[jm]Japheth Miller
← Writing
Aug 14 2025
·
7 min read
·Process

Local SEO is just being real

A field guide to making Google believe your small business actually exists.

Local SEO is mostly being-the-realest-listing in a category full of fakes. That’s the whole secret. Everything else is execution.

Be real

Real photos of real trucks. Real reviews from real customers. A real address — not a virtual office, not a UPS box. A real phone number that a real human answers.

Google can’t verify any of this directly. But it can verify a thousand correlates, and over time those correlates add up.

The review pipeline

Most local businesses ask for reviews badly, late, or not at all. The fix: ask immediately, ask via the channel they hired you on, make the click count exactly one.

The flow that works
Job complete → SMS to customer with one tap link → review on profile. 38% conversion in my best implementation.

Japheth Miller
Japheth Miller
writes when there’s something worth writing.
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