Local SEO that puts you in the Austin map pack.

Google publishes the factors behind local results, and there are only three: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is, in Google's words, "how well-known a business is" - which it says draws on "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have."

Distance is fixed. You can't move your pin, and the businesses closer to a given searcher start ahead of you for that search. That leaves two factors worth spending money on, and they respond on completely different timelines.

Relevance moves in weeks. It lives almost entirely inside your Google Business Profile - primary category, service list, description, attributes, hours, photos. These are free fields, and most Austin profiles we audit have half of them empty.

Prominence moves in months, and only if the work is steady. Citations, reviews and local links compound. There's no version of this that works as a one-off project.

We wrote the full breakdown of how the three factors interact in how to rank higher on Google Maps, including why a competitor further away can still outrank you.

A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on a site that isn't yours. Directories, chambers, trade associations, review platforms, data aggregators. They're the least interesting part of local SEO and one of the most reliable, because they feed prominence directly and almost nobody maintains them properly.

What counts, and what doesn't

Not every listing is worth the hour it takes to claim. We sort them into four tiers and work down:

• Your own properties. Website footer, contact page, LocalBusiness schema. These are the reference record everything else is checked against.
• The majors. Google Business Profile, Apple Business Connect, Bing Places, Facebook, Yelp. These are read by the platforms people actually use, and several feed each other.
• Data aggregators. The wholesale layer that quietly syndicates business data to hundreds of smaller directories. Fixing a record here fixes dozens of downstream listings you'd never find by hand.
• Local and industry. Your chamber, Austin business organisations, trade associations, supplier and franchise locator pages, licensing bodies. Lower volume, higher signal, and the hardest for a competitor to replicate.

What we skip: paid listing networks that generate hundreds of identical low-quality profiles. They inflate a count on a report and do nothing for prominence.

What inconsistency actually costs

Mismatches don't arrive deliberately. You move offices, change a number, someone lists you as "Co." instead of "Company", an old suite number lingers on a directory nobody has looked at in four years. Each one is a small reason for Google to be less certain which record is correct, and that uncertainty is subtracted from the factor you were trying to build.

It costs you twice, because customers hit the same records. A disconnected number on a directory page is a lost call that never appears in any report you'll see.

How we run it

1. Audit. Find every existing mention, including the ones you didn't create, and record what each one currently says.
2. Settle the canonical record. One exact name, address and phone format, down to the abbreviation, agreed before anything gets edited.
3. Fix your properties. Footer, contact page and schema first, so the reference record is right.
4. Claim and correct outward. Majors, then aggregators, then local and industry.
5. Suppress duplicates. Two profiles for one business split your signals and occasionally get the wrong one ranked.
6. Re-check on a schedule. Listings drift. This is the step most citation projects skip, which is why their results don't hold.

Austin is a hard local market for a specific reason: it grew fast, and the competitive set in most service categories is larger and better funded than the city's size suggests. For a lot of searches you're not competing with the shop down the road, you're competing with a regional operator running paid alongside a mature profile.

Three things that follow from that:

• Pick your radius honestly. A business in Round Rock trying to rank across the whole metro usually ranks nowhere. Owning your actual catchment, then letting prominence extend it, beats spreading thin.
• Review velocity is the live battleground. In most Austin service categories the map pack is held by profiles collecting reviews every month, not by whoever has the oldest total.
• Local links are available and underused. Austin has a dense layer of neighbourhood associations, business groups, event sponsors and local press. These are real citations with real links, and most of your competitors haven't bothered.

If you serve customers at their locations rather than yours, your service area is set in the profile - but the physical pin still anchors how far you realistically rank, whatever radius you enter.