Longevity in Local Search: How You Can Keep Rankings High Year After Year

“Beware of an old man in a profession where men usually die young.”  There’s a similar truth in local SEO: the businesses to keep an eye on are those that stay near the top of the local search results over time.  Like all businesses, they have their ups and downs, and they’re probably not #1 for nearly every term, but their downs seem temporary, and their ups are long.  Even if they’re down in the Google Maps results, they may be great in the organic or AI results, or vice versa.  They just don’t go away.

Months-long streaks of good rankings are easy to come by, and easy to lose.  Some businesses are in pushover markets, or they get lucky, or they employ spam effectively, or Google decides to shake up the results for a while.  But those don’t explain why some businesses routinely clobber others in competitive markets, year in and year out.  Why do some businesses avoid falling back into the bucket of crabs?

I’ve observed a few things that give businesses longevity in the local search results.  Most of those traits fall into the hamper of “The harder I work, the luckier I get,” but what a business works on is what really determines the length of its reign.  By the way, many of the moves and SOPs that keep your business visible can help you become visible in the first place, if good local rankings have eluded you so far.

Here are the practices that, in my experience, will help you get your local rankings up and keep them up year after year:

1. Take fliers. Try things that none of your competitors (or even any other business) is doing.  Don’t just copy others.  You may already see the merit in that approach, and in case not, I could explain why it makes sense strategically, psychologically, and ethically.  But that’s as boring as it sounds, so here’s a different explanation: reaction time.  If your experiment ends up working well – whether a wild backlink opportunity, or content idea, or new medium or marketing channel – it will probably be a long time before your competitors can benefit from it, if they ever do.  It may be months before they notice, and months before they try it.  Then, even if they execute it well (a big “if”), they probably won’t see any upside for months, during which time they might just ease up.  So next time your SEO proposes something that sounds edgy or downright crazy, give it a hard look.  Sure, ask questions and ask for examples, but don’t rule it out just because someone else in your local market hasn’t done it. What’s there to be afraid of, anyway?

2. Create raw materials constantly, even if you don’t optimize them for a while.  As I often tell my clients, you need several tons of gold ore to make a gold tooth.  If you enjoy building new pages on your site but hate researching keywords (even with my method), just get the page up, see how it does, and chew on the keyword-research later if you see an opportunity.  If you just did a great YouTube video, but can’t think of an equally great title, just wing it and improve the title later.  If you’re good at taking photos in the field, but dread optimizing them or adding them to your site or both, just throw them onto Google Drive now and have someone else take it from there.  You get the idea.  The raw materials can be pretty much anything.  The point is you can’t just keep keyword-stuffing your title tags and doodling with your Google Business Profile page and expect that to be the end of it.  You need stuff to optimize.

3. When in doubt, work on your website.  Not on your Google Business Profile page, not on your citations, and not even on a social media channel that seems to produce for you.  You do not own any of those assets.  You should not ignore them, of course, but you should also know that they can vanish, be throttled, or go the way of the hair metal power ballad overnight.  You do own your website, though.  Help it so it can help you – in the organic, Google Maps, and AI results, and in those make-or-break moments after someone clicks.

4. Keep your site growing bigger and better year after year.  Don’t get stuck in “break stuff and keep moving” mode,  in which you keep cranking out new pages or blog posts without blinking.  But also don’t get stuck in “preventive maintenance” mode, in which you just stare at your metrics, bother yourself with every little Search Console notification, and maybe doodle with your title tags.  Continue to mint new pages, posts, or videos that can fill in gaps in your visibility, while you improve existing pages on your site with more photos, videos, reviews, internal links, FAQs, case studies, etc.

5. Don’t keep working on the same things you worked on at the beginning of your local SEO effort. Some of the work is one-off, and some of it is ongoing.  It’s fun to do the basics on your GBP page, citations, and website and see a dramatic bump, but repeating the same steps for the same business or location won’t produce the same results.  Your priorities need to shift over time, because what’s holding you back shifts over time.  That’s simply because over the months and years you cross items off of your to-do list, your goals evolve, competitors come and go, etc.  As a wise chess player said, “Openings teach you openings, but endgames teach you chess.”  The real payoff in local SEO happens long after you’ve done the straightforward tweaks.

6. Get links to more URLs on your site.  Let’s say you’ve hauled in some good backlinks from various sources, and most of those links point to your homepage.  That’s a good thing and, to the extent you can control it, you should continue to give your homepage most of the links.  But not all of them.  Every now and then, point one of your hard-earned backlinks to a promising or high-priority “service” page, a “city” page, or another page on your site that you think might start ranking if you bump-start it.  If you’ve got no idea where to start, go into Google Search Console and look for pages with high impressions but few clicks.  One of those might benefit from even one solid backlink.

7. Only lose backlinks intentionally. At least some of your certifications, sponsorships, memberships, scholarships, or partnerships (etc.) have helped your local rankings.  Cut them loose if you must, or if you’ve concluded you just don’t need them anymore, like because you’ve hauled in other good backlinks recently.  Whatever you do, just do it intentionally, if only so you know which cats you might need to stuff back into the bag later.

8. Avoid making changes to your Google Business Profile page(s), whenever you can. That’s usually the best way to avoid suspensions.  That means, for one thing, don’t tinker with your GBP page more than you need to.   It also means don’t make any big changes you don’t need to make, or don’t make big changes now that you can make later.  Did you just open a new location and want to point the landing page URL of your GBP page to your “location” page rather than to the homepage?  Fine, but there’s a 70% chance your Google Maps rankings will drop as a result, sooner or later.  Are you thinking about showing your street address publicly because it may help your Google Maps rankings a bit, even though your rankings are pretty good now?  Don’t do it now unless you’re OK with a possible hard or soft suspension, followed by your needing to re-verify the page.  Considering hiding your address on your GBP page and specifying a service area instead, because you think (correctly) that that will invite less scrutiny and lessen your chances of a suspension?  Don’t do it now unless you’re fine with your Google Maps rankings taking a few hits here and there.  Have a GBP page with an old address, but it doesn’t seem to confuse customers?  Let it sit for a while – until you have a bit less on your plate, until you’re in a better position to absorb a shake-up of your Google Maps rankings, or until you have no choice but to update it.  

9. Spread out any big changes to your business, whenever possible.  Slow ‘em down.  For example, let’s say in the next few months you plan to rebrand your company, change your domain name, redesign your site, change web hosts, move to a new address, and maybe change your hours.  That is a lot for you to do, and a lot for Google and customers to adjust to.  Each of those changes involves a series of baby steps, any of which can go wrong and smoosh your rankings (or worse).  So, if you can, make a couple of the big changes, wait a couple of weeks or months, monitor your vital signs in Search Console, and then make a couple of the other big changes.  Spreading out major changes not only is more manageable, but also helps you keep an eye on how any given change might have affected your visibility, so that you can undo it or adjust it if needed.  You’ve got to maintain a grip.

10. Study Google Search Console data frequently. I’ve often described the usefulness of Search Console and how to use it, and you’re probably on the case.  Even after Google tweaked its reporting in September 2025 and made a dog’s breakfast of everyone’s metrics, Search Console is still the least-bad place to troubleshoot many SEO problems, prevent many more problems, and get ideas that can give your local visibility more cushion.

11. Overwhelm competitors in at least a couple of specific areas.  Don’t just squeak by them.  If they have 100 excellent Google reviews, get 200 excellent Google reviews (and keep going).  If they’ve got a few great “city” pages that rank well and several clunkers that also seem to rank well, make all of your “city” pages and your “service” pages incredibly informative and persuasive.  If they’re open 6 days a week, figure out a way to be open 7 days a week and maybe even open on some holidays.  It probably won’t matter what you choose to be the champ in, as long as you’re the best by far at something.

12. Constantly self-audit for distractions, time-wasters, and unnecessary expenses. Do you spend most of your SEO time on blog posts that seem to produce traffic, but little or nothing else?  Stop.  Do you obsess over page speed?  Don’t (it doesn’t matter much). Do you agonize over whether you’re listed on every little directory your competitors are on?  Don’t expect it to make a difference.  Do you spend more time and energy on what rank-trackers or other tools tell you than on influencing the results you see?  Flip that around.  If you think an activity that’s supposed to help your SEO may actually be a waste of time, there’s an 85% chance you’re right.  If you’re not sure, get a second opinion from someone who knows the activity well, but who has zero vested interest in persuading you to do that activity.

13. Keep a running list of marketing tasks you will work on the minute there’s a downturn in visibility or new business. I guarantee you’ll have a relative dry spell, or perhaps many more, over the course of the rest of your career.  Your job is twofold: to make those dry spells hurt less and happen less frequently, and to get even more growth out of each rainstorm.  Anyway, this is as simple as writing down every SEO-related task you think of, hear about and want to explore, or have meant to do but haven’t gotten around to yet.  Those may include content topics, preventive-maintenance tasks on your site, people you want to ask for a review, or just about anything else.  Jot everything down in an easy-to-find place and don’t worry about details or keeping it organized.  The second-best day in your SEO life is when one of your moves or ideas swoops in for the win.  The best day is when you cross it off of your list years after adding it, because it turned out you didn’t need it to succeed.

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Luck and randomness are not the same.  There’s a random component to luck, of course, but what your bad luck and good luck produce usually depends on the decisions you’ve made.  Even though the local search results (especially Google Maps) sure seem like roulette at times, in reality just about everything you see in the search results is a result of one decision made by one person at one local business.  Your competitors will want to follow you, if only they could.

 

What practices have served you well for years?  What seems to help keep your rankings stable and not on a roller coaster?  Leave a comment!