Local SEO is two separate jobs sold as one. The first is your Google Business Profile, a free listing Google hosts, where categories, services, hours and reviews decide whether you appear in the map results. The second is your website, where service pages, technical basics and consistent business details decide whether you appear in ordinary results. They run on different systems and move on different timelines, which is why a proposal that does not separate them is hard to judge.
Key points
The profile and the website are two different systems, and profile work usually shows movement in weeks while site work takes three to six months.
The primary category on a profile decides which searches you are eligible for at all, not just how well you rank.
Proximity limits every local result, so no amount of work ranks one location across an entire city.
Citations are about consistency rather than volume. Contradictory business details make you harder to resolve as one business.
A proposal that does not separate profile work from site work is difficult to price or evaluate.
What is the Google Business Profile half?
This is the free listing Google shows on the map. The work is unglamorous and it is where most of the early movement comes from.
The primary category is the single highest-leverage field, because it decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all rather than only how well you rank in them. The services list gives Google the vocabulary to match you against specific searches. Hours, attributes and booking links decide whether you survive the filters an urgent searcher applies.
Reviews matter for the words inside them as much as the star average, because those words get matched against what people type. In regulated fields, what you may quote back from a review differs by market, which is a constraint most generic advice ignores.
What is the website half?
This is the part you own. It wins the searches that do not show a map: a service name, a price question, a comparison, a problem described in the customer's own words.
The work is a page for each service worth having, written the way customers ask rather than the way your industry names things. Underneath that sits the technical baseline: accurate and consistent business details, sensible internal links, pages that load quickly on a phone.
It is slower than profile work and it is the part that holds position when a competitor starts investing.
What about citations and directories?
A citation is any mention of your business name, address and phone number on another site. The value is consistency rather than volume.
Fifty listings that disagree with each other are worse than ten that match, because contradictions make you harder to resolve as a single business, and ambiguity is what stops a system committing to you. Buying a package of hundreds of directory submissions is mostly buying noise.
The listings worth having are the ones a human might actually use: the major directories, your professional body, and anywhere your industry genuinely gets looked up.
What is not included, whatever the proposal says
A guaranteed position. Google decides it, and it varies by searcher, device and proximity
Ranking across a whole city from one location. Proximity is a hard limit
Anything that requires access nobody gave you, such as your Google Business Profile dashboard
Full automated visibility into your profile's data, which is not publicly fetchable
Paid advertising, unless it is separately scoped and separately budgeted
How should the two halves be priced?
Separately, or at least separately described. Profile optimisation is largely a project with light ongoing maintenance. Site work is genuinely continuous, because position decays when competitors keep investing.
A single monthly figure covering both is not automatically wrong, but you should be able to ask which portion is which and get a straight answer. If the answer is vague, the scope is vague.
Published agency pricing for local SEO commonly starts in the low four figures per month and rises with the number of locations and the competitiveness of the market.
What should the first ninety days look like?
Month one is the profile: category, services, hours, photos, description, and a review approach that fits the rules in your market. This is where movement should be visible soonest, usually in calls and direction requests rather than rankings.
Months two and three are the site: the service pages that matter most, the technical baseline, and the business details made consistent wherever they appear.
If nothing has moved on the profile after sixty days, ask why. If nothing has moved on the site after ninety, that is normal and not yet a problem.
Related questions
Is local SEO just fixing my Google listing?
No, though that is where most of the early movement comes from. The listing wins searches that show a map. Your website wins the ones that do not, which are often the higher-intent ones.
How many directory listings do I need?
Fewer than most packages sell. Consistency matters more than volume, and listings that disagree with each other actively hurt by making you harder to resolve as one business.
Can I rank across my whole city?
Not from one location. Local results weigh how close you are to the person searching, so the realistic target is the radius you can actually serve, which is where most of your bookable demand is anyway.
How long before I see something?
Profile changes often show in 30 to 60 days, usually first in calls and direction requests. Site work takes three to six months for meaningful change, and longer in a competitive market.