Local SEO by Industry
Google Maps rankings reward different signals in different trades — what wins for a dentist loses for a bakery. Pick your industry for the specific categories, review tactics and profile moves that matter.
Local SEO guides by industry
Why local SEO advice changes by industry
The mechanics of Google Maps are the same everywhere: relevance, distance and prominence. What differs is which of the three you can actually move, and that is decided by your trade.
A restaurant competes almost entirely on prominence. There are twenty others within a mile, everyone has the obvious category, and the ranking is settled by review volume, photo freshness and how busy Google thinks you are. A commercial roofer has the opposite problem — barely anyone searches "roofer" with intent to buy, distance is nearly irrelevant because customers will take someone from thirty miles away, and the winner is whoever has the service list and the location pages that match long, specific searches.
Apply restaurant advice to the roofer and you will spend a year chasing reviews for searches nobody makes. That is why these guides are separated by trade rather than being one checklist with the noun swapped out.
What each industry guide covers
The categories that actually rank
Google has over 4,000 categories and the primary one carries far more weight than the other nine combined. Each guide names the primary that wins for that trade and the secondaries worth claiming — including the ones that look wrong but rank.
The searches customers really use
Almost nobody types the name of your profession the way you write it on a van. The guides list the phrasing that shows up in real Google Performance data for that trade, including the "near me" and emergency variants.
Which signals move the needle
Photos matter enormously for a salon and barely at all for a locksmith. Review recency decides a restaurant and review detail decides a solicitor. Each guide says where to spend the effort and, just as usefully, where not to.
The attributes and fields most profiles skip
Service areas, opening hours for holidays, booking links, accessibility attributes and Q&A. These are unglamorous and they are how two otherwise identical listings end up ranking differently.
Start here, whatever your trade
Three things are worth doing before any industry-specific tactic, because they gate everything else. Make sure your name, address and phone number are identical everywhere they appear online — inconsistent details quietly cap how far Google will rank you. Fill every field on the profile, not just the required ones. And reply to every review, including the good ones, because it is the cheapest ranking signal you control.
Once those are true, the industry guide is where the leverage is. Our free local SEO tools cover the basics if you would rather work through them by hand first.