Start with a real project, not theory. If you don't have a local business to work on, create a Google Business Profile for a side project or offer to help a friend's shop. You learn local SEO by doing it, not reading about it. Master the core mechanics first. Google Business Profile is 40-50% of the ranking equation for map pack results. Learn every field: categories, service areas, attributes, posts, Q&A management, review acquisition. Then move to on-page signals like location in title tags, NAP consistency, and locally-relevant content. Finally, tackle off-page: citations on directories like Yelp and Yellow Pages, local backlinks from chambers of commerce or news sites, and structured data markup. Use these resources in order: Google's Business Profile Help documentation (straight from the source), Whitespark's Local Search Ranking Factors survey (updated every few years with correlation data), and BrightLocal's learning hub. Skip most SEO guru courses; they recycle the same basics. The Local Search Forum and LocalU conference content offer more cutting-edge insights. Practice the repeatable tasks. Audit 5-10 local businesses in your city using tools like BrightLocal or Whitespark's Local Citation Finder. Note their citation gaps, review response patterns, and category choices. Build citations manually for your test project on 20-30 core directories. This repetition builds pattern recognition faster than any course. At Ottawa SEO, we onboard new team members by assigning them three real client audits in their first week, not video tutorials. They learn what inconsistent NAP data actually breaks, how a poorly chosen primary category tanks visibility, and why a business two blocks away outranks another. Local SEO has fewer variables than national SEO, so you can become competent in 2-3 months of focused practice. Track one metric obsessively while learning: map pack rankings for your target keywords in the actual city. Use a rank tracker with geo-grid capability or manually check from different locations. If your actions move the needle, you're learning. If they don't, you're guessing.