What is local SEO, and how does it differ from national SEO?

Local SEO targets searches with geographic intent — "chartered accountant near me", "dentist in Pune" — and competes for a different piece of the results page: the local pack of three map listings that appears above organic results.

What differs from national SEO:

• The Google Business Profile is the single most important asset, not the website. Complete it fully: correct category (which carries substantial weight), accurate hours, service areas, photos, products or services, and regular posts.
• NAP consistency — Name, Address, Phone identical across your site, the Business Profile, and every directory citation. Inconsistency actively damages local rankings, and this is the most common problem in local SEO audits.
• Reviews matter directly. Volume, average rating, recency, and responses all influence local ranking, and they influence conversion even more. Actively requesting reviews and responding to all of them is core local SEO work, not an optional extra.
• Proximity is a ranking factor you cannot optimise. A searcher's physical distance from the business affects what they see, which means results genuinely differ by location and rank tracking must account for it.
• Location pages on the website for each area served, with genuinely distinct content rather than a template with the city name swapped.

Note: LocalBusiness structured data with address, hours, and geo coordinates reinforces the signals. And for multi-location businesses, a separate Business Profile per physical location is required — one profile cannot serve several branches.