Los Angeles Local SEO Starts With the Review Count Next to Yours

Movers have the highest wall in the table, with a typical listing at 400 reviews and a strong one at 900. Immigration lawyers sit at 200 and 350, personal injury lawyers at 180 and 450, and dentists at 150 and 400. For those trades the review count is the main obstacle to the map pack, so a new office should treat each patient or client review as a priority, within the rules of its profession. Urgent care is the odd row: typical 80 and strong 400, but an average rating of 4, lower than every other trade.

The middle ground holds auto repair at 90 and 170, med spas at 80 and 150, plumbers at 50 and 160, and pest control at 50 and 110. Electricians and window replacement firms are closer to the open fields with typical counts of 35 and 45. The open fields are roofing, HVAC, solar, painters, tree service, landscaping, water damage restoration and real estate agents, where a typical listing holds between 15 and 25 reviews. In roofing, HVAC and solar 40 of every 100 listings had fewer than ten, so a contractor who asks every job for a review stands out within a few months.

Notice the websites too. Only 55 of every 100 auto repair listings and 60 of 100 electrician listings pointed to a website, while plumbers were at 95. A profile that links to a fast, specific page has an advantage in a trade where rivals do not.

Area codes alone make a mess of the signal. The city uses 213 and 323, 310 and 424, 818 and 747, and 626, and many ZIP ranges, so a customer or a crawler leans on the street address and the neighborhood name. We make sure the same address, phone and business name appear in the profile, on the site and on the major directories, because one variation in Koreatown or Sherman Oaks can cause a listing to split in two.

Language matters as well. In the Census file 40.8 percent of residents speak Spanish at home, and in Koreatown Korean-language signs and 24-hour businesses sit beside it, with the cited source putting the foreign-born share near 68 percent. We write what a profile says in your own words and keep descriptions accurate, and we read the search terms customers actually use, which sometimes include a neighborhood in more than one language. We do not offer translation, but we respect how people search.

Every customer who finishes a job is a possible review, and the habit that works is the plainest one: a short message sent the same day, with a direct link, written in your voice. Make it easy to answer from a phone. Reply to every review, short and polite, including the unhappy ones, because the reply is read by the next customer as much as by the writer. Do not offer a reward for a review and do not ask only happy customers, since Google can remove reviews it considers shaped.

Ratings are bunched near the top in this city. Nearly every trade in our table averages 4.7 to 5, so a half-point drop is visible. Urgent care, at an average of 4, shows how far a rating can fall in a high-traffic trade. For a new listing the target is not a perfect score but steady volume, because a profile with 15 recent reviews looks alive next to one with 40 old ones.

Photos and categories carry weight too. Add real pictures of your work, your vehicles or your front door, and list only the services you truly provide. In a metro where the Valley, the Westside and the Harbor are separate worlds, a profile that names the districts you actually serve is more convincing than one that lists forty.