Local SEO basics - NAP consistency, citations, and local landing pages
Google states its local ranking factors unusually plainly: relevance (does your business match the query), distance (how far from the searcher), and prominence (how known and trusted the business is, online and off). Distance you can't optimize. The other two you can, and the mechanics are refreshingly concrete.
Relevance: categories, content, and saying what you are
Relevance flows from the profile work last lesson (categories above all) plus your website's local signals. The core on-site asset: a location page per store - its own URL with the store's name, full address, hours, phone, a map embed, directions and parking notes, photos of the actual store, and what customers find there (brands carried, services like tailoring or click-and-collect). Mark it up with LocalBusiness schema (the local sibling of Phase 5's Product schema - address, geo-coordinates, openingHours as structured data), and link it from your footer. This page is what your Business Profile links to, what "yourbrand + city" searches land on, and - done properly - a genuinely useful page rather than SEO filler.
Prominence part one: NAP consistency and citations
NAP - Name, Address, Phone - is local SEO's data-consistency doctrine, and it should feel familiar: it's Phase 2's consistency principle applied to your business identity. Everywhere your business is listed - Google, Apple Maps (via Apple Business Connect - often forgotten, increasingly relevant), Bing Places, Facebook, local directories (Krak and relevant Danish/Nordic directories in our home market), industry listings - the details must match exactly. Format included: pick one canonical writing of your address and replicate it verbatim. Why it matters: consistent citations corroborate your business's identity across the web; conflicting ones create the same ambiguity that inconsistent product data creates - the machine hedges its confidence. The practical pass: list your citations (search your own name + address variants), fix the divergent ones, and register the missing majors. An afternoon, once, then an annual check.
Prominence part two: reviews and real-world signal
Review volume, velocity, and rating feed prominence directly - the dedicated reviews lesson covers the operation. Beyond reviews, prominence aggregates your general web presence: local press, being listed by local guides ("best menswear stores in Copenhagen" roundups are local link building and the AI-source seeding from Phase 6 - the same earned-media work pays both surfaces), event participation, and inbound links from local sites. There's no trick here, which is the point: prominence is Google measuring whether the local world knows you exist. Marketing that makes that true is local SEO.
The honest scope note for online-first readers: how much all this matters depends on your model - the final lesson of this phase sorts exactly that. If you have doors, this is infrastructure. If you don't, one lesson's worth of it still applies to your branded panel, and the rest can wait.