Resources

Practical local SEO writing

Playbooks, checklists, and the lessons we wish we'd had earlier. No recycled "ultimate guides". Just what's working now for local and multi-location SEO.

Blog

Short-form posts on local SEO, Google Business Profile, AI search, and what we're seeing in the SERP week to week.

Read the blog

Guides

Long-form, step-by-step playbooks. Read once, follow exactly, get a result. Beginner to advanced.

Browse guides

Help Centre

Step-by-step answers for using SearchOps: connect profiles, run scans, track keywords, manage your plan, and fix common issues.

Browse help

Citation sources

The complete list of local citation directories per country — UK, US, Canada, and Australia. Grouped by tier and industry.

Browse by country

From the blog

All posts

22 Jul 202617 min read

Google Review Replies Missing? What Is Happening and How to Check

Since April 2026 Google moderates every owner reply and rejects some silently, so a reply can look posted and never go live. That, the July 2026 dashboard outage, and the documented reasons reviews disappear, plus the two-minute check that tells you which one you have.

23 Jun 202615 min read

Auditing Local Search for a 50-Location Brand: A Field Playbook

The single-location audit shatters at scale. Here is the method we use to audit a multi-location estate in an afternoon: match every location, score the estate on shared axes, target the neglected tail, and report it in a way a board can fund.

18 Jun 202617 min read

How AI Answer Engines Decide Which Local Business to Recommend

Answer engines do not rank local businesses, they assemble a shortlist of names. Here is how that decision gets made, the three levers that move it, and what we found testing 600 prompts across ChatGPT and the other leading AI answer engines.

Guides

All guides

Google Business Profile categories

The full searchable list of Google Business Profile categories, with sector and pattern filters, plus how the category system works and why primary category is the highest-leverage GBP field.

10 min read

Local search ranking factors

The deepest current treatment of how Google's local algorithm works. Relevance, distance, prominence, behavioural signals, every named update from Pigeon to the May 2026 core refresh, and the AI Overview retrieval layer.

20 min read

Query fan-out for local SEO

The technical deep-dive on query fan-out: how AI Mode, ChatGPT Search, Claude, and Perplexity decompose one user query into eight to fifteen sub-queries, why local queries fan out hardest, and the May 2026 retrieval playbook for being cited across the full fan.

22 min read

Entity optimisation: the complete guide

Knowledge Graph, Wikidata, schema graphs, sameAs convergence, and the entity stack that powers retrieval across both traditional SEO and AI assistants. The May 2026 playbook.

18 min read

The complete guide to local SEO

What local SEO actually is, why it's different from regular SEO, and the full ranking-factor stack: GBP, citations, reviews, schema, and beyond.

14 min read

Google Business Profile: the optimisation guide

Every field, signal, and lever inside GBP, including the ones that actually move rankings. The complete optimisation playbook, in order.

12 min read

Ranking on Google Maps

Proximity, prominence, relevance. What actually decides Map Pack rankings, and the practical levers you can pull on each one.

10 min read

NAP consistency & local citations

The unsexy work that quietly powers local rankings. How to audit your NAP, fix duplicates, and build a citation footprint that holds.

9 min read

How to get more Google reviews

A repeatable review-generation system that doesn't feel scummy. Timing, channels, scripts, and how to handle negatives.

8 min read

AI Search & Answer Engine Visibility

How local businesses get named when customers ask AI for a recommendation: the record, reputation and earned-media levers that win commercial queries.

16 min read

Local SEO for multi-location brands

Running local SEO across 10, 50, or 500 locations. Architecture, GBP at scale, location pages that don't get duplicate-content flagged.

10 min read

Local SEO for agencies

The operational playbook for delivering local SEO as a service. Pricing, deliverables, white-labelling, and the tooling stack that scales.

9 min read

Start tracking your real rankings today

See where you actually rank on Google Maps, not where Google tells you. Pick the plan that fits and get the full toolset from day one.