Reference

Local SEO glossary

The terms that come up on every assessment call, defined the way we would define them to a client rather than to another agency.

Quick answer

The core local SEO vocabulary: the Map Pack is the three-business block at the top of local results; proximity, relevance and prominence are Google's three documented local ranking factors; a geo-grid or heat map measures ranking from many points across an area rather than one; NAP consistency means your name, address and phone match across every directory; and GEO and AEO are the practices of structuring content so AI assistants and answer engines can cite you. These are the terms our team uses on assessment calls with local service businesses across Canada and the United States.

Definitions written the way we would explain them to a client rather than to another agency. Where a term is contested or commonly misused in sales calls, the definition says so. Each group below maps to a section of the 12-point checklist, and the measured weights behind them are on the 2026 ranking factors page.

Ranking and the Map Pack

Google Map Pack: The block of three local business listings shown with a map at the top of Google results for searches with local intent. Also called the Local Pack or 3-pack.
Local Finder: The expanded list of local businesses you reach by clicking “More places” under the Map Pack. Rankings here often differ from the pack itself.
Local organic results: The normal blue-link results below the Map Pack. A business can rank in one and not the other; on-page signals matter more here.
Proximity: How close the searcher is to your business or service area. Estimated to be the single largest factor in Local Pack ranking, and the one nobody controls.
Relevance: How well your profile matches what was searched: categories, services, description and the website behind it.
Prominence: How well known Google believes your business is: reviews, citations, links and overall activity.
Primary category: The main category on your Business Profile. The strongest single relevance field available, and the one most often set incorrectly.
Secondary category: Additional categories for other services you genuinely offer. They extend which searches you are eligible for without weakening the primary.
Predefined services: Google's own list of standard services you can attach to a profile, as distinct from free-text ones. Their measured importance rose sharply in 2026.
Query justification: The snippet Google shows under a pack listing (“Their website mentions...”, “Provides: emergency service”) explaining why the result matched. A visible clue to what is driving relevance.
Diversity filter: Google's tendency to avoid showing near-identical businesses, or the same owner's multiple listings, in one pack. Can suppress a listing that would otherwise rank.
Bimodal ranking: The pattern where a business ranks strongly near its address and drops off sharply with distance, producing a two-state map rather than a smooth gradient.

The Google Business Profile

Google Business Profile (GBP): The free business listing that powers your presence in Google Search and Google Maps. Formerly Google My Business. It is the single largest controllable input to local ranking.
Service area: The list of towns or regions a service-area business covers, set on the profile in place of a public address. Should reflect where you actually work, not an aspirational radius.
Attributes: Structured yes/no facts on the profile (free estimates, wheelchair accessible, on-site services). A few act like relevance signals for their query type; most influence the click, not the rank.
Google Business Profile Posts: Short updates published to the profile. A freshness signal with a short half-life, not a ranking lever; about one genuine post a week is enough.
Business description: The 750-character summary on the profile. Read by users and machines; should state the service and area plainly, not stuff keywords.
Verification: Confirming you control the business, by video, phone, email or postcard. Nothing on the profile counts toward ranking until it is verified.
Video verification: A short video walkthrough of premises, equipment and signage used to verify or reinstate a profile. Increasingly the default method for service businesses.
Reinstatement: The process of getting a suspended profile restored: fix the guideline breach, gather proof the business is real, and file one careful appeal.
Profile strength: Google's own completeness prompt in the dashboard. Useful as a checklist, but a full bar is not the same as an optimised profile.

Reviews and reputation

Review velocity: The rate at which new reviews arrive. Steady flow now outweighs total count, and bursts can look manipulated to Google's filters.
Review recency: How recently your most recent reviews were written. A top-tier local ranking factor; most consumers specifically look for reviews from the last few months.
Review response rate: The share of reviews you have replied to. Not a confirmed ranking signal, but responding measurably improves later ratings and consumer choice.
Review gating: Screening customers first and sending the review link only to the happy ones. Prohibited by Google's policies.
Review keywords: Words in customer reviews that match search terms. They can appear in query justifications and add relevance for the phrases people naturally use.
First-party reviews: Reviews collected and displayed on your own website. Useful for conversion and Review schema; they do not feed your Google star rating.
Third-party reviews: Reviews on Google, Facebook, industry platforms and directories. Google's own reviews carry the most weight for the Map Pack.
Sentiment: The overall positive or negative tone of your review body text, which Google and AI systems can read beyond the star number.

Citations and business data

NAP consistency: Whether your Name, Address and Phone match exactly across every directory you appear on. Conflicting data caps how far a profile can rise.
Citation: A mention of your business name, address and phone on another website, typically a directory. More influential for AI search visibility than for the traditional Local Pack.
Structured citation: A citation in a formal directory listing with dedicated fields (Yelp, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps).
Unstructured citation: A mention of your business details in running text, a news article, a blog post, a sponsor list.
Data aggregator: A large data provider (Data Axle, Foursquare and others) that feeds business information to many smaller directories. Fixing the aggregator propagates.
Duplicate listing: A second Google or directory profile for the same business location. Splits reviews and signals; should be merged, not deleted.
Listing management: The ongoing work of finding, correcting and de-duplicating your listings across the directory landscape.

Content and on-page

Service page: A page dedicated to one service you offer, stating what it is, who it is for and where you provide it.
Service-area page: A page for one town or region you serve, ideally backed by real jobs and local detail rather than a swapped city name.
Doorway pages: Near-identical pages created only to rank for many city or keyword variations. Against Google's guidelines and treated as thin content.
Internal linking: The links between your own pages. They route authority and tell Google which pages matter; done poorly, key pages sit too deep to rank.
Anchor text: The visible, clickable words in a link. Descriptive anchors help Google understand the destination page.
Entity: A distinct thing Google recognises and can reason about, a business, a person, a place. Local SEO increasingly works at the entity level, not just the keyword level.
Topical authority: The depth and breadth of a site's coverage of a subject. A site that answers many related questions well is trusted more on any one of them.
E-E-A-T: Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trust: the qualities Google's raters assess. Shown through real authorship, credentials, reviews and accurate information.

AI and answer engines

Digital handshake: The moment a person first meets your business online, usually the Google Business Profile card or an AI answer, and decides in a few seconds whether to trust it. Local SEO is the work of making that first impression land. It is also the name of this agency.
AEO (Answer Engine Optimization): Structuring content so answer engines can extract and present a direct answer from it: clear questions as headings, concise answers, verifiable facts.
GEO (Generative Engine Optimization): Structuring content and off-site presence so generative AI systems cite or recommend your business in the answers they produce.
AI Overviews: Google's AI-generated summaries at the top of some search results, drawing on multiple sources. Present on a large and rising share of queries.
AI Mode: Google's dedicated conversational search experience, which runs a fuller generative answer and its own set of citations.
Grounding: The step where a generative system checks its answer against retrieved sources. Businesses that are easy to verify are easier to ground on.
Query fan-out: When an AI system silently runs several related searches to build one answer. Being consistent across many phrasings helps you appear in more of them.
RAG (retrieval-augmented generation): The common architecture behind AI answers: retrieve relevant documents, then generate a response from them. Your content has to be retrievable first.
Share of voice: The proportion of AI answers on your topic and area that mention your business, versus competitors. The AI-era equivalent of a ranking position.
llms.txt: A plain-text file some sites publish to summarise their key pages for AI crawlers. Optional, and not a substitute for normal SEO.
Schema / structured data: Machine-readable markup that tells search engines and AI systems what a page and a business actually are. Usually implemented as JSON-LD.

Measurement

Geo-grid / heat map scan: A measurement method that checks your ranking from many points across a defined area and colours each one, showing coverage as geography rather than as a single number.
Baseline: The measured starting point, usually a geo-grid scan, that all later work is compared against. Without one, progress is a claim rather than a comparison.
Average rank position (ARP): The mean of your positions across all points on a geo-grid. Useful as a trend line, but it hides the spread the map shows.
Share of local voice (SoLV): The percentage of geo-grid points where you appear in the top three. A coverage metric that tracks better with call volume than a single rank.
Attribution: Working out which channel or change produced a call or booked job. Hard in local, which is why controlled tests against a baseline matter.
Conversion tracking: Recording when a visit turns into a call or form fill, so you can measure cost per booked job rather than cost per click.

Risk and technical terms

Core update: A broad change to Google's ranking systems, released several times a year, capable of reshuffling results across whole industries.
Spam update: A targeted change aimed at demoting content and profiles that break Google's spam policies.
Suspension: Removal of a Business Profile from Google, usually triggered by policy violations or risky edits to name, address, phone or category.
Soft suspension: The profile still exists and you can manage it, but it no longer appears publicly. Often fixed by correcting the underlying issue.
Hard suspension: The profile is removed entirely and requires reinstatement with evidence. More serious and slower to resolve.
Keyword stuffing: Cramming keywords into the business name, description or posts. In the name field it is the single most common cause of suspension.
Rank-and-rent / lead-gen site: A site built to rank for local terms and then rented to a business, or used to sell the same lead to several. A third-party model with its own trade-offs.
Service-area business (SAB): A business that travels to customers rather than serving them at a storefront. Requires a specific profile configuration; misconfiguring it is a common cause of suspension.
EXIF / geotagging: Metadata embedded in a photo, including GPS coordinates. Google strips it on upload, and controlled testing has found no ranking benefit from geotagging.

Why the vocabulary matters more than it should

Local search has an unusually large gap between how practitioners talk and how business owners hear it, and a lot of bad selling lives in that gap. “Optimisation” can mean correcting a category or it can mean nothing at all. “Citations” sounds academic and means directory listings. “Authority” is used to describe a real phenomenon and also as a word that fills a slide.

The practical defence is to ask what a term would look like as a completed task. If a provider cannot describe what they would actually do, in what tool, and what would visibly change afterwards, the term is doing sales work rather than technical work. Every entry on this page passes that test, and where one does not translate into a concrete action we have said so in the definition.

Three terms worth being sceptical about

“Guaranteed rankings.” Not a technique, a sales device. Nobody outside Google controls the ranking, proximity alone can decide an outcome before any work starts, and Google's own documentation warns businesses about providers who promise positions. The long version is here.

“Geotagging.” Still sold as a ranking service. Google strips EXIF location data from images on upload, and controlled testing across 27 locations found no ranking effect. If a provider lists it, ask them for the test data.

“Google Business Profile posts” as a ranking tactic. A nine-week controlled study across 441 keywords found zero ranking movement. Posts are a useful customer communication surface. They are not a lever, and you should not be billed as though they were.

If a term you have been quoted is not on this page and cannot be explained plainly, that is itself informative. Ask on the assessment call and you will get a straight answer, or read the twelve questions to put to any provider.

Sources

Sterling Sky, nine-week controlled study of Google Business Profile posts across 441 keywords.

Definitions people ask for most

Frequently asked questions

What is local SEO, in plain terms?

Local SEO is the work of getting a service business to show up when nearby people search for what it does. In practice that means the Google Map Pack, Google Maps, and the local blue-link results. The three things Google names for it are relevance, distance, and prominence.

What is the Google Map Pack?

The Map Pack is the block of three local business listings shown with a small map at the top of Google results for a search with local intent. It is also called the Local Pack or the 3-pack. For most service businesses it is where the phone calls come from.

What is the difference between AEO and SEO?

SEO gets your pages to rank in the list of search results. AEO, answer engine optimization, structures the same content so an answer engine or AI summary can lift a direct answer from it and cite you. They are not opposites. Clear headings, concise answers, and correct structured data serve both.

What is a geo-grid or heat map scan?

A geo-grid scan checks your Google Maps rank from many points spread across your service area and colours each one. The result is a map that shows where you are visible and where you fade, instead of a single rank number taken from one spot.

What is a digital handshake?

It is the first few seconds when someone meets your business online, usually on the Google Business Profile card or in an AI answer, and decides whether to trust it enough to call. Local SEO is the work of making that first impression strong. It is also the name of this agency.

Next step

Have a term we haven't defined?

Ask on the assessment call. If we cannot explain it in plain language, we probably should not be selling it.

Book a free market assessment Get a free Map Pack audit instead

Or call 778-200-8644 · One client per industry, per area. No guaranteed rankings.