Local SEO has evolved a lot over the years, from the early days of just having to have a consistent name, address, and phone (NAP) profile coherence across the internet, through to the Possum update in 2016 (which introduced address-based filtering that made virtual offices and shared-address listings significantly riskier for local pack visibility) and then through to the modern AI-powered rules of how search is governed and how this is affecting local search and the Google Maps product.
The way we would now approach local search and franchise SEO has changed substantially since 2020. AI Overviews appear more for local queries, and the way users are interacting with, identifying, and finding local businesses and services has evolved. This doesn’t mean to say that the local pack doesn’t matter anymore, but there are more nuances to what local SEO success looks like.
In this guide, I’m not going to tell you to burn the existing local SEO playbook; location pages, reviews, and service area businesses all still matter.
However, how we go about this and how we try to achieve success in this way have changed. See this as an evolution of the local SEO playbook and not a revolution of your entire local SEO strategy.
How Google Evaluates Multiple Locations
Google’s local algorithms have evolved beyond the basic directory lookups that we were heavily used to merely days, and now operate more as a sophisticated entity matching engine, utilizing small, advanced parts of the back-end indexing and retrieval mechanisms to better evaluate physical storefronts independently while looking at the broader brand ecosystem, as well as looking at the user’s information.
When we look at local SEO, we typically would look at three core factors: those being relevance, distance, and prominence. However, these have evolved beyond what their initial standards were.
Relevance
Relevance is more about conceptual matching and entity clustering. So, relevance is no longer just about matching keywords on the page, but about how accurately a specific storefront matches the intent of a search query, and for multiple-location businesses, Google determines relevance by analyzing data across the entire footprint.
You need to ensure that your primary and secondary categories have exact alignment across all the Google Business Profiles without over-categorizing, which can dilute local signals. With your local service profiles, you need to be explicitly defining what services are available at which locations, as capabilities can often vary by storefront.
Your local page architecture also needs to make sure you’re connecting each Google Business Profile listing to dedicated local landing pages that feature unique, localized content, schema markup, and regional context. This doesn’t mean to say to create lots of doorway pages programmatically, but to create localized entity pages that add value to users who would land on them.
Distance
The physical proximity of the user…
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