Search for a local service on a phone. Count how much of the screen is taken up before you see a single blue link.
There is usually an ad, then a map with three business listings under it, then — well below the fold — the organic results that most website work is aimed at. For a query with local intent, those three listings are the page. Being the fourth-best business in your city means being invisible to anyone who does not scroll.
That block is the local pack, or map pack, and the listings in it come from Google Business Profile, not from your website. You can have an excellent website and not appear at all.
What decides the three
Google describes local ranking as three factors: relevance, distance, and prominence. It is worth being precise about which of these you can affect, because one of them you cannot.
Distance is how close your business is to the searcher, or to the location implied by their query. If someone two towns over searches, you are competing against businesses nearer to them. You cannot move your business, and no amount of optimisation overcomes geography for a searcher standing outside a competitor’s door. Any provider who implies otherwise is selling you something.
Relevance is how well your profile matches what was searched. This is entirely within your control and it is where most of the easy gains are, because so many profiles are half-finished.
Prominence is how well known the business is — reviews, citations across the web, links, and offline notability. Slower to build, but controllable.
So the work is: maximise relevance, build prominence, and accept distance.
Relevance is mostly just completing the profile
The unglamorous truth is that a large share of local ranking problems are a profile nobody finished. In order of impact:
Primary category. The single highest-impact field on the entire profile. Google weights it heavily, and businesses routinely pick the wrong one — a business that mostly does emergency plumbing categorised as “Contractor” instead of “Plumber”. Look at what the businesses currently ranking in your pack use as their primary category. Add secondary categories for the rest of what you do, but choose the primary one carefully; it is the strongest signal you get.
Services and products. Individually listed, each with a description. This is a large free text surface most profiles leave empty. It is where you can be specific about what you actually do in language matching how people search.
The business description. 750 characters. Not a keyword dump — write it for a person deciding whether to call.
Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, women-owned, appointment required, languages spoken. Some of these feed filters people actually use.
Hours, including holiday hours. Google demotes profiles with information it suspects is stale, and “open now” is a genuine filter people apply.
Photos. Real ones, taken by you, added regularly. Not stock photography, which is often recognisable and undermines exactly the trust the profile exists to build.
None of this is difficult. It is simply tedious, so it does not get done, which is precisely why doing it is worth so much.
NAP consistency, and why it leaks slowly
Your Name, Address and Phone number appear in a lot of places: your website, your profile, directories, social pages, industry listings. Google uses the consistency of those mentions as a corroborating signal that your business is what it claims to be.
Inconsistency is rarely dramatic. It looks like this: your website says “Suite 100” and your Yelp listing does not. Your phone number is (555) 555-0100 in one place and 555.555.0100 in another. You moved in 2019 and three directories still carry the old address.
Each one individually is trivial. Together they ask a machine to decide whether these are all the same business, and sometimes it decides wrong.
The fix is boring and effective: pick the exact canonical form of your name, address and phone — character for character, including punctuation and abbreviations — and make every listing match it. Then stop changing it.
On the sites we build, every NAP value on the page comes from a single configuration file, so the footer, the contact page, and the structured data cannot disagree with each other. Consistency stops being a thing you maintain and becomes a property of the system.
Reviews do more than you think
Review count and rating both feed prominence, but there is a third factor people miss: velocity. A steady trickle of reviews reads as an operating business. Forty reviews in one week in 2023 and nothing since reads as a campaign.
What actually works is asking every satisfied customer, at the moment the work is finished and they are pleased, with a link that takes them straight to the review form. Removing friction matters enormously — most people will not hunt for where to leave one.
What does not work, and what you must not do:
- Buying reviews. Against Google policy, and under the FTC’s rule on fake reviews it can carry civil penalties.
- Incentivising them. Offering a discount for a review is prohibited, even if you do not specify it should be positive.
- Review gating — asking how happy someone is and only routing the happy ones to Google. Explicitly against policy.
- Writing them yourself. People can tell, and so can Google.
Respond to reviews, including the bad ones. A measured reply to a one-star review is read by everyone who comes after, and it is often more persuasive than the five-star reviews above it.
If you do not have a storefront
Many businesses serve customers at the customer’s location — trades, mobile services, consultants working from home. Google supports this properly as a service-area business: you hide your address and declare the regions you serve.
Do this correctly from the beginning. The tempting shortcut — listing a home address, or worse, renting a mailbox at a co-working space to appear in a more valuable area — is a direct guidelines violation. Suspensions do happen, reinstatement is slow and uncertain, and losing an established profile costs far more than the ranking was ever worth.
The order to do this in
- Claim and verify the profile. Nothing else matters until you control it.
- Fix the primary category.
- Complete every field — services, description, attributes, hours, photos.
- Make NAP identical everywhere, starting with your own website.
- Build a review request into how you finish a job.
- Add local content to the site that gives the profile something to corroborate.
- Track rankings from a grid of points across your service area, not from your own office — checking from where you sit flatters you and tells you nothing.
Most businesses stop after step one. Steps two and three are an afternoon of work and are frequently the difference between position six and position two.
We do this as part of every build — see how the local SEO work fits together, or send us your existing profile and we will tell you what is missing.