SEO
Local SEO: how to appear in the Google map pack
Relevance, distance and prominence: what each means in practice, what you can change, and where to start on a profile nobody ever tended.
6 min readFluxo Ads
When someone searches a service with local intent, Google opens a block with a map and three businesses above the blue links. Being in those three changes the volume of calls you get that day. This article explains what decides who gets in.
The three factors
| Factor | What it means | Under your control? |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | How well the profile matches what was searched | Yes, almost entirely |
| Distance | Where the person is when they search | No |
| Prominence | How known, cited and reviewed the business is | Partly |
Most businesses lose on relevance, which is precisely the most controllable factor. And almost always for two trivial reasons: the wrong primary category and empty profile fields.
Start with the primary category
The primary category carries more weight than any other field in the profile. A repair shop listed as "electronics store" competes for the wrong query, no matter how good everything else is.
Pick the category describing what you do, not what you happen to sell alongside. Then add secondary categories, which broaden reach without diluting the primary.
Fill in everything, literally everything
- Services, one by one, each with its own description. The category alone is not enough: the service list matches specific queries.
- Hours, including holidays. A profile with wrong hours earns negative reviews from people who arrived to a closed door.
- Service area, if you travel to the customer.
- Attributes available for your business type: accessibility, payment methods, parking.
- Real, recent photos of the place and the work. Stock photography reads as generic and does not help.
- Frequently asked questions, which you can publish already answered.
Reviews: volume and recency, not just rating
A 5.0 rating with five reviews from three years ago loses to a 4.7 with a hundred and twenty recent ones. The signal is not only the average: it is how frequently new people keep reviewing, which indicates an active business.
The routine that works is asking at the moment of greatest satisfaction, usually right after delivery, with the link ready. And replying to all of them, bad ones included: whoever is deciding reads the reply, and a problem resolved well in public convinces more than ten compliments.
What not to do, under any circumstances: buy reviews. The pattern is detectable, the risk is profile suspension, and rebuilding takes longer than doing it right would have.
Consistency of name, address and phone
The same business listed with three different name variants and two phone numbers across the web weakens the signal that it is a single entity. Standardize everywhere: profile, site, social media and directories.
The website still matters
The profile ranks in the map block. The site ranks in the links below it. Together they occupy both areas of the same results page, which is why SEO and Google Business Profile travel together.
An under-appreciated detail: AI assistants pull heavily from business profile data to answer location-based questions. A complete profile also feeds AI citation.