The challenge
The business operated eight locations across two regions, all offering the same set of services. The website had a single "services" page and a single contact page — no location-specific pages, no per-market content. Google Business Profiles existed for each location, but most were partially filled, several had wrong categories, two had ownership issues, and three had duplicate listings competing with the canonical profile.
Local pack visibility was poor and inconsistent. In the brand's flagship market, the business held the map pack for branded searches but lost it on generic service queries. In five of the other markets, the business simply did not appear in the local pack at all — competitors with better-optimised profiles and stronger review velocity took every position.
Citation hygiene was bad enough to be actively harmful: name variations across directories, three different phone numbers in circulation, and old addresses still listed on legacy aggregators. Review volume was sporadic — bursts after a happy customer pushed a review, then weeks of silence — and there was no recovery path for unhappy customers. The marketing lead had been compensating with aggressive local PPC, which masked the underlying problem but ate into margin month after month.
Our approach
GBP optimisation per location
Every location rebuilt to a single template: full category set, services, photos, hours, attributes, and Q&A. Treating GBP as a real ranking surface, not a one-off setup task.
Citation cleanup and expansion
NAP audit across the structured citation network, fixing inconsistencies, killing duplicate listings, and expanding into the directories that move the needle in each vertical.
Geo-targeted landing page architecture
A location landing page for each market with genuinely unique content — local context, location-specific services, real photos, embedded map, and proper LocalBusiness schema.
Review generation workflow
A repeatable post-service review request flow built into the customer journey, not a sporadic ask. Recovery flow for unhappy customers before they go public.
Local link building
Chambers of commerce, local news, partner sites, sponsorships, and community organisations. Slower than editorial outreach but the only links that move local pack rankings.
What we did
- Full GBP audit across all eight locations: category mix, services, attributes, photo inventory, hours, special hours, ownership status, and Q&A.
- GBP rebuild: standardised primary and secondary categories, complete services list per location, weekly photo cadence with real on-site images, and Q&A seeded from common customer questions.
- NAP consistency campaign: pulled citation data from the major aggregators and key vertical directories, fixed inconsistencies, and suppressed duplicate listings.
- Location landing page templating: a single Astro template fed by a per-location dataset, producing 8 pages each with unique copy, local proof, embedded map, and location-specific schema.
- LocalBusiness schema implementation per location, including geo coordinates, opening hours, areas served, and aggregateRating where eligible.
- Review funnel implementation: post-service SMS request integrated with the booking system, plus a recovery path for low ratings before they hit the public profile.
- Internal linking from the central services page to each location page, and from each location page to relevant service detail pages.
- Local link outreach: chambers of commerce in each market, regional trade associations, local sponsorship opportunities, and partner cross-links.
- Local news and community angles: developed three angles per year per market, pitched to the local press for genuine editorial coverage.
- Tracking setup: rank tracking by market and by location, GBP insights tracked monthly, and call/direction request tracking wired into the analytics stack.
Outcomes
Local pack outcomes are easy to report misleadingly — a single rank check from a single location can show whatever you want. These directional outcomes were consistent across markets and across multiple tracking methods:
- Map pack visibility growing steadily across the served markets, with the largest gains in markets where the location previously had no map pack presence at all.
- GBP-driven call and direction-request volume rising substantially as a share of total inbound, indicating the local pack work was producing real commercial activity rather than just rank movement.
- Review velocity recovering: the rate of new reviews per month increased significantly once the post-service flow was in place, with average rating trending upward.
- Reduced PPC dependency on local-service keywords, with the brand able to dial back protective bidding on its own location-plus-service terms in markets where the map pack and organic both held.
- Citation hygiene metrics — NAP consistency, listing completeness, duplicate suppression — moving from poor to clean across the directory landscape, supporting long-term ranking stability.