Author: Ryan Walsh
10-minute read
Published: 24/12/2025

 

Local SEO is the process of getting your business more visitors and visibility, primarily through Google. Whether that be through the “Map listings” or via organic search results, often many levers need to be pulled in to get more eyeballs noticing and clicking on your business.
Local SEO is a separate discipline from, say, national organic search engine optimisation, because people often want to find goods or services locally.

For example, the person may voice search on Google and ask:

– Find me a local taxi company
– Find me the best place locally to buy sushi

You get the picture: the shopper doesn’t want to be dragged miles away; they want to find companies within the local vicinity.
This is where our SEO boffins can help- we now have over a decade’s worth of SEO knowledge accumulated. We therefore understand how Google has moved from using a central centroid to finding businesses now with high precision based on where you are standing in that city at any given time.

How can a business improve its local SEO in 2026?

Google Business Profile optimisation:

For those who don’t know, you can get a Google Business listing for free, and it doesn’t take much time to set up. This sounds great in theory, yet consider this: there’s often only three places or slots where your business can be displayed.

Therefore, think about the sheer mass of competition you have locally, literally, well, sometimes hundreds of other companies you are competing with in order to rank in those top three positions. Thus, the real work begins when optimising this Google Business profile.

In 2026, we recommend critically reviewing your Google Business profile and identifying ways to improve it.

Therefore, ask the following questions.

– Are the opening hours still correct?
– Is the NAP information up to date? (Name of business, address and phone number)
– Have I added pictures of my team, storefront or products to my Google Business account?
– Are business reviews being managed?

Google often gives up-to-date listings more visibility.

So, we get it, you’re busy running your business, who’s got the time to say, add pictures of new products to your Google Business account?

You might run a coffee shop, you might have say new line-up of homemade food offering. By adding these to your Google Business account your not just enticing customers, your telling Google your profile offers more information, is updated more regularly and cares about informing the customer regarding what you are selling.

Still, more broadly speaking, if you want your business to show more often in Google’s Business results, well, it’s essential to keep your Google Business up to date. Therefore, cast your eye over your Google Business account and check where some of the information needs updating or is no longer relevant.

 

Business citations are still important (NAP information)

Okay, so some SEO tactics have survived since the 1990’s; one of those is building quality business directory listings.
Sure, this SEO tactic that is as old as the hills, yet it still holds water in 2026- you need quality business directory listings. However, don’t just set aside an hour; start building NAP listings all over the shop in frantic attempt to build as many as possible.

Instead, you need quality business directory listings, for example, if you run a solicitor’s practice, obtain high DA (Domain Authority) listings which are exclusive for use by solicitor practices.

Ditch the spammy directory listings with low DA scores, as links emanating from these sources can look spammy.
Spam directly links simply dilute your own DA score. Well, worse than that, accumulate too many spam links, and a big fat Google algorithm penalty can be applied and that can be right headache to fix!

 

Gain reviews / Respond to customer reviews.

Genuine business reviews are critical. Don’t try to cheat the system by offering something for free, as your Google Business listing could be removed in the blink of an eye if you don’t play by Google’s rules.

Instead, gain genuine positive reviews from real customers. Therefore, when you have genuinely helped a customer, they have expressed gratitude for the service or business generally, why not direct them over to your Google Business account?

Quite simply, a business that has accumulated many positive reviews and gone the extra step to respond to both positive and negative reviews show you’re on top of things. You care so much about your business’s reputation that you’re personally responding to reviews.

 

Have you added Schema Mark-up- well, 2026 is the year to do it!

Tools such as Google’s Structured Data Markup Helper make it a piece of cake to add structured data. So, be sure we get it by adding a schema mark-up to your company website.

Sure, it sounds super complicated, yet all it is adding a structured language to markup, which is more straightforward than it sounds.
Adding schema markup makes Googlebot’s job a lot easier understanding what your business offers, where it is located and customer satisfaction levels, such as when you highlight product ratings. Googlebot crawls and indexes the whole web; its job is relentless, so it is crawling quite literally millions of pages a day.

Therefore, if you can clearly label your company’s NAP information with Schema markup, it will stand out in the source code. Which, again, is just another green flag that you care about optimising your business’s local SEO.

Not just that, our agency has had huge success when we turn our clients products or services into a “featured snippet”. Even when an SEO company has you on page one, your still surround by a mass of competitors all bidding for the customers attention.

Therefore a featured snippet can be your golden ticket to success, it can lock-on a shoppers attention and generate more clicks. After all, that’s what our agencies are here for right, generating more clicks.

 

In 2026, walk in your customers’ shoes (write content marketing to help them)

Don’t literally walk in your customers’ shoes, unless you want to. What we mean by this is think as your customers think.

Think about what problems, questions, and interests they have.

Often, a high-value product won’t be purchased until the customer has spent considerable time researching it online.

Take, for example, a diamond ring: customers often have questions about its size, clarity, and cut.

Therefore, if your local store has published helpful content marketing, well, your business locally becomes seen as the experts in diamond rings.

However, you can’t expect to write one blog post on a wet Sunday afternoon and rocket to becoming a huge success by the following Friday (if only it worked like that).

No, for the content marketing to work, to improve your organic and local search engine optimisation, it has to do the following:

 

Answer the question

So, first of all, millions, yes millions of pieces of content marketing are written each day, which won’t make the cut.

These pages are “crawled but not indexed”, meaning, well, they don’t cut the mustard.

Therefore, put your time and effort into writing work that well answers the question. You cannot believe how many blog posts I have read, obviously written by various SEO companies over the years, which, well, don’t answer the question!

They are 1,000 words of mush; they offer no valuable insight and show no understanding of Google EEAT.

 

Google EEAT

To attract more local customers in 2026, on-site written content should reflect a strong understanding of Google EEAT.

Google EEAT stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness.

Now, Google’s algorithm, or should we say Googlebot, initially reads the work. Then an assessment is made- does the author really and honestly know what they are talking about?

Or, is perhaps the work AI generated or just a copywriters attempt to rehash a AI generated piece of content to save time?

Google’s algorithms, therefore, ask questions such as:

– How in-depth is this content marketing, or is it content thin?
– Who is the author? Are they an expert?
– What’s the author’s level of experience? Does the work clearly show they know what they are talking about

 

Helpful content marketing in 2026

We think, therefore, the absolute key to local SEO success in 2026 is simple: go the extra mile to help your customers. Now, we don’t mean carrying their bags to the car; we suggest the following when we are talking about search engine optimisation:

– Write helpful blog posts (such as this)
– Publish work where it’s clear you’re an expert on the subject, but also written to be helpful so that your improving time on-page times, commonly referred to as time on site figures.
– Gain links to improve authority metrics; it’s then about building powerful backlinks.

 

Have a tidy-up of pages and tackle content-thin pages

So, you may have noticed that the advice so far has been generally the “golden rules” which surround SEO. These have stood the test of time; however, now let’s turn the dial up a notch and talk about what our agency has noticed that really and truly makes the difference.

That’s tackling low-quality and content-thin pages.

So, sure, the temptation with SEO is continually be working on new things, to be working on say new guides, content marketing, such as blog posts your reading right here.

However, when improving SEO in 2026, it’s also time to look backwards. To ask yourself, which pages are content-thin, which are outdated, and which are just poorly written.

So, in our agency’s experience, there are two major issues we see: AI-written or mostly AI-written junk content. The second is content-thin pages. Take the time to improve these pages. Imagine it’s a bit like a fire that’s about to go out, and you have to breathe life back into the fire.

This is kind of the same with content-thin pages, take the time to find them, notice and be critical and say, this page is not up to scratch.

Then rewrite the page, improve it, and add better, higher-quality information.

Local backlinks, leverage these.

Now, granted again, this tactic is as old as the hills, we get it, but in 2026, it’s a method you could implement with speed and ease.
Have a look at where you can build more quality local links. Lets give you an example, you could be a top dentist, you could have won awards from all over the country. However, unless you get a link from those award websites, well sometimes Google will struggle to know you have won those awards.

Therefore in 2026 work with an agency to help strengthen and improve your businesses backlink profile.

Come to one of the best agencies around

We don’t like to shout how good we are all over social media, we let our level of knowledge and expertise do the talking.

Ryan Walsh is one of the most knowledgeable consultants in Cardiff. Therefore whether its advice needed in relation to a large e-commerce website, or you operate in one of the most competitive niches in Cardiff, we are the company to call.

With over 10 years experience, we simply know what works, what doesn’t and are widely considered as the experts in regards to organic and local SEO.

If you want SEO success in 2026 come to the experienced SEO agency.