When someone searches “notary near me” or “math tutor Montréal”, Google shows two different things: a map with a few businesses pinned on it, and the normal list of websites underneath. Local SEO is the work of appearing in both. For a service business, it is usually the highest return marketing work available, because the people making these searches are not browsing. They need someone, soon, nearby.
The map results run on your Google Business Profile
The map section, the one with the pins and the star ratings, is not built from websites. It is built from Google Business Profiles. If you do not have one, or yours is a bare listing claimed years ago and forgotten, you are invisible in the most prominent part of the local results.
A profile that competes has a precise category as its primary category, complete hours and service descriptions, real photos, and above all, reviews. If you do nothing else after reading this, claim your profile and fill in every field. It is free, and for local searches it can matter more than your entire website. I wrote a section-by-section profile guide if you want to do the whole job properly.
Reviews are the local currency
Two businesses offer the same service. One has 4.9 stars from thirty reviews, the other has one rating and no text. You already know who gets the call, and Google’s ranking reflects the same instinct.
The way to accumulate reviews is unglamorous: ask, every time, right after the moment the client is happiest. Send the direct review link so it is one tap. Reviews with actual sentences beat bare stars, because they describe the work in the searcher’s own vocabulary, and because AI assistants read them as evidence when deciding whom to recommend. One of my clients, LeTuteurScientifique.ca, holds a 5.0 star profile built exactly this way: consistently asking at the right moment, nothing more exotic than that.
Never buy reviews and never write your own. Platforms are good at spotting it, and a single exposed fake costs more trust than fifty real reviews earn. There is a full piece on how reviews affect rankings and how to earn them.
Your website carries the other half
The map gets attention, but plenty of local searches still resolve in the ordinary results, and your profile itself links to your site, where sceptical customers go to verify you. Three things matter most.
Name your place and your service in real sentences. Google connects you to a city because your pages say it: in headings, in text, in the footer. “Family mediation in Montréal, serving Rosemont and the Plateau” does work that “Welcome to our practice” never will. Do not hide the city in an image or a logo; write it.
Give each service its own page. A tutor who covers math, chemistry and physics needs a page for each, because “chemistry tutor Montréal” is its own search with its own intent. One page per service you genuinely offer, each one substantial. This is different from generating hundreds of thin pages for every keyword combination, which is the version of this idea that deserves its bad reputation.
Keep your details identical everywhere. Name, address, phone, exactly the same on your site, your Google profile and every directory. Machines confirm a business by cross referencing sources; contradictions erode confidence silently. And if you serve a whole region rather than one address, the service-area guide covers that setup.
The part most guides skip
Local SEO now has a second audience. When someone asks ChatGPT or Perplexity “who is a good bookkeeper in Verdun”, the assistant reads the same public record: your site, your profile, your reviews, your directory presence. The businesses that are well documented for Google turn out to be the ones assistants can recommend too, provided the site states its facts plainly enough for a machine to quote. I cover that side in AI SEO: how to get recommended by ChatGPT.
Where to start if this is all new
In order of return: claim and complete your Google Business Profile this week. Start asking every happy client for a review, with a direct link. Then look at your website and ask whether it names your city and each of your services in plain text on real pages. That order alone puts you ahead of most local competitors, who set up a profile once and never touch any of it again. And if the business itself is brand new and none of this exists yet, the complete setup order for a new business walks through everything from the domain name up.
If you want to know exactly where your business stands, the free audit covers local visibility along with speed and AI search readiness. I do this work from Montréal and the diagnosis is specific to your situation, in plain language.