Local SEO in Melbourne

How the Maps pack works across Melbourne

Google picks the three map results by relevance, prominence and distance from the searcher. In a city spread as wide as Melbourne, distance does a lot of the deciding. A café in Collingwood isn’t competing with one in Carlton for the person standing on Smith Street, and a dentist in Glen Waverley has a different set of rivals from one in Moonee Ponds.

So one rank check from your shop tells you very little. We scan a grid of points across your area with the same method as the free geo-grid rank tracker we built, from a three-by-three up to a thirteen-by-thirteen grid, and colour each point by your position. Then you can see where you’re strong, where you fade, and which competitor takes over.

Inner city versus growth corridor

The strategy for Fitzroy is not the strategy for Wyndham.

In the inner suburbs, competitors sit a few doors apart. Brunswick Street has cafés on nearly every block, and the map pack for “brunch Fitzroy” can change from one corner to the next. Winning there is about relevance and reviews: the right categories, menus Google can read, photos that match what people search for, and a steady flow of fresh reviews.

Out in Casey, Melton or Wyndham, there are fewer businesses spread over much bigger distances, and customers will drive further. Here the work is widening the radius you rank in, usually through service-area settings, region pages on your site and reviews from customers in the suburbs you want to reach.

Reviews under Australian rules

Reviews still move the map, but in Australia they come with legal edges. The Australian Consumer Law treats fake reviews and selectively requested reviews as misleading conduct, and the ACCC has said manipulating reviews is an enforcement priority. Google’s own policies go further and ban incentives entirely.

The routine we set up is simple: a direct link from our review request link maker, sent to every customer by SMS or email after the job, and a reply to every review, including the bad ones.

Clinics need extra care. AHPRA’s advertising rules ban testimonials about clinical care, so we don’t repost patient reviews on your site or in ads, and we write review replies that thank people without confirming they’re patients.

Getting your details consistent

Google cross-checks your business against other sources, so your details need to agree everywhere. Start from the records that are hardest to change, your ABN Lookup entry and your ASIC business name, then make your profile, your site and every directory match them exactly. Old addresses from a previous lease are the most common mess we clean up.

A first month for a trade in the inner north

Say you’re an electrician based in Brunswick who wants more jobs across the inner north. In the first month we’d:

• scan a grid across Brunswick, Coburg, Northcote and Thornbury to get a baseline
• fix the primary category, services list and service areas
• remove a duplicate listing left from an old mobile number
• write region pages for the inner north and the north-west on your site
• start the review requests and replies

We’ve done this kind of work for an auto recycler in Chicago, junkcars.cash, where we built the site and run local SEO remotely, much as we would for you.

Beyond the map pack

The pack covers the searches with local intent. The organic results underneath need SEO for Melbourne businesses, and if you want a sense of how we handle the same service in another big, spread-out city, see how we run local SEO in Chicago. Our local SEO service overview sets out the full process, and the Melbourne hub covers the rest.