Local search used to mean the map pack. Increasingly the first answer a buyer sees is a paragraph naming two or three companies, assembled by a model that never showed them a map at all.
What the model is drawing on
For a local service question the evidence set is broader than your website and mostly not controlled by you. Review platforms, directories, your business profile, local press, forum threads, and then your own pages as corroboration rather than as the primary source.
That ordering matters. A model weights what others say about you above what you say about yourself, for the same reason a buyer does.
Consistency is the whole game
The single most common reason a local business cannot be recommended confidently is that the facts about it disagree across sources. Three variants of the company name, two phone numbers, a service area that says county on one profile and city on another, a specialism claimed in one place and absent everywhere else.
Faced with that, an assistant hedges, and hedging means naming a competitor whose details line up.
- 01Fix the name, address, phone and service area to one exact form everywhere they appear.
- 02State the specialism explicitly and identically. "Custom home building and remodelling in Durango" is retrievable. "Quality craftsmanship since 2006" is not.
- 03List service areas as places, not as a radius nobody can parse.
- 04Keep the business profile categories accurate and narrow rather than aspirational.
- 05Publish the boring facts on your own site too: licence numbers, insurance, areas served, what you do not do.
Measuring it
Build a prompt set the way a buyer would phrase it, including the town, and run it on a schedule. Record whether you are named, in what position, and what the assistant says about you, because an inaccurate mention is a different problem from no mention and needs a different fix.