9 Local SEO Lessons from Squid Game
Squid Game is back. Seasons, sequels, global activations, 60 million views in the first days of Season 3.
Squid Game is back. Seasons, sequels, global activations, 60 million views in the first days of Season 3.
The franchise refuses to leave. And honestly, revisiting it from a local SEO perspective is more useful now than when we first wrote this because the game of local search has gotten a lot more competitive since 2021, the rules have changed several times, and the businesses still ranking at the top of the Map Pack are the ones who understand exactly what the show has been trying to tell us all along.
Here are nine lessons from Squid Game that apply directly to how you manage your Google Business Profile and your local ranking strategy.
Table of Contents
- Everyone Starts on a Level Playing Field
- Knowing the Rules Wins More Than Brute Force
- Observation Is a Competitive Advantage
- Panic Produces the Wrong Moves
- The Unexpected Rule Change Will Come
- Consistency Outlasts Intensity
- Trust Is Built Before You Need It
- The Person Without Information Always Loses
- Surviving Is Not the Goal, Winning Is
The 456 players who arrived at the Squid Game complex had wildly different backgrounds, skills, and physical conditions.
But in the game, they all wore the same uniform, had the same starting position, and faced the same rules.
The playing field was as level as it was going to get.
The Google Local 3-Pack works the same way. A small independent business in any category can hold the top Map Pack position above a national chain with a multimillion-pound marketing budget, because the ranking is earned, not bought.
No business can pay Google to appear in the Map Pack. No business can advertise its way there.
The lesson: do not assume you cannot compete with larger or more established businesses in your local market.
The signals that determine Map Pack position precise category configuration, consistent review acquisition, active profile management are available to every business equally.
The independent plumber who has built a better profile than the franchise chain will outrank the franchise chain. That is the design of the system.
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Seong Gi-hun figured out how to carve the honeycomb without breaking it. It was not strength that saved him.
It was understanding the mechanics of the game before making a move.
The players who charged in without understanding what was actually required lost.
Local SEO is full of businesses that are working extremely hard on things that do not move their ranking. Adding dozens of citations to low-authority directories.
Posting on social media instead of GBP. Building links to a website while their GBP profile has the wrong primary category.
Effort in the wrong places.
The lesson: before putting effort in, understand what Google is actually evaluating. Relevance, Distance, Prominence.
The primary category is the highest-leverage single change on any profile. Review velocity is the most compounding Prominence signal.
Profile completeness is the foundation everything else builds on. Know the rules of the game before you start playing hard.
- Observation Is a Competitive Advantage
The players who made it furthest in the games were the ones watching the other players as much as the games themselves.
What are they doing? What mistakes are they making? What advantages do they have? Sang-woo’s tactical thinking was built on observation, not just participation.
Most local businesses optimise their GBP profiles in isolation, comparing their profile to a checklist rather than to the actual profiles currently outranking them.
This is the equivalent of studying the game rules from a manual when you could be watching the players who are already winning.
The lesson: the most valuable data for improving your Map Pack position is not a generic best-practice guide.
It is the specific category configuration, review count, post frequency, and profile completeness of the businesses currently holding the positions you want.
Run a GMB Crush competitor audit before making any optimisation decisions. The businesses outranking you are showing you exactly what works in your specific market.
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When players in Squid Game panicked, they made catastrophic decisions. They moved during Red Light. They rushed the Tug of War before the strategy was set.
They trusted the wrong people. Panic collapsed the gap between a survivable situation and a fatal one.
In local SEO, panic looks like this: rankings drop unexpectedly, and the business owner immediately changes their primary category, rewrites their description, adds a dozen new citations all at once, and asks ten people for reviews in the same week.
Several of these changes conflict with each other. The algorithm sees a profile undergoing simultaneous rapid changes and the ranking instability gets worse, not better.
The lesson: when your ranking changes, diagnose before you act. One change at a time. Run a competitor audit to understand whether the problem is in your profile or in a competitor’s profile.
Check whether a Google algorithm update has affected your category.
Give changes enough time to produce data before making another change. Calm, methodical, evidence-based decisions beat reactive thrashing every time.
- The Unexpected Rule Change Will Come
Just when the players thought they understood the game, it changed. New games. New alliances. New betrayals. The entire structure of the competition shifted in ways that nobody predicted.
The players who adapted survived. The ones who assumed the game would stay the same were eliminated.
Google updates its local ranking algorithm regularly. Categories get restructured. New profile features appear.
The AI Pack format starts appearing for queries where only the traditional Map Pack appeared before.
GBP interface changes shift where profile information is displayed. What worked well six months ago may need adjusting today.
The lesson: build a profile that is fundamentally strong rather than tactically optimised for a specific moment’s version of the algorithm. Profiles with accurate categories, genuine reviews, original photos, consistent NAP, and active management hold their positions through algorithm changes better than profiles whose ranking is propped up by tactical hacks that work until Google changes the game.
When the rules change, the strong foundation survives.
The shortcut does not.
Stop Optimising Without Competitor Data
GMB Crush’s competitor audit shows exactly what the businesses outranking you have done differently. That is the data that turns effort into strategy.
The players who survived the early games were not always the strongest. They were the ones who did not make mistakes when they were tired, under pressure, or distracted.
Consistency of execution under sustained pressure separated the survivors from the eliminated.
The most common failure mode in GBP management is the burst-and-neglect cycle: a business optimises its profile thoroughly, acquires a cluster of reviews, runs a burst of posts, and then goes quiet for four months.
During those four months, competitors who are posting weekly, responding to every review, and adding photos monthly are steadily building a Prominence advantage. The burst-and-neglect profile gradually loses the positions the burst won.
The lesson: four to six new reviews per month, one post per week, photos added monthly, responses to every review within 24 hours. Each individual action is small.
The compound effect of doing all four consistently for twelve months is a profile that most competitors cannot match. Sustained consistent effort beats periodic intense effort every time the Map Pack ranking is calculated.
- Trust Is Built Before You Need It
The alliances that worked in Squid Game were built in quiet moments, not in crisis. The players who waited until they desperately needed help before trying to build trust found that the relationships they needed were not available in time.
A GBP review profile built before something goes wrong is what protects a business when something does. A business with 200 reviews and a 4.8 star average can absorb a 1-star review without much damage.
It can respond to it professionally, and prospective customers reading the full review picture will see it for what it is: one outlier against a strong positive record. A business with 15 reviews is in crisis when the same 1-star review arrives.
The lesson: build your review profile continuously, starting now, as a permanent operational workflow. Not when you need it.
The review velocity you build in the good months is the credibility buffer that protects you when a difficult customer leaves a difficult review. Trust with your prospective customers, and trust with Google’s Prominence algorithm, is built before the moment you need it most.
The players who went into games without understanding what they were facing made avoidable mistakes.
The ones who had information about the games, about the other players, about the rules, made better decisions. Information asymmetry was as powerful as any physical advantage in the compound.
Most local businesses are operating at a disadvantage. They do not know exactly where they rank across their service area, only at their own address. They do not know what categories their top-ranking competitors are using.
They do not know how their review velocity compares to the Map Pack occupants. They are optimising blind.
The lesson: the businesses winning their local Map Packs consistently are not smarter or working harder than their competitors.
They have better information. They know their geo-grid ranking footprint.
They know their competitors’ category stacks. They know their review velocity relative to the market.
Every optimisation decision they make is based on data rather than assumptions.
That information asymmetry is what GMB Crush is built to eliminate in your favour.
- Surviving Is Not the Goal, Winning Is
A lot of players in Squid Game were focused on surviving the next game rather than winning the whole prize. Playing not to lose is a different strategy from playing to win. Plenty of players made it through several games and still lost everything.
In local SEO, the equivalent of playing not to lose is maintaining a Map Pack position without trying to improve it. You are in position 3, you are getting calls, and the work to push to position 1 seems like more effort than the incremental improvement is worth.
But position 1 captures a significantly higher proportion of Map Pack clicks than position 3. The difference between holding your position and actively pursuing the best position in your market is a real, measurable business outcome.
The lesson: know what winning looks like for your local market and pursue it deliberately. For most local businesses, winning means holding the top two Map Pack positions for their primary search terms across their full service area.
Run a geo-grid audit to see how far your current ranking footprint falls short of that goal. Then close the gap. Playing to win produces different decisions than playing not to lose and in the Map Pack, the prize for first place is substantially larger than the prize for third.
Recommended Reading
The complete GBP optimization guide: all 14 steps for building a profile that wins the Map Pack
Squid Game is a story about competitive environments where the rules are enforced, information asymmetry is weaponised, and consistent, methodical players outlast emotionally reactive ones.
Local SEO is less dramatic, but the dynamics are surprisingly similar. The Map Pack has limited positions. The competition is ongoing. The rules change without announcement. And the players with the best information and the most consistent execution win.
Season 3 just launched. The franchise keeps going. And the Map Pack in your local market keeps running too, every day, whether you are actively competing for it or not.
The question is not whether the game is being played. It is whether you are playing it well.
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