Local SEO means that someone in your area who searches for the service you offer finds accurate information about your business — name, address, hours, services, reviews — and can reach you in one click. Most of this visibility doesn't depend on tricks, but on consistent data and a few rules published by Google. We go through them below, together with the decisions that often come up for Romanian businesses.
Your Google Business Profile: the rules that matter
The Google Business Profile is the main source for local results and for the map. Google publishes clear rules, and breaking them leads to the profile being suspended:
- The name must be the real name of the business, as it appears on your storefront, your website and as customers know it — without added keywords, cities or slogans. “Popescu Plumbing” is correct; “Popescu Plumbing – The best 24/7 plumber in town” is not.
- Categories are chosen so they complete the sentence “This business IS a…”, not “this business HAS a…”. Choose the minimum needed for your main activity.
- The address must be precise and real. Virtual offices and PO boxes are not accepted. If you work at your customers' premises (a service business without premises open to the public), Google asks you to hide the address and declare your service area.
Fill in your hours (including holidays), phone, website, services and real photos. An incomplete profile is treated as less relevant, and one with false information can be removed.
Consistent data: same name, same address, same phone
The name, address and phone must be identical on your website, your Google profile, Facebook, listing platforms and your website's structured data. Small differences (“St.” vs “Street”, an old phone number on one platform) create distrust for search engines and, more recently, for the AI systems that describe your business in their answers. Make a list of every place your business appears, correct them once, then keep the list.
Your website: what it needs for local search
- A contact page with the address, hours, phone and a map, in text (not only in an image).
- LocalBusiness structured data with the same information, so engines read it without ambiguity.
- Service pages that explain what you do, for whom and how to request a quote — not a list of keywords.
- Your service area, stated explicitly, if you work in several towns.
City pages: when yes and when no
A frequent question: “Should we make a page for each city?”. The answer depends on one thing — whether the offer differs between cities. If you have locations, teams, prices or services that differ, each page has its own content and deserves to exist. If the same team does the same thing everywhere and the pages would differ only by the city name, you produce near-identical pages that compete with each other and that search engines treat as duplicates. In that case, a single page with the service area clearly described is more useful.
Reviews: how to ask for them properly
Reviews influence both local ranking and the customer's decision. The rules are simple: ask after the service is delivered, ask all customers (not just the happy ones), with a direct link to the Google form, and reply to all of them — including the negative ones, with facts rather than excuses. Bought reviews, reviews written by employees or “swapped” reviews break Google's rules and can lead to their removal or the removal of the profile.
How to measure
In your Google profile you track views on the map and in search, calls, direction requests and clicks to your website. In Google Search Console you track the queries that include place names and the pages that appear for them. Compare similar periods (the same quarter last year) and separate searches for your business name from searches for your service — growth in the second category is what brings new customers.
What doesn't work (and can do harm)
- Keywords in the profile name, or several profiles for the same location.
- City pages with the same text and only the town name changed.
- Bought reviews or reviews written in-house.
- Fictitious addresses to “appear” in a city where you have no activity.
All of the above break Google's rules and, in practice, get detected.
We apply these principles in our SEO & AI search visibility projects; if your website is about to be rebuilt, also read what you can control in search and AI answer visibility.