- Google ranks local results on relevance, distance and prominence. You control the first and third.
- Your primary category does more to decide which searches you appear in than any other single setting.
- Reviews matter for volume and for recency. A steady trickle beats a large pile of old ones.
- Most of the highest-value work here costs nothing but an hour of attention.
For a local business your Google listing brings in more enquiries than your website does. Most of them are half finished, which is good news if yours is not.
If you serve customers in a specific area, the search results that matter are not the ordinary blue links. They are the map pack: the three local listings that appear above everything else for searches with local intent. Those listings come from Google Business Profiles, not from websites.
This guide covers how those rankings are decided and what to do about it, in the order worth doing it. The Google Business Profile audit will score your listing against twelve factors and tell you what to fix first.
How Google decides local rankings
Google is unusually open about this. Local results are ranked on three things:
Distance you cannot change. Relevance and prominence are entirely within your control, and they are where all the useful work sits.
Relevance comes from your categories, services, description and the words used in your reviews. Prominence comes from review volume and recency, how consistently your details appear across the web, links, and how actively the profile is maintained.
The primary category is the biggest single lever
Of everything you control, your primary category has the largest effect on which searches you appear in. It is also the setting most often chosen once at signup and never revisited.
Google offers thousands of categories and the differences are meaningful. An "Electrician" and an "Electrical installation service" surface for measurably different queries. Pick the one that describes what you primarily do, in the words customers actually use.
Look at the businesses ranking above you for your most important search. Their primary categories are visible on their listings. If three of them share a category you have not chosen, that is worth knowing.
Add secondary categories for genuine additional services, but do not pad the list. Irrelevant secondary categories dilute your relevance rather than broadening it.
Reviews: volume, recency and replies
Reviews do three jobs at once. They are a direct ranking signal, they are the main thing a prospective customer reads, and the words inside them help Google understand what you do.
Three things matter, in this order:
- Recency. A business with forty reviews including several from the past month signals active trading far more strongly than one with two hundred that stopped three years ago. This is the factor most owners overlook.
- Volume. Twenty is a sensible first target. It is enough for an average rating to look credible and for one bad review not to dominate.
- Replies. Replying is a ranking signal and a public demonstration of how you handle problems.
The most reliable way to get reviews is to ask every satisfied customer, at the moment they are happiest, with a direct link that takes one tap. Not a leaflet, not a QR code on an invoice, and never an incentive, which breaches Google's policies and can get reviews removed.
Reply calmly, acknowledge the specific issue, say what you did about it, and move the detail to a private channel. Future customers read the reply as carefully as the complaint, and a measured response to criticism often reads better than an unbroken wall of five stars. Never argue, and never disclose anything about the customer.
Name, address and phone, everywhere
Google cross-checks your business details across the web. Where they disagree, confidence in the listing drops and rankings suffer.
The three that must match exactly are your business name, address and phone number, right down to formatting. "Ltd" in one place and "Limited" in another is a mismatch. So is a mobile number on one directory and a landline on another.
Check and correct your details on your own website, Google, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Companies House, Facebook, any trade directories you are listed in, and any industry bodies. Then leave them alone.
What to do, in priority order
Work down this list. The items at the top produce far more than the items at the bottom, and almost all of it costs time rather than money.
Local search priority list
0 of 12Where your website still matters
The profile drives the map pack, but your website supports it and wins the ordinary organic results underneath.
- Put your address and phone number in the footer of every page, in text rather than inside an image, so they can be read and matched.
- Create a page per area you genuinely serve, with real content about working in that area. Do not generate fifty near-identical pages with the place name swapped, which is treated as spam.
- Add LocalBusiness structured data, which states your name, address, phone, hours and location in a form machines read directly.
- Make it fast and usable on a phone. Most local searches happen on mobile, often while the person is standing outside somewhere.
- Answer the questions customers actually ask. Pricing, coverage area, availability and how to get started. This is also the content AI search tools quote when someone asks about businesses like yours.
Profile improvements can show up within a couple of weeks. Review velocity and consistency work compound over months. Treat this as a routine rather than a project: an hour to fix the fundamentals, then twenty minutes a month asking for reviews, replying to them and posting once. Profiles decay when they go quiet.
