A Coral Gables med spa called us in March. They had eight Google reviews, a Google Business Profile that listed the wrong hours on weekends, and a website that ranked on page three for their own name. By June they were sitting in the map pack for "med spa coral gables" and booking eleven new consultations a week from search.
Nothing we did was clever. We ran the same 90-day local SEO sequence we run for almost every Miami small business we take on. It is unglamorous, it is repeatable, and it works in this city specifically because most of your competitors will not bother.
This is that playbook, written so you can either run it yourself or know exactly what to demand from any agency that offers to run it for you. If you want our team on it, our local SEO service is what we use to deliver this exact plan.
A few notes before we dig in. This plan assumes you are a real business with a real Miami address (or a defined service area) and a website you can edit. It assumes you are willing to spend 30 to 45 minutes a week on the work, or hire someone who will. And it assumes you accept that Google rewards consistency, not heroic bursts.
Phase One: The First 30 Days
The first month is foundation work. Boring. Critical. Skip it and the rest of the plan will quietly underperform for the next six months.
Audit your Google Business Profile like a stranger
Open your profile in an incognito browser. Look at it as a customer would. Are the photos current? Is the primary category exactly right (a "med spa" is not a "spa")? Are the hours correct for next weekend, including holidays? Is the phone number the one a human answers? Is the website link going to the right page, ideally a service page, not your homepage?
Fix every gap you find. Rewrite the business description in 750 characters, with the primary keyword in the first sentence, written for a human. Add the service area if you serve clients outside your storefront. Confirm the categories. Most Miami businesses we audit get the primary category slightly wrong, which costs them visibility for the queries they actually want.
Lock in your NAP across the web
NAP is name, address, phone number. It needs to be byte-for-byte identical everywhere it appears. Use a tool like Moz Local, Yext, or Whitespark Citation Builder to find your top 50 listings (Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places, BBB, Yellow Pages, industry directories) and update any inconsistencies. Pay attention to suite numbers, abbreviations (Ave vs Avenue), and old phone numbers that still float around on directory sites from years ago.
For multi-location Miami businesses, build a clean spreadsheet of every variation that has ever existed for each location. Hunt those down too.
Set up tracking before you change anything
Install Google Analytics 4 if it is not there. Add Google Search Console. Connect Google Business Profile insights. Capture the baseline: monthly organic traffic, top ten queries, average map pack position for your three primary keywords, total reviews, average star rating, monthly calls and directions from your profile. If you do not capture this now, in three months you will not know what worked.
Pick your three primary keywords
Not ten. Three. For each, write down the search intent and the user. A Doral logistics company we work with picked "warehouse space doral," "freight forwarder miami," and "customs broker miami." That is enough to anchor the next 90 days. We help clients pick these inside our SEO playbook, which is free if you want a head start.
By day 30 you should have a clean GBP, consistent citations, real analytics, and a focused keyword shortlist. You will not see ranking changes yet. That is normal.
Phase Two: Days 31 to 60
Month two is where momentum starts to show. The work shifts from cleanup to consistent signal building.
Stack reviews intentionally
Reviews are still the single most powerful local ranking signal we see in 2026. They also build trust faster than any other asset. The goal in month two is to add at least one review per week to your Google profile, ideally two, with text rather than just stars.
Build a request system that does not feel pushy. We use three triggers for Miami clients: at the moment the client expresses delight (in person or in chat), 48 hours after a successful service or delivery, and at a quarterly checkpoint for ongoing clients. Send the review link directly. Personalize the ask. Spanish-speaking clients get the request in Spanish. Texts outperform email for review conversion in our experience by roughly 3 to 4 times.
Respond to every review, positive or negative, within 48 hours. Use the customer's name. Mention something specific from their review. Avoid generic templates. Google reads these responses, and so do future customers.
Publish two Google Business Profile posts per week
Most Miami businesses publish zero. The bar is low. Two short posts per week, each with a real photo, builds the freshness signal Google uses to weigh active profiles. Mix three post types: a service or offer post, a behind-the-scenes or event post, and a customer story or result post. Each one is two or three sentences plus a clear call to action.
Build the first three local landing pages
If you serve more than one Miami neighborhood, you need a real landing page for each. Not a single page that lists all of them. Not a footer line that says "we serve Miami, Brickell, Wynwood, Coral Gables." Real pages.
Each landing page gets a unique H1 with the neighborhood and service, an intro that proves you actually work in that area (named clients, projects, addresses you have served), specifics about that neighborhood that matter to the service (parking in Coconut Grove, hurricane-rated installs in the Beach, bilingual staff in Hialeah), and an embedded map with your service area highlighted. We aim for 800 to 1,200 words per page. Generic pages of 200 words will not rank.
By day 60 you should be seeing more profile views, more direction requests, and the first wiggle in your map pack rank. If you want a second pair of eyes, see our recent local SEO work and the kind of progress we ship in the first 60 days.
Phase Three: Days 61 to 90
Month three is where you push for visible wins. Foundations are set, signals are flowing, and now you turn to the on-page and link work that lifts you the rest of the way.
Optimize the three pages your customers actually land on
Run the three primary keywords through Search Console. Find the pages Google currently associates with each query. For most Miami small businesses, those are the homepage, one service page, and one neighborhood page. Rewrite those three pages with intent.
For each page, the checklist is short but specific. The H1 includes the keyword, written for a human. The first 150 words include the keyword and a clear answer to the search intent. Subheadings (H2s) cover the questions Google shows under "People also ask" for that query. The page has a unique title tag and meta description, both under their character limits. There is at least one internal link to a deeper relevant page and one to a conversion page like contact or pricing. The page loads in under two seconds on a 4G connection.
We treat the homepage as the catch-all (brand and primary keyword), and the service pages as the deeper rank-targeting pages. The neighborhood pages are the geo-modifier wins.
Earn three legitimate local links
Backlinks are still part of the equation, especially for competitive Miami queries like "miami web design agency" or "personal injury lawyer miami." The good news: local links are easier to earn than national ones if you actually live in the city.
Three sources to start with: a local chamber or BNI chapter (Brickell, Coral Gables, Doral, and Coconut Grove all have active ones), a charity or community sponsorship that lists supporters on their site, and a local journalist or blog you can pitch a small story to. We have placed Miami clients in the Miami Herald, Miami New Times, and several neighborhood newsletters using nothing more than a clean pitch and a relevant local angle.
Avoid paid directory schemes. Avoid the agency that promises 50 backlinks for $99. Both will hurt you.
Set the reporting cadence
By day 90 you should have a simple monthly report that tracks: map pack rank for your three keywords, organic traffic to your three target pages, total Google reviews and average rating, calls and directions from your profile, and any leads attributed to organic search. Send it on the same day every month. Compare month-over-month and to your day-zero baseline.
What This Plan Will Not Do
Three honest warnings.
This plan will not rank you for ultra-competitive head terms like "miami plumber" or "miami dentist" if you are entering a market with no reviews, no website authority, and no time. Those queries need 12 to 18 months of work plus paid support. A 90-day plan moves you into the map pack for neighborhood-level and modifier queries, which is where most of the money is anyway.
This plan will not work if your business has fundamental problems your reviews keep mentioning. If you are getting one-star reviews for slow service, no amount of local SEO will sustain a ranking. Fix the operations, then run the plan.
This plan will not magically generate content. You still need to write the landing pages, take the photos, ship the GBP posts, and reply to reviews. Local SEO is a habit, not a project. The 90-day plan builds the habit.
The One Thing to Do Tomorrow
Open your Google Business Profile in incognito and write down every single thing that is wrong or out of date. Categories, hours, phone, photos older than a year, missing services, missing description. Fix all of it before the end of the week.
That single afternoon will move more for most Miami small businesses than the next month of "SEO" they could buy from a bargain agency.
When you are ready to run the full 90 days, start a project with us and we will scope it for your specific market, your budget, and the neighborhoods you actually serve. If you would rather work the plan yourself first, our Google Business Profile service covers the foundation work alone.