Google Local SEO Services: Three Surfaces, and Which One You Are Paying For

Oct 3

5 min read

Search for what you do plus your town and look at the page Google returns. Near the top there may be an ad. Below it, a map with a short list of businesses beside it. Below that, the ordinary links. Those are three separate surfaces. They are filled in three different ways, you get onto them by three different routes, and a service called Google local SEO might be working on any one of them. Knowing which is the difference between a fee that helps and a fee that misses, so we will walk through all three and what a fee on each one is really paying for.

The check to run before you read any quote

Do that search now, on a phone, for the thing a customer would actually type. Write down three lines: whether an ad appeared and whose, whether you are in the map list, and whether your website appears in the links below it. That is your starting position and it takes two minutes. Do it for two or three of your services, because the answer can differ between them. When a provider quotes you, hold the quote against those three lines and ask which of them the work is meant to move. A provider who can answer that in one sentence is worth continuing with.

Three numbered lines to write down after searching your own service and town: the ad, the map list, the links.

Surface one: the ad

The slot at the top marked as sponsored is bought. You pay Google per click and you are there while you are paying. It is the fastest of the three and it stops the day the budget stops. The important thing to know is that it is sealed off from the other two: Google's own guidance for site owners states that advertising with Google will not have any effect on your site's presence in its search results, and that Google never accepts money to include or rank sites in those results. Buying ads does not help your organic position and stopping them does not hurt it.

A three-item card on the ad surface: paid per click, stops when the budget stops, sealed off from organic results.

Surface two: the map result and the profile behind it

The map and the short list of businesses beside it are drawn from business listings rather than from websites. Behind your entry sits a profile you hold in a separate account: your categories, your hours, your service area, your photographs, your reviews, and the replies to them. You can open it, edit it, and see the result without touching your website at all. Work on this surface is profile work. It is real work, it matters a great deal for a business whose customers arrive by map, and it is a different job from anything done to your site.

Surface three: the ordinary links

Below the map sit the results drawn from websites, and getting onto them costs nothing to Google: its guidance says plainly that it costs nothing to appear in its organic search results. What it costs is the work of making your site answer the question somebody typed and making it easy for Google to read. That is the page titles and descriptions a searcher sees in the result, the pages that say what you do and where, the internal links, the speed, and whether every page you want listed can actually be reached. It is ongoing because the results keep changing around you, which is the part our guide to ongoing SEO sets out in detail.

Three columns naming the three surfaces on a local results page: the ad, the map result, and the ordinary links.

Why the surface changes what the fee should be

A profile has a finite number of fields. Once they are accurate the ongoing work is posts, photographs, new reviews, and answers, and that is a bounded job. A website has no such boundary, because the pages, the competitors, and the results keep moving. An ad has no end at all: it runs while you pay. So a quote that says local SEO without naming a surface is a quote for an unknown quantity of an unknown job, and the fastest way to make it readable is to ask which of the three lines you wrote down it is meant to move.

How much do Google SEO services cost?

The honest answer is that the question is missing its subject: cost for which surface. Ads are priced by Google per click and the figure is whatever you set. Profile work and website work are priced by whoever does them, in one of a few shapes, and the ranges published online cover both jobs at once which is why they are so wide. What makes any figure readable is the pair of lists: what will be done in a month, and what was done last month with dates. Ours is published rather than quoted, with the split between what a subscription covers and what it does not, on our pricing page.

Can I do local SEO myself?

A good part of it, yes, and it is Google saying so: its guidance states that if you run a small local business you can probably do much of the work yourself, and points at its own starter guide. The profile is the obvious place to start because it is already yours and needs nobody's approval. An evening spent making the categories, hours, service area, and photographs right is an evening well spent whatever you decide about hiring anyone. The website surface is the one where the hours accumulate and where the work does not finish, and that is the honest trade to weigh.

What happens when the results page changes?

The surfaces move. A results page gains a feature, loses one, or changes shape, and a summary written by a machine may sit above all three of the surfaces described here. What has held through every previous change is the underlying arrangement: somebody types a need, something decides what to show them, and the businesses that are easy to find, accurate about what they do, and easy for a machine to read are the ones in the running. We will leave predictions about the next layout to others. The useful response to a changing results page is to keep checking the three lines yourself, because your own search is the one measurement no announcement can make stale.

A three-step sequence of the arrangement that has held through every change to the results page.

Which surface we work on, said plainly

The third one. We work on your website: one site, one published price, a fixed number of optimizations each week, cancel any time, no contract. The business profile and the local listings are on our not included list, in writing, and so are new pages, redesigns, custom development, off page link building, social, ads, email, and content marketing. If your customers reach you through the map result rather than through your site, that surface belongs with someone else, and we would rather say so now than after you pay. If you are weighing several providers on this, how to choose an SEO agency sets out the questions that work on any of them.

One website, one published price, a fixed number of optimizations to your site each week, cancel any time, no contract, and a written record of what changed. Which surface that covers and which it does not is set out line by line on our pricing page, including the not included list, so you can put it beside a quote that covers a different surface.

And if you have run the three line check and want a second read on which surface your customers are actually arriving from, book a free SEO consultation. You will speak to the person who does the work.

Written by Spencer Capron at Capron Media, in collaboration with our AI agents. The same way we do the work for clients. Spencer reviews everything published here.