Local SEO is won in the map pack, not the blue links.

Ours run R2,500 for a once-off profile setup, R3,450 a month for a local SEO campaign, and R6,500 a month for businesses covering multiple areas. Freelancers locally start around R1,500 a month and larger agencies charge R10,000 and upwards.

Faster than national SEO. Profile improvements and review volume can move map pack position within four to eight weeks. Service area pages take longer, usually three months, because they have to earn their own rankings first.

Partly. Google weighs distance heavily in the map pack, so a business twenty kilometres away rarely outranks a local one. What you can do is rank the website page for that area in normal results, which is why we build service area pages alongside the profile work.

More than the businesses currently above you, and more recent. There is no fixed number. What matters as much is that you reply to all of them, because Google reads the replies and so do buyers deciding between three options on a map.

Real ones do. Thin pages with the town name swapped out get treated as duplicates and can drag the whole site down. We build fewer pages with genuine local content, which is slower and works.

Then that is the first job, and it is the cheapest meaningful thing you can do. Setup and verification is R2,500 and it usually produces movement before any other work does.

Local SEO is the work of ranking a business for searches with local intent, such as "electrician near me" or "attorney in Centurion", and especially in the Google map pack that appears above normal results. It combines your Google Business Profile, reviews, citations and location pages.

Mentions of your business name, address and phone number on directories and other websites. Google cross-references them, so inconsistencies, an old address on one directory and a different phone number on another, quietly undermine your local rankings until they are cleaned up.

The block of three business listings with a map that appears at the top of local searches. It gets the majority of clicks for local intent searches, which is why local SEO focuses on it rather than only the blue links below.

You can rank in the map pack with only a Google Business Profile, and for some very local trades that is enough to start. A website multiplies the effect, because it gives Google more evidence of relevance and gives you somewhere to rank for the searches the map does not cover.

Yes. Each location gets its own profile, its own page and its own tracking, which is what the multi-area campaign at R6,500 a month covers. Mixing locations into one profile is a common mistake that suppresses all of them.

By suburb, using position tracking that checks from different locations, because rankings differ street by street. The monthly report shows where you stand in each area you serve and which competitor moved when you did.