Devstars
Blog
Date: 10/06/2026
Stuart WatkinsReal numbers from three clients, and an honest answer about who this actually works for.
Yes, more than almost anything else you can do for a local business. A complete GBP, consistent NAP details and a solid set of local citations put you in the map pack where 42% of local searchers click, let customers convert without ever visiting your website, and build the entity consistency AI search tools now use to decide who gets recommended. For businesses with a physical location or service area, it’s the highest-return SEO work there is. For pure online businesses, it matters far less, and we’ll be honest about that below.
We’ve been doing this work for years across salons, dealerships and storage facilities. Here’s what it looks like with real figures attached.
Think of your GBP as a second shopfront that sits directly in Google’s results. When someone searches “self storage near me” or “hair salon near me”, the map pack appears above the organic results, and the three businesses in it take the lion’s share of attention.
The numbers back this up. Around 46% of all Google searches carry local intent, and 42% of people running a local search click a result inside the map pack. Fully completed profiles get 7x more clicks than incomplete ones.
The thing is, the conversion often doesn’t happen on your website at all. Someone finds you in the map pack, sees your reviews and photos, taps “call” or “get directions”, and becomes a customer. We genuinely don’t mind if they never visit the website. The job got done.
No. The honest answer it there are three tiers.
If you’re in the first tier and you’re not doing this properly, you’re missing out. Here’s the proof.
Giant Storage runs seven self-storage sites across the South West. We’ve been building out their local search ecosystem: a GBP per location, location pages on the website, and citation campaigns through BrightLocal for each site.
When we audited their call tracking earlier this year, one figure stood out. The Frome Google Business Profile generates more than a third of their traffic with a 75% engagement rate. That made it the highest-quality lead source after direct traffic, ahead of organic search at 39% and paid ads at 46%. People who call from a GBP have already seen the location, the reviews and the opening hours. They’re ready to buy.
The location pages tell the same story. Over six months, nearly all of the site’s organic clicks came from the location pages for Yeovil, Frome, Salisbury and Crewkerne. Not the blog. Not the homepage. The pages tied to a place, working in tandem with the profile for that place.
We’ve worked with Headmasters for over eight years across their 56 salons. The big wins never came from ranking for generic hair content. They came from “hairdresser near me” and “hair salon near me” in the specific areas where the salons sit.
That means 56 individual Google Business Profiles, each with its own reviews, photos, posts and consistent details, each backed by a dedicated location page. It’s unglamorous, systematic work. It’s also what keeps every salon visible to the people standing half a mile away with their phone out, and it supports a business turning over millions.
For a deeper look at how local SEO works at scale for multi-location businesses, that article covers the full playbook. We utilised Googles Local business API to ensure updates to the salons onsite were updated across thie entire estate.
The booking process was automated with a a call out for reviews after a visit to the salon.
South Coast Powersports launched as a brand-new motocross and enduro dealership on a brand-new domain. No history, no authority, nothing.
We built the local foundations from day one: a properly optimised GBP, citations across specialist and general directories, and consistent naming everywhere the business appeared. Combined with schema and focused content, the site had 24 keywords in the top 10 within 60 days, and over 100 keywords ranking within six months. Searches like “motocross dealer near me” started driving enquiries from people ready to buy, not tyre-kickers reading blog posts.
Three different sectors. Same playbook.
NAP is your business name, address and phone number. The rule is simple: it must appear in exactly the same form everywhere. Your GBP, your website, your schema markup, every directory listing, even your physical signage.
Citation signals are a modest slice of the direct ranking algorithm these days, around 7% by most estimates. But that figure badly undersells what consistency does. Every matching mention is a corroborating vote that you’re a real, established business. Every mismatch fragments that picture.
With Giant Storage we standardised on “Giant Storage – [Location]” across every touchpoint, the same approach Big Yellow uses across its estate. We even caught a sign proof where the word order didn’t match the listings, and fixed it before the artwork went to print. That’s the level of attention this needs. Pedantic? Yes. Worth it? The call figures above say so. There’s a lot more detail on managing NAP consistency across multiple locations if you want to go deeper on the mechanics.
Directories aren’t dead, they’ve just changed jobs. Yell, Thomson Local, Yelp and the industry-specific directories for your sector do three things now.
First, they corroborate your NAP, feeding the consistency picture Google builds. Second, some still drive referral traffic and calls in their own right, particularly the sector-specific ones. Third, and this is the newer bit, they’re part of the source material AI tools read when deciding which businesses to recommend.
The mistake is treating directories as a one-off job. Listings drift. Old addresses linger, phone numbers change, duplicates appear. We run structured citation campaigns per location and audit them on a cycle, because a citation profile is infrastructure, not a task you tick off.
This is where it gets interesting. Around 40% of local business queries now trigger an AI Overview, and a growing share of discovery happens in ChatGPT and Google’s AI Mode rather than ten blue links.
Two things follow. First, “near me” searches are unusually resistant to the zero-click shift. When someone searches “storage unit near me” they don’t want a summary, they want a name, a number and directions. The map pack still delivers that, and local AI answers largely pull from the same map pack data.
Second, AI tools lean heavily on entity consistency when deciding who to cite. A recent Yext study of 17 million AI citations found 86% came from brand-managed or brand-influenced sources: your GBP, your schema, your listings, your reviews. The boring local SEO fundamentals are now your AI visibility strategy too. We’re seeing this on our own site, where our NAP guidance keeps surfacing for the machine-generated query variations AI Mode produces. If you want to understand how this fits into the bigger picture, our GEO consultancy work in London covers the full AI visibility strategy in detail.
Here’s the sequence we run for clients:
Yes. The two work as a system. The GBP wins the moment of search, the website corroborates it and handles the deeper research. Google also cross-checks them against each other.
Yes, if you do it the standard way: tracking number as primary, real business number kept as secondary, real number in your schema and citations. We run this across client GBPs with no ranking impact, and the major national operators do the same.
Profile improvements can move the needle within weeks. Citation consistency is slower, typically two to four months as Google re-crawls the ecosystem. South Coast Powersports ranked for 24 top-10 keywords within 60 days on a brand-new domain, but that was the full playbook running together.
Not with a GBP, no, and don’t be tempted to use a home address or virtual office to get one. Put the same energy into consistent entity signals across LinkedIn, Crunchbase and your industry’s directories instead.
Directly. AI tools draw on the same map pack data, reviews and brand-managed sources when recommending local businesses. The consistency work is doing double duty.
Devstars has been building local search ecosystems for multi-location businesses for over a decade, from 56-salon chains to six-site storage operators. If you’d like an honest read on whether this would move the needle for your business, get in touch and we’ll take a look at your current footprint.
Tell me what you’re trying to fix. Half an hour, no pitch, no slide deck.
If we’re the right fit we’ll talk about what’s next. If we’re not, I’ll point you to someone who is.
