What your Google Business Profile can do for local search, and what only your website can

Relevance, distance and prominence, and which of the three you can move

Google's own local ranking documentation names three inputs: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is the one everybody fixates on and the one you cannot negotiate. If a searcher is eight miles from you and two miles from a competitor with a comparable profile, geography is doing most of the work, and no amount of posting will overcome it for that specific search from that specific spot.

Relevance is largely a categorization and content problem. Your primary category is the single most consequential field on the profile, and the services you list underneath it determine which queries you are even eligible for. Prominence is the fuzziest of the three: it reflects how well known the business appears to be across the open web, which is where reviews, citations, press, and the depth of your own site start to matter.

• ●Primary category first, then secondary categories that describe what you actually do, not what you wish you sold
• ●Service list and service descriptions filled in properly, in the words customers use
• ●Hours, holiday hours, service area, and a phone number that a person answers
• ●Photos that are yours, added over time rather than dumped once
• ●Prominence comes from the rest of the web, so a thin site is a ceiling on the profile

The eligibility rules that quietly get US listings suspended

Google's guidelines for representing your business are enforced more aggressively in the US than most owners expect, usually after a competitor reports the listing. The business name field must be your real-world name, exactly as it appears on your storefront, van, invoices and license. Adding a city or a service to it is a policy violation, and the fact that a competitor is doing it right now is not a defense; it is a redress report waiting to happen.

Address rules cause the other half of suspensions. If you travel to customers rather than serving them at your location, you are a service-area business and the address must be hidden. Virtual offices, mailboxes and coworking desks you do not staff during posted hours are not eligible addresses. And one profile covers one business at one location, so spinning up separate listings per service or per city to blanket a metro is the fastest route to losing the one that was working.

• ●Business name as it exists in the real world, with no keywords or city bolted on
• ●Service-area businesses hide the address rather than listing a home or a mailbox
• ●No virtual offices, no coworking desks you are not physically staffing
• ●One profile per location, not one per service line or target city
• ●Expect video verification, and be ready to show signage, equipment and the space

The ranking work that lives on your website, not on your profile

Once the profile is clean, the remaining movement comes from your site. Name, address and phone number should match the profile exactly, character for character, including the suite format and whether the street type is spelled out. Mismatches are common after a rebrand or a move and they are invisible until someone checks.

Beyond that, the useful pattern is a real page per service and, where you genuinely operate, a real page per market. The word real is doing the work. A page that swaps a city name into the same eight paragraphs is a template with a find-and-replace, and Google has been discounting that pattern for years. A page worth publishing names the neighborhoods you cover, the permitting or code quirks that apply there, jobs you have done nearby, and the response time you can honestly commit to.

• ●Identical NAP on the site, the profile, and anywhere else it is published
• ●One substantial page per service, structured around what the customer is deciding
• ●City or market pages only where you actually work, with specifics no competitor could reuse
• ●LocalBusiness structured data with the same details as the profile
• ●Click-to-call in the header on mobile, and a quote form short enough to finish one-handed
• ●Enquiries routed into whatever CRM you already use, so nothing sits in an inbox overnight

Reviews, Yelp, and the platforms your customers check second

In the US the review layer is not one platform. Google carries the most ranking weight, Yelp carries disproportionate weight with certain audiences and in certain metros, and the trade marketplaces carry their own. Customers routinely find you on Google and then check Yelp before dialing, which means a strong Google rating with an unanswered one-star on Yelp is a leaky funnel rather than a ranking problem.

Read each platform's rules before building a review process. Google prohibits incentivized reviews and prohibits soliciting only from customers you expect to be happy. Yelp goes further and asks businesses not to solicit reviews at all, and runs recommendation software that hides reviews it does not trust, including many that were solicited in a burst. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews and testimonials also makes buying or fabricating reviews a federal problem, not just a platform one. A steady, unfiltered ask to every customer beats a campaign every time, and it is the version that survives an audit.

When local search is not the thing holding you back

Sometimes the honest answer is that ranking is not the constraint. If you already appear in the pack for your core services and the phone still is not converting, the problem is downstream: nobody answers during the hours you posted, quotes take four days, or the site gives no reason to pick you over the two listings beside you. Local SEO will only deliver more of the same calls into the same process.

The other case is a business whose customers are not searching locally at all. National B2B, specialist manufacturing, anything sold through referral or procurement, will get very little from map pack work regardless of how well it is done. We would rather tell you that at the start than bill for six months of profile management that was never going to move revenue.

Frequently asked questions