Local presence is the pillar most businesses already half-win
Of the six things we measure, local presence is where businesses do second best. Median 76 out of 100 across 1366 firms, with only 51 scoring below 50.
That is worth saying plainly, because local SEO advice tends to be written as though every business is failing at it. Most are not. Claiming a Google Business Profile, filling in the hours and collecting some reviews is now normal behaviour.
Which makes the remaining gap more interesting
Section titled “Which makes the remaining gap more interesting”If most of your competitors have a complete profile, completing yours does not put you ahead — it stops you being behind. The businesses that score badly here usually have one of three specific problems, and they are worth checking in this order:
No profile we could match at all. Either it does not exist, or it exists under a name that does not match how the business trades. We record this as unmatched rather than scoring it zero, because absence of a match is not evidence of absence — but from a customer’s point of view the effect is the same.
A profile that exists and is thin. No description, no category, no photographs, no hours. It appears in the map pack and tells someone nothing when it does.
Reviews that stopped. Volume matters less than recency. A profile with forty reviews, none in two years, reads as a business that may have closed.
What the pillar actually contains
Section titled “What the pillar actually contains”Profile completeness across the fields Google exposes, review volume and how recent those reviews are, consistency between the profile and the website, and how often the business appears in the local pack across a geographic grid of the town rather than from a single point.
That last one is the part most tools skip. A business can rank in the map pack from the town centre and be invisible three miles out, which is where a good share of its customers actually are. Every index publishes a coverage grid showing exactly that.
The honest limits
Section titled “The honest limits”We match businesses to profiles by name and location, and matching is imperfect: a firm trading under a name that differs from its registered listing may be recorded as unmatched when it does have a profile. Where that happens the pillar is excluded from that business’s score rather than counted as zero — a missing measurement must never look like a bad one. The changelog records corrections, including three venues removed from one index for being in the wrong town.
Where to spend effort instead
Section titled “Where to spend effort instead”If your local presence is already above the median — and statistically it probably is — the pillars worth your attention are the two where nearly everybody is failing: visibility and AI search presence. Local presence is necessary and no longer sufficient.
See how your sector compares: browse the indices, or read the case studies for what moving these signals looked like for comparable firms.
Figures recomputed at build time from the published datasets, 1366 businesses across the South West.