The benefits of local SEO are the enquiries that come from people looking for a business in your area, through the Google map and the local results, without you paying for each click: phone calls, requests for directions, website visits, bookings.
What they're worth depends on the sector, far more than the guides that list them let on. On 10 October 2026 we pulled the cost per click of 18 UK local searches from Google Ads: it runs from £0.43 for "pizza manchester" to £27.98 for "locksmith london". The same spot on the map is worth 65 times more to a London locksmith than to a pizzeria in Manchester.
Below you'll find the full table, the other benefits with a way to measure each one, and the cases where local SEO doesn't pay off much. How local rankings work, with the three rankings and the factors that weigh in each, is covered in our guide to local SEO.
The benefit you can measure in pounds: what the map's clicks would cost in Google Ads
The most concrete way to put a value on local SEO is to ask how much you'd pay to get the same clicks with an ad. Google Ads puts a price on every search: the average cost per click estimated by Keyword Planner.
We took 15 searches with a city name (London, Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow) plus three "near me" searches, and for each one we read the monthly volume and the average CPC. These are Google Ads figures for the United Kingdom, averaged over the last twelve months available (September 2025 to August 2026), extracted through DataForSEO.
| Search | Searches a month (UK) | Average Google Ads CPC | Cost of 100 clicks |
|---|---|---|---|
| locksmith london | 4,400 | £27.98 | £2,798 |
| locksmith near me | 74,000 | £18.50 | £1,850 |
| divorce solicitor leeds | 210 | £14.45 | £1,445 |
| accountant london | 3,600 | £9.49 | £949 |
| solicitors manchester | 1,900 | £7.15 | £715 |
| dentist manchester | 2,900 | £6.37 | £637 |
| plumber near me | 90,500 | £6.12 | £612 |
| electrician birmingham | 1,900 | £4.91 | £491 |
| vets manchester | 1,000 | £4.51 | £451 |
| dentist near me | 246,000 | £3.98 | £398 |
| opticians birmingham | 880 | £3.30 | £330 |
| estate agents manchester | 3,600 | £3.05 | £305 |
| plumber birmingham | 2,900 | £2.79 | £279 |
| car body repair leeds | 320 | £1.75 | £175 |
| gym leeds | 4,400 | £1.04 | £104 |
| beauty salon glasgow | 390 | £0.54 | £54 |
| hairdressers glasgow | 5,400 | £0.44 | £44 |
| pizza manchester | 2,900 | £0.43 | £43 |
The median CPC of the 18 searches is £4.25. Seven cost more than £5 a click, and they're all locksmiths and plumbers, solicitors, accountants or dentists. Three are under £1: a hairdresser, a beauty salon and a pizzeria.
An example to make the number concrete. A London locksmith who gets three clicks a day from the profile, about 90 a month, would have paid around £2,520 for those same 90 clicks in Google Ads at the average CPC. A pizzeria in Manchester, with the same 90 clicks, £39.
Two caveats on the sum. A click on the map and a click on an ad aren't the same thing: someone who taps a profile often calls without visiting the website, while someone who clicks an ad lands on a page you chose. And the CPC is a national average; in a specific neighbourhood it can be different. As an order of magnitude, though, it holds up, and it's the simplest way we know to put a price on a position you don't pay for.
The map sits above the first organic result
The second benefit is position. The local pack, the box with the map and three profiles, sits above the organic results on searches made of a service plus a city. On the same 10 October we checked three searches from the table, each from its own city, on desktop. On "accountant london" the three map listings took positions 2 to 4, after a row of directories, and the first real website came fifth. On "plumber birmingham" the map sat below eight sponsored Local Services ads and a row of directories, but still above every organic result. On "locksmith london" there was no map at all: Google showed a panel for a single firm, The London Locksmith (4.9 stars from 600 reviews), next to the organic results.
It isn't an isolated case. In our test on 24 searches in six Italian cities the local pack appeared on all 12 strictly local searches, and a shorter check from four UK cities gave the same result. For many businesses that means the most visible result isn't the website: it's the Google Business Profile.
Below the map, meanwhile, the website has to contend with directories. On "plumber birmingham" seven of the ten organic results were directories or marketplaces: Checkatrade twice, TrustATrader, HaMuch, WaterSafe, Gumtree and MyBuilder. On "accountant london" there were Unbiased, Yell and FreeAgent's accountant finder, plus a row of five directories above the map (Yell, Bark, Cylex, Tipped, infoisinfo). Directories don't get into the map: only businesses do.
The phone rings without anyone visiting the website
Third benefit: some of the enquiries come straight from the profile. In the Performance section of the profile, Google counts calls, requests for directions, website clicks, messages and bookings separately, as its official guide to performance metrics explains.
For businesses that live on phone calls, like the emergency trades at the top of the table, this is the benefit that counts most. Someone locked out taps "Call" on the profile and never opens the website. That's why local SEO works even for businesses with a modest website, and for the same reason, measuring it by website visits alone underestimates it.
A practical detail: according to the same guide, search data is updated at the start of each month and can take up to five days to appear. If you check the profile on the first of the month and find nothing, there's no problem: you just have to wait.
You don't need to be the biggest firm in town
Fourth benefit, and the least talked about: on the map, competition is limited to your area. Google says so in its guide to local ranking: results depend on relevance, distance and prominence, and distance is how far the business is from the person searching.
In practice a small business can sit ahead of a big one if it's closer and more relevant. On "accountant london" the first listing in the map, Perrys Chartered Accountants, had 38 reviews and sat above Starbridge with 548. In the UK check in our local SEO statistics, Pimlico Plumbers appeared in the London pack with 6,200 reviews next to a firm with 73. And when we read 21 local pack listings in six Italian cities, three had got in with three reviews or fewer.
In the organic results it's the other way round. There, domain authority and links count, and chains and portals start with an advantage.
A position you can't buy (and that doesn't switch off)
Google says it plainly in the same guide: there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. That cuts both ways. You can't pay to get into the map, and neither can the competitor with a bigger budget than yours.
And what you build stays. A Google Ads campaign stops bringing in enquiries the day the budget runs out; a profile with the right categories and 150 reviews keeps working even in the months you don't touch it. Not for ever, because reviews age and competitors move, but the decline is slow.
That doesn't mean picking one channel over the other. In sectors with high CPCs, using both together makes sense, and that's the subject of our article on SEO and Google Ads together. The differences between the two, with costs, are in SEO vs SEM.
Reviews work outside the map too
The fifth benefit comes through reviews, which are both a ranking factor and a sales argument. The most solid data are American. In BrightLocal's Local Consumer Review Survey 2026, based on a sample of 1,002 US consumers:
- 97% read reviews before choosing a local business;
- 74% look for reviews written in the last three months;
- 47% won't use a business with fewer than 20 reviews;
- 31% only use businesses with at least 4.5 stars, up from 17% in 2025;
- 45% use generative AI tools such as ChatGPT for local recommendations, up from 6% the year before.
These are figures from another market, and the 2026 survey doesn't cover the UK. The closest UK context comes from Ofcom: in May 2025, 82% of UK online adults used Google Search, and 77% of adults who use a smartphone opened Google Maps at least once in the month, making it the third most used smartphone app (Ofcom, Online Nation 2025, published 10 December 2025). The map is where the local pack takes people when they tap it.
How to ask for them at a steady pace, and how many you really need, is covered in our article on how to get Google reviews.
A note on the statistics doing the rounds. Several pages on the benefits of local SEO quote percentages on store visits after a smartphone search, attributed to Think with Google. The Think with Google page that collected those figures now redirects to the Google Business homepage (checked on 7 October 2026). We've checked the other most quoted statistics one by one in local SEO statistics.
Who gets big benefits and who gets small ones
Local SEO doesn't pay off equally for everyone. Cross the CPC table with the way people use the profile, and the cases split like this.
| Type of business | Examples from the table | Benefit | Why |
|---|---|---|---|
| Emergency and home-call trades | locksmith, plumber, electrician | Very high | CPCs from £2.79 to £27.98, and the enquiry starts with a phone call from the profile |
| Professionals with an office | accountant, solicitor, dentist, vet, optician, estate agent | High | CPCs from £3.05 to £14.45, a choice driven by proximity and reviews |
| Shops and personal services | hairdresser, beauty salon, gym, car body repair | Medium | CPCs from £0.44 to £1.75: the value is in visits and directions more than in savings on clicks |
| Restaurants | pizza | High in visibility, low in pounds | 2,900 searches a month and £0.43 a click: the profile matters because that's where people choose, not because it saves money |
| National e-commerce, B2B with no premises open to the public | none | Low or none | buyers don't search by area: classic SEO is what's needed |
For restaurants the reasoning is different, and we've worked it through separately in the article on restaurant SEO. For a manufacturer selling nationwide or abroad, on the other hand, the lever is a different one: in the Macropix case, a project in Italy, the work that took a page from position 88 to position 2 was classic SEO, with no map profile involved.
What local SEO doesn't do
Three limits to factor in before you sign up to a retainer.
Distance doesn't move. If the customer is searching from the other side of town, a well-kept profile won't beat a competitor three hundred metres from them. The radius in which the profile competes is limited, and reaching further takes other tools: Google Ads with a set geographic area, or website pages dedicated to the areas you serve.
It doesn't fix a weak reputation. If reviews are few or low, local SEO makes exactly that visible. With 31% of American consumers ruling out anything under 4.5 stars, more visibility for a 3.8-star profile can mean more people seeing it and passing it over.
It isn't instant and it isn't costless. Category, opening hours and name can be corrected in a day, but reviews grow at the pace of your customers. On SEO timescales in general there's our article on how long it takes to see results. And the work has a cost: the UK price lists we read run from £100 to £4,000 or more a month depending on what they include, and we went through them one by one in how much local SEO costs.
How to tell whether the benefits are coming through
The most honest measure is the actions on the profile, not the position. Every month, in the Performance section, look at three numbers: calls, requests for directions, website clicks. Compare them with the same month a year earlier, because many local businesses are seasonal: "gym leeds" went from 6,600 searches in September 2025 to 3,600 in June 2026, and "plumber birmingham" swings between 1,600 and 4,400 searches a month.
Calls from the profile should be set against the total calls you receive: if the share grows, the profile is working. To turn the result into revenue you need to know how many enquiries become customers, the calculation we do in the article on SEO ROI. If the numbers don't rise, the diagnosis starts from how to improve local SEO.
Work on the profile and the website is part of our SEO service. In sectors where a click costs more than £5, it's worth weighing it up alongside a local Google Ads campaign while you wait for the profile to climb.
Frequently asked questions
More enquiries from people searching in your area without paying for each click: calls, directions, website visits and bookings from your Google profile. On searches that combine a service and a town, the map sits above the organic results, and competition is limited to nearby businesses. The money value varies a lot by sector: in our UK check a Google Ads click cost from £0.43 to £27.98.
The click doesn't, the work does. Setting up a Google Business Profile costs nothing and Google doesn't sell positions in local search; the cost is the work, yours or a consultant's. The saving is that you don't pay for the clicks: across the 18 UK local searches we measured, the median Google Ads CPC is £4.25.
It depends on the CPC in your sector. Where a click is expensive, like the £27.98 for "locksmith london", local SEO saves you the most and it often makes sense to run both channels together. Where it costs £0.43, as for "pizza manchester", ads are cheap but people still choose from the map.
There's no fixed timescale. Fixes to the profile (category, opening hours, name) take a day and count from when Google publishes them; reviews grow at the pace of your customers, so it takes months. Measure by comparing calls and directions in the Performance section with the same month a year earlier.
Yes, if you serve customers in a specific area: locksmiths, plumbers and electricians work at customers' homes, and they're exactly the sectors where it's worth most. It isn't useful if you sell online across the whole country with no service area, because buyers don't search by area.
No, but it helps. The Google profile brings in calls and directions even without a website. The website is what competes in the organic results below the map and gives Google more information about your business, and on searches like "plumber birmingham" it's up against directories such as Checkatrade, TrustATrader and MyBuilder.
The sum to do before you sign
Before asking what the benefits of local SEO are, it's worth doing one division: the monthly retainer divided by the average CPC in your sector. The result is the number of clicks a month the profile has to bring in to be worth as much as the same money spent on ads.
On a retainer of £300 a month, a London locksmith needs 11 clicks from the map to break even. A hairdresser in Glasgow needs 682, and there local SEO has to be justified by something else: directions, reviews, the fact that the choice is made on the map and not on the ads. None of the pages on the benefits of local SEO that we read on Google UK's first page does this sum, yet it's the number that decides whether the retainer is an investment or a cost.
