Local SEO Guide For Small Businesses 2026

If you're trying to figure out what EAT stands for with Google and how you can rank better for local SEO. In this video, I'm going to break down Google's EAT algorithm specifically for local service businesses. My name is Phil Richer. I'm the owner of Flash Consulting. We partner with local service businesses and we help them increase their sales and keep their schedules full. And on this YouTube channel, we share content about ways to grow your business. All right, so let's get right into this. So if you're not familiar with eat, E, E A T expertise, experience, authoritativeness, and trust, this is what Google is building their SEO Search Engine optimization rankings off of. And they've shared this all over the place that this is the algorithm. They recently added another E to this. That's why it's E, E, A T. But ultimately what they want is you to build trust with them. Just like any other referral partner that's out there, you have to build trust. And the way that you do that is by sharing these things with businesses specifically, like national search engine optimization, like big things, there's a strategy for this. For local service businesses, there's a strategy as well. And so in this video, I'm going to share how you can do this for your business. All right, so I really like this, this outlet called Search Engine Land. And they recently posted this article, why does EAT Matter for local SEO? And they kind of broke it down here, but I'm going to actually go through and show you what to do. But I'm going to walk you through these four areas. Experience, expertise, authoritativeness, and trustworthiness, and how you can demonstrate these in your business for local SEO. All right, so experience, how can you demonstrate to Google that you have experience in this industry serving this specific location? Well, what they recommend is by doing Google Business Profile posting, we typically recommend doing this at least twice a week. And I'll show you what that looks like, having either local employees and this could be someone like on their LinkedIn or on their Facebook saying that they work at this place and they also live in this location. And you don't have to get too specific with your employees on that. And then also encouraging customers to upload photos because customer reviews also get geo targeted, which means Google's basically building a map around that person that left your review. And I'm going to show you how this works. So Google Business Profile posting, if you were to go to google.com business, you can manage now and sign into the back end of your account, basically it's going to Give you something that looks like this. And you can go down here and you can add an update. And so these are your postings here. So what we would recommend is doing postings with your geo targets in here. So for example, let's say you did. You're a mover. You could post, check out this local move that we did in this specific city with some before and after pictures or just a picture of your truck. It doesn't necessarily have to be your truck in that area, but using that actual word, the geolocation inside of your posting, Google is indexing all the content that you give it. And so this is a really good way to demonstrate that you have the experience. The other thing that they recommended was by uploading photos. So same thing, adding photos in here. And you can add a little description on the photos. So you can say like, this is in this area, this is in that area. The reason that reviews are so important. I'm just going to show you. Let's just pick a review on. On here. Okay, let's pick this review. So if we go to this person, actually that's not a good example because they only have one review. Let's X out this. I'm gonna actually go back. Let's just pick someone that has a bunch of reviews. All right, let's just pick this guy. He has two reviews. Okay, so we're gonna go here, we're gonna go to reviews. And so you can see that the reviews that they have posted are roughly all around our geographical area. So basically what this is telling us, review, review, review, review. And basically what this is telling us is that in this area, this person leaves reviews, which means these are local reviews. This person leaves local reviews. So what they want is for you to have local reviews, not, you know, buying reviews from overseas or whatever. They want real people that have left real reviews and even to share pictures because local photos are really important. So if this person were to upload some photos with their view, it would help. All right, so that's how you can demonstrate your experience to Google expertise. Okay, so local service pages and blog posts. We have talked a little bit about blog posts before and some about local service pages. But I'm going to share with you the strategy that we use. So when it comes to blog posts, you can obviously share blog posts. Let's say that you do. You're a moving company. Again, let's say that you talk about seven things to look for when you're. When you're preparing for a local move. You could talk in that Blog post about your local area. So maybe you need permits in your area. Maybe in your area, there's really bad traffic at this time. So maybe you plan your move around that. You can demonstrate your geographical area, but also demonstrate your expertise and knowledge of that specific location. Another really good way to do blog posts is to do case studies. So if you're doing moves and let's say that you're in New York, you could say long distance, move from New York to California, or local, move in the Bronx or whatever, you can target neighborhoods and talk about the services you provided in those neighborhoods. And it's a really good way to share content that's relevant, but also get your geographical targets in there. For local service pages, we're obviously national, so this doesn't really play to us. But essentially what you do is you can build, we do it as industries that we serve. So let's say we serve air duct cleaning companies. You can build out URLs on your website pages that say digital marketing for air duct leaning companies. For example, you can build this out that says movers in New York City, movers in Brooklyn, movers in whatever the cities are. And then every single page on here needs to have unique content specifically revolving around that location. So you don't want to have duplicate content and duplicate URLs. Google doesn't like that. But these local service pages, as you can see, it shows that you have expertise in those local areas. On these pages, you can share maybe your trucks with pictures of local landmarks, or you can just talk about the local area if you're familiar with it. But essentially you want to be creating a little map around your business, demonstrating your expertise around there. All right, Authoritativeness, local links. So this is a really big one when it comes to off site search engine optimization, which is like your Google listing, your Yelp listing, your Facebook listing, all those different citations are what they're called. Google looks at this. They want your name, address and phone number to match. It's called your nap. And so you want someone to either build out all these citations for you. A lot of companies use a tool called yext, Y, E, x T. And they can build out these citations. But more importantly, they need to be monitoring your citations because all these different algorithms are pulling in data from all over different data sets. And so if your phone number, let's say you have a tracking number that's floating out there somewhere, you have multiple different phone numbers. Your phone number could get pulled in to one of these listings and then it throws off your Name, address and phone number. And then Google says, hey, well, is it this phone number or this phone number? And then you start to lose that authoritativeness and the trust from Google that they're giving the best information. Because at the end of the day, Google wants to provide the answer to what someone's searching for, and they want to provide very credible information. And so if you can make sure that you're, your authoritativeness is really, really good and that you have your name, address and phone number that matches across the board, Google has a lot more confidence in showing your information because they feel like that when someone calls that number, it's actually going to connect them to the solution that they want. And so that's a really good way to build out local links. A lot of companies do this as local SEO or SEO services specifically for local businesses. They've been doing this for a long time. All right, so the last one is trustworthiness. We talked about getting reviews and specifically those local reviews. Reviews are a huge part of your ranking when it comes to Google. We have shared this before. 17% of your ranking is based on Google reviews. And so we talked about, I showed you how you get local reviews and also consistent reviews and also responding to reviews. So even one star reviews, responding to reviews, getting consistent positive reviews is how you can really build trustworthiness with Google. As we mentioned in the beginning, basically you can do these three things and then it leads to trust overall with Google. And so in your business, if you need help getting some of this stuff set up, this is obviously what we do for businesses. We help in this component. We help make sure that we hit all these different levers. You know, building out service area pages on a monthly basis, building out blog posts on a monthly basis, helping with reviews, posting on their content, uploading photos, you know, all that stuff. I'll put a link down below. You can set up a time to talk. If not, hit like and subscribe. We'll see you in the next video and be sure to drop a comment if you have a question. I love getting comments because we can create more content off that. All right, see you in the next video.