A lot of small businesses have heard they need SEO. Fewer know there are two kinds, and that the one they need depends on where their customers are.
Here's the short version. Local SEO gets you found by people near you. SEO gets you found by people anywhere. The work overlaps, but it isn't the same work.
Local SEO: the map
Search "plumber" or "electrician near me" on your phone and Google shows a map with a short list of businesses under it. That list is local SEO.
What decides who shows up there is mostly outside your website:
- Your Google Business Profile. Verified, the right category, the right hours, the right service area.
- Reviews. How many, how good, and how recent.
- Distance. How close you are to the person searching.
Google says its local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity. You can't change distance, but you can work on the other two.
The good news with local SEO is who you're up against. You're not competing with every business in Australia, only the ones near your customer. For some local searches that bar is lower than you'd think. In September 2026 we pulled Google's map results for "seo joondalup", searched from Wangara. Two of the three businesses shown had one review or none.
SEO: the website
Normal SEO is about your website ranking in the regular Google results, the list of links under the map, or on searches where there's no map at all.
That's decided by different things:
- Your pages. Does a page clearly answer what the person searched for?
- Your site. Can Google find and read every page?
- Other sites linking to you. Links from real, relevant websites are one of the ways Google judges who to trust.
Here you're competing with everyone who ranks for that search, anywhere in the country. That's harder and slower, but it's the only way to reach customers who aren't near you.
Which one do you need?
Ask yourself one question: do your customers need to be near you?
- A plumber in Wangara. Customers are within a half-hour drive. Local SEO first. A website helps, but a lot of the calls start from the map.
- An online shop. Customers are anywhere in Australia. Searches like "buy baby clothes online" usually don't show a map. SEO is what matters.
- An accountant in Joondalup. Most clients are local, but some find them by searching a specialty, like "accountant for tradies". Local SEO for the local clients, SEO for the specialty.
- A consultant who works remotely. If you work with businesses all over Australia, the map won't help much outside your own area. SEO does the heavy lifting.
If your customers come to you, or you go to them, start with local SEO. If they could be anywhere, start with SEO. If it's a mix, start local, because it's usually faster and cheaper to fix, then build the website side.
Where most local businesses go wrong
They spend money on the website and never look at their Google listing. In our own check of trades businesses in Wangara in September 2026, we found a Google listing whose website button opened a web server's default page, phone numbers on Google that didn't match the business's Yellow Pages entry, Facebook page or own website, and addresses that were different on Google, Yellow Pages and True Local. None of that shows up by looking at the website.
It happened to us too. When we checked our own listing, we found two GBIT profiles on Google Maps, and the one with our reviews had never been verified.
So if you're a local business, check the listing first. It's free to look at, and it's often where the quickest wins are.
Where to go from here
- If you're not showing up on the map: Google Business Profile help
- If you're a trades business: SEO for tradies in Perth
- If you're in Joondalup or the northern suburbs: local SEO in Perth's north
- If your customers could be anywhere: SEO services
Or send us your business name and suburb, and we'll tell you which one we'd start with, free.
