Fair questions, straight answers

Local SEO is the work of making your business show up when nearby customers search for what you do — in Google Search, Google Maps, and increasingly in AI answers. It centers on your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your local rankings, and how consistently your business appears across the web. Full plain-English guide: AyanaSEO.ai/learn/what-is-local-seo.

Any business with a Google Business Profile that serves a local area. Keyword generation and analysis are tuned per vertical — deepest for home services (plumbers, HVAC, electricians, roofers), with legal, dental and medical, restaurants, automotive, beauty, fitness, and more on the same rails. If most of your customers find you through “near me” searches and the map, this is built for you.

Agencies managing client portfolios, and brands with multiple locations — we're single-location by design in V1 (multi-location is on the roadmap). Purely online businesses with no local service area won't get value from map-based tracking. BrightLocal and Localo serve those cases well; we'd rather tell you that than refund you later.

Your dashboard: your rank, visibility score, keyword wins, the geo-grid heatmap, your competitor list, review sentiment, rank history, and AI insights — one screen that answers “how am I doing, who's beating me, and what should I do next?”

The 10 businesses actually appearing around you in local results for your keywords — detected automatically, not a list you have to build. Deeper AI analysis (review sentiment, Google Posts promo tracking) runs on your top 5 rivals.

Generated from your business category and location, grounded in real search data — a mix of emergency searches (“emergency plumber [city]”), transactional searches (“best HVAC company near me”), and competitor/landmark searches customers actually use. Your 10 priority keywords get daily tracking.

Your local rank isn't one number — it changes depending on where the searcher is standing. The geo-grid checks your rank from 16 points across your area (grid spacing adjusts for urban, suburban, or wide service areas) and paints the result as a heatmap: green where you win, red where your competitors do.

The technical stuff that decides local rankings: name/address/phone consistency between your site and listing, LocalBusiness schema, mobile click-to-call, map embeds, HTTPS, mobile page speed vs your competitors, plus an AI-readiness checklist — whether your site gives AI assistants what they need to recommend you. Up to 4 audits per month.

Live Google results. Every scan checks your ranked position in Google Maps and organic results, anchored to your business's coordinates on desktop and mobile — and flags, keyword by keyword, when you appear in the local pack on the Google Search page. The same results a customer near you sees — not a national average.

You'll hear “local pack” and “map pack” used interchangeably for the block of roughly three businesses Google shows at the top of normal Search results. Strictly, there are two different surfaces: that pack on the Search page, and the full ranked list inside Google Maps — and your position can differ between them. We track both, honestly labeled: your ranked Google Maps position for all 50 keywords, anchored to your coordinates on desktop and mobile, plus a per-keyword flag showing which searches you actually appear in the local pack for. That gap is where the insight lives — ranking #4 on Maps while missing the three pack slots is a different problem, with a different fix, than not ranking at all. Tools that show one surface and label it as both leave you guessing which number you're looking at.

Because Google personalizes and localizes. Your own results are skewed by your search history, your logged-in account, and your exact location — you are the least reliable person to check your own rank. AyanaSEO.ai queries from neutral, coordinate-anchored searches, which is why the geo-grid shows a range across your area rather than one flattering (or terrifying) number.

Here's the honest mechanics. Google's archives are coordinate-blind and only preserve the top 3 of the old search-page pack — so any tool promising your precise rank from a year ago, for a business that wasn't top-3, is guessing. We don't. The 12-month view is your market's, not a fabricated version of yours: your free scan shows who's owned the top 3 for your category in your city, month by month, labeled as the city-level estimate it is. Your own coordinate-anchored rank history is separate — it starts accruing from your first nightly scan, precise from night one, complete over time.

The full 50-keyword scan and your first audit kick off at checkout; panels fill in within about 10 minutes. Your preview scan data — including the 12-month view of who's owned your market — appears instantly while that runs in the background.

Yes for keyword rankings — both, every scan, because they genuinely differ. Keyword rankings are tracked in Google Maps and organic results on desktop and mobile, with local-pack presence flagged per keyword; the geo-grid runs on mobile Maps results, where “near me” searches actually happen.

Your 10 priority keywords update every night. The full 50-keyword set refreshes weekly. You also get 3 on-demand refreshes per month for moments when you need to know right now, and the geo-grid re-scans automatically 2× a month. The full refresh schedule, published →

Yes, strictly. Every customer gets the same public review link — we never filter who gets asked based on how happy they seem (that's “review gating,” which violates Google policy and the FTC's fake-review rule, 16 CFR Part 465). Tools that route unhappy customers away from public reviews put your listing at risk; we built this the compliant way on purpose.

No — we draft, you decide. The AI suggests a reply based on the review's content; you edit it and send it yourself. Google explicitly discourages fully automated replies, and your customers can tell.

AI reads your recent Google reviews — and your top 5 competitors' — and scores them on the four aspects that decide reputations in your vertical: service speed, price clarity, work quality, and professionalism for home services; communication, expertise, case outcomes, and responsiveness for law firms; bedside manner, wait time, expertise, and office & staff for practices. You see why the shop up the road is winning, not just that they are. Refreshes weekly.

No, and be suspicious of anyone who says they can. We help you earn reviews the compliant way and respond to the bad ones well.

Type your business name, pick your listing, and in seconds you'll see your real Google Maps rank for your main service keyword — plus the top 3 competitors outranking you, with their ratings and review counts. No signup, no credit card. Your full preview stays available for 7 days, and you can run a fresh scan after that.

Automatic tracking runs on schedule (priority keywords nightly, full set weekly, geo-grid 2× monthly, sentiment weekly, competitor promos every 48 hours). On-demand actions are capped to keep the price at $19.99: 3 manual rank refreshes/month, 3 extra geo-grid scans/month (more at $1 each), 4 GBP audits/month, 5 PDF report exports/month, citation gap once per 30 days. The caps reset monthly. Every cadence and cap on one page →

The free scan is the trial — real data for your actual business for 7 days, no card. We think that beats a 14-day tour of an empty dashboard.

No. Everything we analyze is public. They'd have to be watching you to even wonder — and if they're smart, they already are. That's rather the point.

One optional add-on exists: extra geo-grid scans beyond your 3 monthly manual scans, at $1 each. That's it. No credit packs, no per-citation fees, no tier upgrades.

Price and focus. BrightLocal's entry plan is $41/month ($31/month on annual billing) for tracking only — review tools cost $65/month, and it's built to scale to agencies with 100 locations. Localo starts at $49/month, tracks 10 keywords, and gates competitor tracking, audits, and citations behind a $169/month tier. AyanaSEO.ai is $19.99/month, tracks 50 keywords, includes all of it, and is deliberately built for one location: yours. (Competitor prices verified August 2026.)

No. AyanaSEO.ai works entirely from public data — the same search results, reviews, and business listings anyone can see. Nothing to connect, nothing to install, no permissions to grant.

Ranking positions, listing facts, and derived insights over time — that's what powers your history and trends. Verbatim third-party content (like raw review text) is kept only briefly for processing, then purged; we keep the analysis, not the transcript. You can request deletion of your account data at any time at admin@ayanaseo.ai.

After 7 days the preview locks. Run a fresh scan for a new preview window, or subscribe to keep the full Action Plan live — a fresh scan shows the same 12-month view of who's owned your market either way, so you lose nothing by having waited.