Local SEO · 5 min
When someone in your town types "dentist near me" or "car repair + city", above all the results Google shows three businesses on a map. Those three get the vast majority of calls. Everyone else gets crumbs. Local SEO (GEO) is the discipline of getting into those three.
What Google looks at when choosing the "top 3"
- Google Business Profile: fully completed — the right primary category, description, opening hours, services with prices and at least 10 real photos. An empty profile is an invisible profile.
- Reviews: their number, average, recency and — what most people don't know — the text of the reviews. "Great hairdresser, quick booking, Sarajevo" is worth more than "5 stars" alone.
- NAP consistency: name, address and phone must be identical on your website, profile, Facebook and in directories. Google reads inconsistent details as unreliable.
- Activity: replying to reviews, weekly posts on the profile, up-to-date information.
Why this is the best-value marketing for a local business
Someone searching "near me" is ready to buy today — that's the most valuable visitor there is, and a click from the map is free. Unlike ads, which stop when the budget does, a well-kept profile works for months. In smaller towns in Bosnia and Herzegovina competitors are so inactive that two or three months of discipline can realistically get you into the top 3.
What you can do yourself, and what we do
Yourself: claim your profile at business.google.com, fill in everything, add photos and ask every customer for a review. Us: full profile optimisation, a system that collects reviews automatically, NAP clean-up across directories, local keywords on your website and LocalBusiness schema — all as part of the SEO/GEO/AEO package from 249 KM a month.
A bonus your competitors don't know about: AI search tools (ChatGPT, Gemini) use Google Business data for local recommendations. A well-kept profile means visibility both on the map and in AI answers. Check your local visibility for free →
