Q&A › Local search
How the three results on the map get chosen, and why your Google Business Profile matters more than your website for that.
For a business with a counter or a van, local search is most of the game. It runs on different rules from ordinary search results.
The three businesses shown on the map near the top of a local search. For a business people drive to, those three slots are most of the traffic. They are chosen by Google Business Profile data, not by your website, which surprises most people.
The listing with your hours, photos, reviews and directions. It is free, it is the single most important thing for local search, and it is separate from your website. A business with a good profile and a mediocre site usually out-ranks the reverse.
Name, address and phone written identically everywhere — your site, your profile, directories. "Suite 2" in one place and "Ste. 2" in another are two businesses as far as a machine is concerned. Inconsistency is a common and entirely avoidable reason a business never surfaces.
Mentions of your business details on other sites — directories, chambers, trade bodies. They corroborate that you exist where you claim to. Quality beats quantity: a handful of real, relevant listings is worth more than a hundred bought ones.
A great deal, for ranking and for the decision. Recency and volume both count, and a steady trickle reads better than thirty in one week. Asking every satisfied customer, every time, is the whole technique.
Harder, deliberately. Proximity is a real factor, so you compete at a disadvantage outside your own area. What legitimately helps is actual work there: real projects, real customers, a page about that work. What does not is a page with the city name swapped.
Yes — Google has a setting for exactly this. Declare yourself a service-area business and list the areas you cover. Publishing a home address you do not want visitors at causes more problems than it solves.
A near-identical page produced for each town, differing only by the name. Google treats this as spam and penalises it. The honest version is one real page per place you can say something true about, which usually means far fewer pages than an agency will offer you.
Yes, as corroboration. Google cross-checks your profile against your site, so matching details, the area named in plain words, and a working phone number all help. But if you only have time for one, fix the Business Profile first.
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