Local Entity SEO 2027

Look inside the book

What is in Local Entity SEO 2027?

The full table of contents: 83 chapters. You can read the opening and the first 5 chapters of Local Entity SEO 2027 here for free, each on its own page (in Dutch).

Front matter

1. Honest advice: why most agencies cannot help you (in Dutch) Free to read

Part I: The fundamentals, what always applied and still does

1. 1Basic principles of local SEO: the rules of the game, now and in the AI era (in Dutch) Free to read

2. 2Your Google Business Profile: the foundation of your digital entity (in Dutch) Free to read

3. 3NAP consistency and local citations: your business's fingerprint (in Dutch) Free to read

Part II: The new rules, now in force

1. 4From keywords to entities: how Google redrew the map (in Dutch) Free to read

2. 5GEO: Generative Engine Optimisation (in Dutch) Free to read

3. 6Google AI Mode: how your customer searches now In the book

   Google launched AI Mode in 2025: a conversational search experience in which users ask layered questions and get AI-generated answers without necessarily clicking a link.

4. 6bThe newest Google Business Profile features in 2026 In the book

   In 2026 Google overhauled the Business Profile more thoroughly than in any previous year. If you still maintain a profile the way that was usual in 2024, you are behind. This chapter covers the features that really matter.

5. 6cCompleting your profile one hundred per cent: the complete playbook In the book

   Most business owners fill in their Google Business Profile the way they fill in a tax form: as fast as possible, as little as possible, and then never again.

6. 6dPomelli: Google's free AI marketing assistant In the book

   There is a tool Google rolled out in 2026 that many owners of small and medium-sized businesses still do not know, even though it solves a problem they have had for years: creating consistent, professional, on-brand marketing material without time, budget or design skills.

7. 7Reviews: the new backlinks In the book

   Ten years ago, backlinks largely determined how high you ranked. For local businesses, reviews have taken over a large part of that role.

Part III: Content, video and building visibility

1. 8Local keyword research for the AI era In the book

   Three years ago you optimised for "electrician Utrecht". Today a customer asks AI Mode something completely different.

2. 9On-page optimisation for local entities In the book

   On-page optimisation is the systematic improvement of the elements on your website, so that search engines and AI models understand what you do, for whom and where. Most principles are unchanged. The execution has become more refined.

3. 10Content strategies for a local audience In the book

   In May 2026 Joy Hawkins named her most important content strategy for that year: write about what your competitors have not yet written about. Copying what the highest-ranked businesses do gives you little chance in an environment full of AI summaries.

4. 11Video first: the fastest route to the top In the book

   There is a lot of loose talk about video. You hear "video converts better" everywhere, and that is only true for videos people actually watch.

5. 12Unstructured citations: the hidden engine of AI visibility In the book

   Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report places unstructured citations among the most influential factors for visibility in AI-generated results.

Part IV: Authority, reputation and protection

1. 13Backlinks and local authority 2.0 In the book

   Backlinks are still a relevant ranking factor, but how they work for local businesses has shifted. A hundred links from unrelated sites deliver less than ten links from sites that are geographically and thematically relevant to you.

2. 14Protecting your entity: what two AI experiments taught us In the book

   In a world of AI-generated answers, you are vulnerable in a way that was unthinkable three years ago.

3. 15Mobile SEO and the local consumer In the book

   Most local searches take place on a smartphone, and ever since the rollout of mobile-first indexing Google has indexed the mobile version of every site as the main version.

Part V: Measuring, scaling up and keeping it going

1. 16Measuring, analysing and adjusting In the book

   Most business owners measure the wrong thing. They look at website visits and organic traffic, while the figures that make or break a local business sit in a completely different category.

2. 17Scaling up to multiple locations In the book

   Businesses with multiple locations face a real tension: consumers want the reassurance of a trusted brand name and the authenticity of a local provider.

3. 18The 30-minute strategy In the book

   Most owners know by now that local SEO matters. They have no time for a daily marketing operation. They have a business to run.

4. 19Google Business Profile in 2027 and beyond In the book

   This book is about what works now. A complete strategic picture also needs a look at what is coming.

Part VI: The local ranking factors

1. 20The 25 most important local ranking factors In the book

   Every year Darren Shaw of Whitespark runs a large survey of local SEO experts worldwide. The 2026 edition consulted 47 specialists, including Joy Hawkins of Sterling Sky and dozens of other professionals who work with the data every day.

Part VII: Engagement, protection and advanced strategies

1. 21Profile engagement: being active pays off In the book

   There is a stubborn misconception in local SEO: the idea that you optimise a Business Profile once and then sit back. That is not true.

2. 22Manipulation on Google Maps: what happens and how to defend yourself In the book

   Local SEO is competitive. Where there are winners, there are also players who push the boundaries or simply cross them.

Part VIII: Playbooks by industry

1. 23Law firms In the book

   Legal services are the most expensive local category in the country. A single personal injury case can be worth more than a small shopkeeper earns in a year, and the marketing budget follows that logic.

2. 24Medical, dental and mental healthcare (GGZ) practices In the book

   Healthcare is the category where the highest visibility potential goes hand in hand with the highest compliance risk. Google treats medical searches as Your Money or Your Life and raises the bar for trustworthiness accordingly.

3. 25Home services and installers In the book

   Home services and installers are the category Google is building on hardest right now. Local Services Ads, the Google Verified badge, Get a Quote in Maps and the agentic calling features were all launched there first.

4. 26Estate agents and property In the book

   Property has two problems the other categories do not have. The portals beat you on almost every housing-related search, and the organisation of the industry itself changed on 1 January 2025.

5. 27Restaurants and hospitality In the book

   Restaurants live and die by the reviews of the past forty-eight hours and by whether a machine can establish at 6.40 pm on a Friday evening that you have a table free. In the United States, that machine now takes the order as well.

6. 28Retail In the book

   Retail has a structural advantage that no service provider has: real-time stock. A customer who can see that you have the item on the shelf, right now, two kilometres away, buys more often than in any service category.

7. 29Fitness, wellness and personal services In the book

   Hairdressers, studios, spas, gyms, barbers and trainers all sell the same thing: an appointment. This whole playbook is about removing steps between a search and a booked slot.

8. 30Car sales and servicing In the book

   Car businesses are two businesses under one sign. Someone looking for a car and someone who has just seen the engine warning light come on have nothing in common, and one profile that tries to serve both serves neither well.

Part IX: The customer, the law and the competition

1. 31The seven platforms AI does believe In the book

   AI systems do not simply accept who you say you are. They check it. And the places where they check are, strikingly consistently, not the places where local businesses put their effort.

2. 32The local customer's buying journey In the book

   Most local SEO advice optimises for the last five seconds of a decision that took two weeks. That is why so many businesses score well and still lose the customer.

3. 33The legal baseline: reviews, accessibility and privacy In the book

   Four areas of Dutch and European law affect local marketing directly. None of them is optional, and each is routinely misrepresented in other advice.

4. 34Competing with a bigger, better-funded rival In the book

   Most local businesses have a competitor with more locations, more reviews, more budget and a well-known name. The instinct is to compete on the same terms and slowly lose. There is a better approach, and it is well documented.

5. 35The cold start: a new or relocated business In the book

   A new profile has no history, no reviews and no trust. A relocated business has something worse: conflicting data spread across the web pointing to an address you no longer use.

6. 36Hiring an agency without being sold something you do not need In the book

   Outsourcing local SEO is a reasonable decision. The industry is full of people who take the money and deliver a monthly report on impressions. This chapter is a filter.

Part X: A worked example, step by step

1. 37Step 1: the starting position In the book

   Do it anyway, and write it down. Without a baseline measurement you will spend a year unable to prove whether this has worked.

2. 38Step 2: the matrix of services and places In the book

   Van Dijk does not need a keyword list. The business needs a grid: what they do along one side, where they do it along the other, and the honest intent of each cell.

3. 39Step 3: the profile, rebuilt In the book

   These are the four hours with the highest return in the whole plan, and they cost nothing.

4. 40Step 4: the website pages In the book

   One page that describes everything ranks for nothing. Van Dijk needs a page per service and a page per place, and those are two different things.

5. 41Step 5: the content cluster In the book

   The service pages catch people who know what they need. The cluster catches people six weeks earlier, and this is the content AI systems cite.

6. 42Step 6: reviews, by the rules In the book

   Van Dijk has nine reviews. The nearest competitor has a hundred and forty. This is the gap that costs jobs before anyone even looks at a website, and it can be closed within a quarter.

7. 43Step 7: answers built for AI In the book

   Van Dijk's next customer may never see a website. They ask a question and are given two names.

8. 44Step 8: schema and the entity In the book

   Schema markup does not give you a higher position. It gives you unambiguity, and an AI system needs unambiguity before it mentions you by name.

9. 45Step 9: the paid layer and the phone In the book

   For a plumber in the United States, 2027 revolves around Local Services Ads. That feature is not yet on Google's own country list for the Netherlands, so for now it is not a choice to make but a preparation to put in place.

10. 46Step 10: the ninety-day plan and what you measure In the book

    Everything above, put in order. Nothing here costs more than a few hours a week.

Part XI: AI automation for SMEs

1. 47What AI automation does and does not do for your ranking In the book

   Sooner or later every vendor in this category says a version of the same sentence: keep visitors on your site longer, and Google will reward you for it. That sentence deserves to be taken apart, because the answer is more interesting than a simple yes or no.

2. 48The phone is the product In the book

   Local search results deliver someone who is ready to buy to a phone number. What happens in the next fifteen seconds decides whether all the work in this book makes money.

3. 49AI phone assistants: what they do and what they cost In the book

   An AI phone assistant answers your phone, holds a conversation and does something with what it learns: books an appointment, takes a message, texts you a summary or transfers the call to a person. Two years ago this was a novelty.

4. 50AI chat on your website In the book

   Website chat is the oldest form of this software, and the one with the clearest use case, which is also the narrowest: the visitor who is almost ready and has one more question.

5. 51Missed call to text, and the follow-up machine In the book

   Of everything in this part, the simplest tool has the best ratio of cost to result: if a call goes unanswered, the system sends the caller a text within seconds.

6. 52Bookings, and why Reserve with Google decides everything In the book

   If you work with appointments, one decision determines whether Google's AI environments can transact with you, and it is not a decision about your website.

7. 53The legal baseline for AI telephony and AI chat In the book

   This chapter exists because most guides on this subject cite the wrong law. They warn about US law (the FCC, the TCPA, individual state laws) while different rules apply to a Dutch business. Those are set out below.

8. 54Let AI write, not speak In the book

   There is a way of using AI in a local business that carries none of the risks from the previous chapter, yet most of the benefit: letting AI draft what a person then signs off.

9. 55Google's own AI tools for SMEs In the book

   Google gives away a range of AI tools that most local businesses have never opened. There is one fixed drawback: availability differs by country, the products change quickly, and experiments from Google Labs often disappear without notice.

10. 56When Google calls you In the book

    There is a development in local search that almost nobody is preparing for, and it turns the whole relationship between a business and the search engine upside down.

Part XII: A second worked example, the freelancer

1. 57The freelancer's starting position In the book

   Not visibility. Six new regular monthly clients a year, and a tax return season that needs no waiting list in February.

2. 58Every freelancer's address problem In the book

   Sanne works from home and clients almost never visit. That single fact sits on top of a real, well-documented conflict, and there is no clean solution for it.

3. 59A profile built for a person, not a building In the book

   A sole trader has an advantage over an office with several people, and usually wastes it: the entity clients choose is a person, and a person is much easier to make recognisable to a machine than an organisation.

4. 60Four pages and fifteen answers In the book

   A freelancer cannot maintain a content machine. So the plan is four pages and fifteen answers, and then nothing else for six months.

5. 61The automation that makes a one-person practice reachable In the book

   Last month Sanne answered three of the nine phone calls. Everything in part eleven exists for this problem, and this is what it looks like in practice.

6. 62Sanne's year, in four hours a month In the book

   The whole plan, in order, at a pace someone with a full diary can actually keep up.

Part XIII: Multiple locations, franchises and groups

1. 63The franchise paradox In the book

   Every brand with multiple locations runs into the same contradiction, and most resolve it in the direction that costs money.

2. 64Governance: who may change what In the book

   The technical work of multi-location local SEO is easy. It fails because nobody has recorded who owns which field.

3. 65Structure, URLs and schema at scale In the book

   The technical layer is where a multi-location chain either builds an advantage or leaks it, and that is largely determined by decisions you only make once.

4. 66Scaling up, software and when to buy it In the book

   There is a threshold at which managing multiple locations by hand stops working, and knowing where it lies saves both an unnecessary purchase and a costly delay.

5. 67What goes wrong at scale In the book

   Five failure patterns explain most of the damage in multi-location local SEO, and all five can be prevented.

Part XIV: Four extra playbooks and three things nobody accounts for

1. 68Business services: accounting, insurance, advice In the book

   Accountants, bookkeepers, insurance advisers, financial advisers and consultants share a problem the installation trade does not have: there is nothing to see in the work. The client does not see a finished bathroom.

2. 69Childcare, schools and tutoring In the book

   Nothing in this book is chosen with as much care as childcare, and nowhere is the waiting list shorter than here.

3. 70Pet services: vet, grooming, boarding, training In the book

   Pet services combine urgency, emotion and repeat visits like almost no other category, and it is one of the fastest-growing local categories in the country.

4. 71Elderly care, home care and funeral services In the book

   These categories share a searcher almost nobody optimises for: the adult child, in another province, at eleven at night, under time pressure, who is not the person who will receive the care.

5. 72Measuring whether AI mentions you In the book

   Everything in this book about GEO comes down to one question you cannot look up in a dashboard: when someone asks an assistant for a business like yours, does your name come out?

6. 73The full audit, in ninety minutes In the book

   Once a year, or as soon as you take over a business or client, you work through this sequence. It takes about ninety minutes and it finds almost everything.

7. 74What you spend, and in what order In the book

   The last practical question, and the one most books avoid because the honest answer does the industry no favours.

Part XV: Problems, takeovers and the questions readers ask

1. 75When something goes wrong In the book

   Sooner or later every local business has a bad week in public. A review that does the rounds, an inspection, an accident, an employee who misbehaves, a closure nobody had planned.

2. 76Buying, selling or a new name In the book

   Changes of ownership and name changes destroy more local visibility than any algorithm update, almost always through avoidable mistakes made in the wrong order.

3. 77The questions readers ask most In the book

   These are the questions that come in after every masterclass. The answers sum up most of this book.

4. 78The ten mistakes that cost the most In the book

   After a few hundred audits, the same mistakes keep coming back. They are ranked here by what they cost, not by how often they occur.

Part XVI: Images, video and the signals everyone underestimates

1. 79Photos are now a ranking factor In the book

   For fifteen years photos were decoration. At some point in the last two years they became a signal, and most businesses have not noticed.

2. 80Video, without a production budget In the book

   Video is where photos were two years ago: widely seen as optional, quietly carrying a lot of weight, and almost nobody in a local industry does anything with it.

Questions

Questions about Local Entity SEO 2027

Where can you find Local Entity SEO 2027 online?

Besides this site, Local Entity SEO 2027 is also listed on these book platforms:

• Amazon.nl: paperback
• Amazon.nl: ebook
• Goodreads: paperback
• Goodreads: ebook
• Goodreads: English edition
• Goodreads: German edition

All books by Gijs Bodenstaff in one place: Goodreads, BookBub and Amazon.