Learning local SEO where the map is not available

What does Google weigh for a local ranking?

Google names three factors. Relevance, how well your profile or page matches what was searched. Distance, how far each business is from the person searching, with Google using what it knows about their location when they have not shared it. And prominence, how well known a place is; Google writes that this factor also draws on things like how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has.

On the same page sits a sentence worth quoting, because the opposite is sold constantly: "There is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." That is Google's own wording, not ours.

Of the three, distance is the only one outside your control. It is why the ranking for one phrase differs between two cities even when the searcher never typed a city name. We wrote the worked example of that difference, and how to track it, in our piece on city-by-city rankings, and this lesson carries on from there.

Why the first step everyone teaches does not run in Iran

Every local SEO tutorial opens with one sentence: create and verify your Google Business Profile. Now open Google's own page about supported countries. It says Google must comply with sanctions imposed by the United States Office of Foreign Assets Control, and that as a result Business Profile currently does not support businesses in a short list of places, Iran among them.

So the first step everyone teaches cannot be carried out by an Iranian reader of that tutorial. Nobody writes this plainly, and the result is guides that send a reader chasing a button that will not work for them for several hours.

There are things we do not know, and we write them as such. We do not know whether a place already listed on Google Maps can be claimed and managed from inside Iran; we have not verified it. We do not know how often or where the local results pack appears for Persian searches inside Iran. We neither recommend nor sell any way around the restriction.

The rules of that service are still worth reading, even where it is unavailable, because they say what Google treats as one local identity. Eligibility has two shapes: either you have a physical location a customer can visit, or you travel to the customer; and a rented mailing address you do not operate from is not eligible. No more than one profile is created per location. And the name has to be the one that appears in the real world on your signage and stationery, not the name plus a few keywords. All four rules carry over to the site side: one page per real location, the same name on every page, and no title that is the business name followed by a list of services.

Our position: put aside the step that is unavailable and work on the three factors that remain available. Relevance and prominence are both built from your own site as well.

So what do you actually work on?

Four things, in this order. First, write your real service area on the site, with the names of the cities and districts, phrased the way a customer says them rather than the way the company registration does. Second, have a reason for every city you build a page for; the next section is the test for that. Third, write the name, address and phone number identically everywhere, on your own site and off it. Fourth, collect local proof: a review from a customer in that city, real photographs of the place, a partnership or a mention somewhere the people of that city actually read.

Do not treat the third one lightly. A phone number written once with a leading zero and once with a country code, an address that sometimes says "street" and sometimes does not, a name spelled three ways: all of them make matching harder for any system. The work takes an afternoon, and in the link building lesson we saw that this same consistency is the basis of citations too.

What is missing from the list matters as well: the "listed in hundreds of directories" packages. Google puts low-quality directory links in its link spam list, and adding your name to a hundred sites nobody opens builds neither prominence nor relevance.

When does a city page deserve to exist?

There is a simple and merciless test: count the sentences on that page that are only true of that city. If you take the page "our services in Shiraz", swap Shiraz for Isfahan, and no other sentence becomes false, then the page is a template and you are asking Google to index one page several times.

What does a sentence that is only true there look like? The travel time to a customer in that city, a branch or a warehouse that really is there, a real constraint such as serving that city only three days a week, a price that differs because of transport, the name of a project you delivered there, or even the word the people of that city use for your service and people elsewhere do not.

If you have none of those, you have two options and both are legitimate: write a single page that names every city you cover, or do not build the city page until you have something to say. Which one depends on the real differences between branches, and the city-by-city piece works that choice through.

The boundary: some repetition is fine. Your guarantee, payment terms and FAQ really are the same in every city, and writing them identically is honest. What causes the problem is a page with no unique sentence at all.

How much does local structured data help?

The LocalBusiness type on schema.org has two required properties: address and name. Everything else, from opening hours to coordinates and telephone, is recommended. Filling them in is the right move, because it tells a machine that this page is about one business at one specific address.

But let us cut one expectation short right away: this markup does not by itself lift you in local results, and it does not replace a Business Profile. What it does is explain, not rank.

There is a trap inside this very type that turns up constantly: the aggregateRating property. Google's documentation says it is only recommended for sites that capture reviews about other businesses. Meaning a rating you collected about yourself has no place inside a LocalBusiness node. Why, and what we did about that rule on our own site, is in the schema lesson.

How do you measure a local ranking?

The ranking you see in your own browser is not your ranking. Your search is coloured by your location and your history, and if you sit in Tehran you will never learn what a customer in Mashhad sees. So the measurement has to happen outside your browser, with an explicit location.

And here you meet a problem almost no tutorial mentions: rank tools take a city by name, from a location database that does not contain Iran. You cannot send "Mashhad" as the target. The workaround we use, documented in the next block, is to send geographic coordinates instead of a city name.

Keep three things apart so the number does not mislead you. Record each city's rank separately and never average them. Keep the date of every measurement, because local results move day to day. And measure the phrase a customer actually types, not the phrase with the city name appended; those are two different searches. Our own tool for this is rank tracking.