Point every search at the right page

You can rank for a search and still lose the customer, by sending them to the wrong page. In local you've got several places a search can land: your Google Business Profile, your homepage, a service page, a location page. Each search wants a specific one.

Match the search to the page

A raw '[service] [your town]' search is often best served by your profile and homepage together, that's the map pack plus your main site. A specific service ('boiler repair') wants a dedicated service page that goes deep on just that. A '[service] [nearby town]' wants a location page for that town. Send an 'emergency' searcher to a slow generic homepage and you've wasted the ranking.

One page per intent, or you compete with yourself

If two of your pages target the same search, Google doesn't know which to rank and often ranks neither well. Decide which page owns which search, and link the others to it. This gets more important the more service and location pages you build, which is the next chapter.