.
Definition