Local SEO that actually moves the needle, not just checkboxes

A lot of local SEO advice reads like a checklist written for anywhere in the world, meta tags, alt text, a sitemap. All correct, all necessary, and all insufficient on their own for a business trying to be found locally.

What actually moves the needle for a local business is consistency: the same business name, address, and phone number everywhere it appears online, a Google Business Profile that's actually kept current, and pages that mention the specific city and neighborhood a customer would search for rather than vague regional language.

SEO also isn't a one-time setup. It's closer to maintenance, the businesses that keep showing up are the ones that keep publishing something, updating something, or fixing something every few months, not the ones that did it once at launch and never touched it again.