The local SEO agency that gets you into the map pack

What local search looks like right now

Three figures worth knowing before you spend a month on local SEO. Each one links to the source it came from, so you can check it rather than take our word for it.

Three signals decide who Google puts on the map

Every map-pack ranking comes down to the same three things, and Google says so itself in its Business Profile ranking documentation: local results are ranked mainly on relevance, distance, and prominence. We work all three, and lead with the two you can actually control.

The 14 checks we run in the first two weeks

Ordered by impact, top to bottom. This is the order we work in, and it is the same list you can hold any other local SEO company to.

1. 1
   Primary category on your Google Business Profile

   The one field that moves the most on the whole profile. A wrong primary category keeps you out of the map pack for the term you care about, however many reviews you have.

2. 2
   Secondary categories, services, and attributes

   Google matches these against the wording of the search. We fill every field that genuinely applies and remove the ones dragging you into queries you cannot win.

3. 3
   NAP consistency at the aggregator, not the directory

   In the US most directory listings trace back to a few data aggregators. We correct the aggregator record first, then the copies, then suppress duplicates. Fixing forty directories by hand is the slow way.

4. 4
   Apple Business Connect and Bing Places

   BrightLocal recorded Apple Maps usage for local recommendations climbing from 14% to 27% in a year. Both listings are free, take about an hour, and most businesses have never claimed either.

5. 5
   Review volume, recency, and response rate

   Google names review count as a prominence input in its own documentation. We wire a request flow through the tools you already pay for, or through n8n, Zapier, or Make.com if you have none, and answer every review.

6. 6
   schema.org LocalBusiness markup in JSON-LD

   Each location page ships with structured data carrying address, hours, phone, and geo coordinates. We write the JSON-LD to Google’s published LocalBusiness guidance, then validate the schema markup before it goes live.

7. 7
   Location pages that are not clones of each other

   One page per location or service area, each genuinely different. Near-duplicate location pages get filtered out of the index and burn the crawl budget you wanted spent on the pages that convert. Content pruning usually comes before writing anything new.

8. 8
   Internal linking from your strongest pages down

   Service pages that already hold topical authority should be passing it to the local pages. Internal linking costs nothing and most local sites still leave every location page one orphaned click from nowhere.

9. 9
   Canonical tags and single-hop 301 redirects

   Retired location URLs, tracking parameters, and www variants split your signals. We build a redirect map, ship each 301 redirect as a single hop, and set a self-referencing canonical tag on everything that stays.

10. 10
    Core Web Vitals measured on a phone

    Map-pack traffic arrives on mobile, on a cell connection. We check Largest Contentful Paint, Interaction to Next Paint, and Cumulative Layout Shift in field data, not just a Lighthouse run on a laptop.

11. 11
    Google Search Console coverage and query data

    Search Console shows which local queries you already surface for and which location pages Google decided not to index. In a technical SEO audit that is where the fastest wins sit, and where you catch crawl budget draining into pages nobody searches for.

12. 12
    GA4 and Google Tag Manager wired to calls, not sessions

    Click-to-call, direction requests, and form submits become named GA4 events through Google Tag Manager. Without that, nobody can honestly tell you whether local SEO worked.

13. 13
    Profile posts, fresh photos, and Q and A

    An active Google Business Profile outranks a dormant one carrying the same reviews. Posts, current photos, and seeded questions are the cheapest ongoing signal available to you.

14. 14
    Local links and mentions that are not directories

    Chamber pages, local press, sponsorships, supplier listings. A handful of genuine local links builds more prominence than another hundred citations on sites nobody visits.

Why local businesses choose FactoryJet

Whether you run one location or twenty, here is how a founder-led local SEO agency stacks up against a typical agency or doing it yourself with tools.

The systems your local visibility actually runs on

Local SEO is not one dashboard. Your visibility sits across systems that do not talk to each other, and the gaps are where rankings leak. Here is each one, and what it is for.

On the site itself, it is a technical SEO audit with the geography turned up

Every location page ships with schema.org LocalBusiness structured data in JSON-LD, built to Google’s LocalBusiness structured data guidance, with a self-referencing canonical tag, a single-hop 301 redirect for anything retired, and internal linking from the service pages that already carry authority. Pages are held to the published Core Web Vitals thresholds on mobile, and where we build the site ourselves that means static site generation in Next.js with edge caching on Cloudflare, so the CDN does the work instead of a caching plugin. We run an accessibility audit against WCAG at the same time, because a location page a screen reader cannot use is a location page a share of your customers cannot use either.

Where a rebuild or a replatforming is involved, the URL mapping and the redirect map get written before anything moves, not after somebody notices the calls stopped. And when a page gets the traffic but not the calls, a heatmap and one session recording usually answer it faster than another round of A/B testing.

What lands in your inbox each month

• Calls from the profile and from the site, tracked as GA4 events rather than guessed at
• Direction requests and clicks through to your site from Google Maps
• Form submits with their real source, so paid and organic never get credited to each other
• Review count, average rating, and response rate for the month
• Which location pages Google Search Console shows as indexed, and which it dropped
• Core Web Vitals field data for the pages that matter, not a one-off Lighthouse score

Reports are assembled from your own Google Business Profile, Google Search Console, and GA4 data. We do not have a proprietary metric, because a number only we can calculate is a number you cannot check.