"SEO" and "local SEO" get used interchangeably online, sometimes even by agencies who should know better, and it leaves new clients unsure whether they're paying for two different things or one thing with a confusing name.

They're two different things. Related, and often working together, but built on different signals and solving different problems.

What Does Regular SEO Actually Do?

It focuses on the website itself. The content on your pages, how it's structured, how well it answers what someone's actually searching for, and how many other sites link back to it. It's the discipline that gets a page to rank for a search term regardless of where the person searching happens to be standing.

For a business that sells nationally or operates entirely online, this covers most of what matters.

What Does Local SEO Add That Regular SEO Doesn't?

Your presence outside your own website. Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your listings on other directories, and whether your name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear online. None of that lives on your site, but all of it decides whether you show up when someone nearby searches for what you offer.

It's entirely possible to have a genuinely well-built website and still be invisible in local search. It's also possible to have an average website and still dominate local results, if the rest of your presence is solid. Neither situation is unusual, we see both regularly.

How Much Does Each One Actually Influence Rankings?

According to Whitespark's 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey, drawn from input across dozens of local SEO specialists, Google Business Profile signals account for roughly a third of what determines Map Pack rankings, the businesses shown next to the map. In regular organic rankings, that share drops sharply, and on-page content and backlinks take over as the main factors instead.

Each one calls for a different focus.

So Which One Does Your Business Actually Need?

If you serve customers in a specific area, both, usually in a particular order. Local SEO tends to matter more urgently for a business that depends on nearby customers. That's where the highest-intent searches happen.

We've covered the mechanics of this in more depth in how to get your business to show up on Google Maps, and in what local SEO actually is and why it matters.

A strong Google Business Profile alone won't rescue a website that says little about what you actually do. A well-written website alone won't get you into the map results if your profile is thin or your reviews go unanswered. We've watched businesses lose customers to competitors online for exactly this reason: not a worse service, just a gap on one side or the other that never got closed.

Sheffield has no shortage of businesses competing for the same searches. The ones pulling ahead usually aren't doing anything unusual. They've just stopped treating this as one job and started treating it as two, each done properly.

If you want an honest read on where your business currently stands on either side, get in touch with our team.