The three business listings that appear above the ordinary results are called the local pack, and getting into them is a different job from ranking a web page. Google decides who appears there on three things: how relevant the business is to what was searched, how close it is to the person searching, and how prominent it is. Your website matters much less than your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and whether your name, address and phone number are written the same way everywhere online.
Relevance, distance, prominence
Google describes local ranking in those three words, and it is worth understanding what each one means in practice.
Relevance is how well your business matches what was typed. The single biggest lever here is your primary category, and it is the thing most businesses get wrong. A category chosen carelessly years ago decides what you are eligible to appear for.
Distance is how far you are from the person searching, or from the place they named. There is no way around this one. A business in Mississauga will not appear in a Brampton search as easily as a business in Brampton, and no amount of optimisation changes geography.
Prominence is how well known the business appears to be. Reviews, citations, links and general web presence all feed it. This is the part you build over months.
The primary category is the biggest single lever
Of everything on the profile, the primary category carries the most weight, and you only get one.
The test is simple: what is the one thing you most want to be called when somebody is looking for it? Not the longest list of everything you do. Secondary categories widen the net a little, but the primary is what you are really competing under.
A common and expensive mistake is picking the category that describes your biggest existing service rather than the one you want more of. If web hosting already pays the bills and you want design work, pointing your profile at hosting spends your strongest signal on the business you already have.
Reviews, and how to ask without breaking the rules
Reviews are one of the largest parts of local ranking, and they also decide whether anyone calls after they find you.
Ask directly and ask soon, while the work is still fresh. A short message with a direct link to the review form gets a far better response than a general request to look you up.
Ask people to mention what the work actually was. The words inside a review are read as a signal, so a review saying a business built a restaurant website is worth more than one saying great service.
Never offer anything in return. Discounts, entries into a draw, free months: all of it breaches Google's policy, and the penalty ranges from reviews being removed to the profile being suspended. A suspended profile takes months to recover and sometimes never does.
Reply to every review, including the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint reads better to the next customer than no complaint at all would have.
Make your details identical everywhere
Your business name, address and phone number are the three facts Google uses to work out that all the mentions of you across the web are the same business.
If your address is written with a suite number in one place and without it in another, or your phone number has different formatting on your website and on a directory, each variation weakens the match a little.
Pick one exact version of each, down to whether you write Suite or Unit, and use it everywhere without exception. Then go and fix the old listings that say something else.
Finish the profile, then keep using it
An incomplete profile is a weaker profile. Services, a real description, opening hours, attributes, and photographs all contribute, and most businesses stop after the address.
Photographs matter more than people expect. Profiles with real photographs of the actual place, the team and the work get noticeably more attention than those with a logo and nothing else.
Posting to the profile is free and almost nobody in a small market bothers. A short post about work you have finished is a signal that the business is active.
Answer questions in the Questions section. You are allowed to ask and answer your own, and doing so puts the answers customers need where they will actually be seen.
What will not work
Keywords stuffed into the business name. It is against the guidelines, competitors report it, and the correction usually arrives with a suspension attached.
An address you do not really operate from. Virtual offices and mailbox addresses are the most common reason profiles get suspended, and a suspension costs more than the ranking was worth.
A separate profile for each city you serve. One business at one location gets one profile. If you genuinely serve an area without a shopfront there, a service area business is the honest way to say so.
Questions people ask
- How long does local SEO take to work?
- Profile changes such as the primary category can move things within a few weeks. Reviews and consistent listings build over three to six months. A competitive category in a large city takes longer, because everyone near the top is already doing the same work.
- Can I rank in a city where I have no office?
- In the map results, not really. Distance is one of the three things Google weighs, and there is no way to fake proximity safely. You can rank in ordinary search results for that city with a genuine page about the work you do there, and that is the honest route.
- How many reviews do I need?
- There is no threshold, only your competitors. Look at the three businesses currently sitting in the pack for your search and count theirs. That is the number that matters, and steady genuine reviews beat a sudden burst, which looks bought.
We do this
If you would rather have it done than do it, this is the part of what we offer that covers it.