Episode Description
James Dooley speaks with Mike Lovat, Paul Troscott and Luke Baston about semantic SEO strategies for local SEO and local SERPs. The discussion focuses on site focus, site radius, topical maps, entity targeting and why large informational content networks can dilute transactional local websites. Paul explains why local sites should stay tightly aligned to the query vector, using methods like cosine similarity, BM25 and TF-IDF. Luke covers entity selection, commercial attributes and the risks of targeting the wrong category. Mike explains how excessive blog content can shift a site towards an informational resource rather than a local service business. The group also discusses geo-contextual content, Google Business Profile support, hyper-specific location signals, off-page topical maps, wasteful domains and third-party corroboration. The conversation gives local SEO professionals a practical framework for improving rankings through tighter semantic relevance.