How Does Google Decide Which Businesses Appear in the Local Pack?
Three factors. Unusually for this industry they are published rather than guessed at. This guide explains what each one means in practice, which of them you can influence and why one of them cannot be changed at all.
Three Things And They Are Published
Google's own guidance on improving local ranking names three factors: distance, relevance and prominence. That is stated rather than inferred, which makes this one of the few corners of search where you can read the answer instead of paying somebody for their theory about it.
Why that is worth pausing on. Most of this subject is inference.
Vast amounts of SEO advice are educated guesswork about undocumented systems. Here the framework is published, so anybody presenting local ranking as a mystery is either uninformed or selling something.
What each one means, briefly. Then in detail below.
Distance is how close you are to the searcher. Relevance is how well your listing matches what they typed. Prominence is how well known your business is.
What most advice actually is. An elaboration of these three.
Nearly every local SEO recommendation you have been given fits inside one of them. Recognising which is a fast way to judge whether a proposal is coherent.
What is not published. The weighting.
Google names the three factors and does not say how much each counts. Any figure you have been shown for that is somebody's estimate, which block six returns to.
One more thing Google states. You cannot buy it.
Its guidance says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Advertising exists elsewhere on the page and it is labelled as advertising. Anybody offering to buy you a place in the pack is selling something that is not for sale.
Distance
How far your business is from the person searching is a major factor in what they see. It is also the one you cannot do anything about. That single sentence explains most of the frustration in local search and most of the money wasted trying to get round it.
What it measures. The searcher to you.
Not your service area and not where you would like to work. The physical gap between the person holding the phone and the place your business is.
Why it exists. It is what the searcher wants.
Somebody looking for a locksmith at eleven at night wants one nearby. A results panel ignoring distance would be worse for them, which is the whole justification.
What follows for you. A ceiling on which searches you can win.
There are searches you will not appear prominently for because somebody closer exists. That is not a fault in your listing and no amount of profile work changes it.
The only way to be closer. Genuinely be there.
Real premises, staffed, where customers can visit. Nothing else counts. Every arrangement designed to look like premises you do not have is a suspension risk rather than a strategy. Our suspension guide covers what happens to businesses that try.
What it does not measure. How far you will travel.
Willingness to drive somewhere is not proximity to it. A business happy to work across a county is still, for this purpose, exactly where it is.
What to do with that. Stop fighting it.
Accepting distance as fixed frees you to work on the two factors that respond, which is the point of block six.
Which Means There Is No Single Ranking
Because distance is part of the calculation, results differ for every searcher depending on where they are standing. There is no single position for your business in local results, which makes the question of what position you are is unanswerable as asked.
What that does to reporting. A single number is fiction.
Anybody telling you that you are third in the local pack has measured from one place. Two streets away the answer is different. Both answers are true.
Where the confusion starts. Checking from your own premises.
Searching from the office gives you the most flattering version of the results that exists, because you are as close to yourself as it is possible to be. Owners then conclude everything is fine.
The mirror image. One customer complaint.
Somebody says they could not find you, they were four miles away, then the business panics about a listing that is working perfectly well within its realistic range.
The better question. How far out does it reach.
Ask how far from your premises you remain visible rather than whether you appear. That is measurable, it is genuinely useful and it is the number we track for clients.
What to do about tracking it. Measure spread rather than position.
Your own performance data shows where people were when they found you, which describes your real catchment better than any position check from a single spot.
Where this gets diagnosed. Its own page.
Why a business is not showing up opens on exactly this, since it accounts for a large share of those questions.
Relevance
Relevance is how well your listing matches what somebody searched for. This is where the profile fields do their work. It is also the factor that responds fastest to being taken seriously.
Where it mostly comes from. The primary category.
The single most consequential setting on the listing, because it determines which searches you are considered for at all. A business under the wrong category is irrelevant to its own market by definition.
What supports it. Services and attributes.
The services you list, in customer language, plus the attributes describing practical facts about the business. Both connect the listing to more specific searches than the category alone can reach.
What contributes less than people think. The description.
Businesses spend hours on it and it is not the field doing this job. Stuffing services into it achieves nothing, which our optimisation guide covers along with the rest of the fields.
Why accuracy beats ambition. Competing where you lose.
Claiming relevance to work you barely do puts you against specialists in it. You lose those searches and you dilute what the listing is understood to be.
How relevance is tested cheaply. Look at who appears.
Search the terms you want and see what the listings appearing under them are categorised as. Ten minutes of that tells you more than a week of theory.
What good relevance looks like. Unambiguous.
Somebody reading the listing knows exactly what you do within seconds. If a stranger could not summarise your trade from it, the relevance work is not finished.
Prominence
Prominence is how well known the business is. It draws on reviews and on references to the business elsewhere on the web. Google's guidance states that review count and review score are factored in.
What it is not. Something you set.
There is no prominence field. It accumulates from what other people do, which is why it cannot be completed in an afternoon like a category can.
What builds it. Three things.
Reviews arriving steadily, the business being mentioned and listed accurately across the web, plus a website substantial enough to be worth referencing.
Why it is the slowest. It is cumulative.
A month of good work adds a little. A year of it adds a great deal. That timescale is why prominence gets neglected in favour of things that feel faster.
Why it is the most valuable. It is hard to copy.
A competitor can change their category this afternoon. They cannot acquire four years of genuine reviews and local reputation, which makes prominence the closest thing to a durable advantage in local search.
What weakens it. Inconsistency.
Details that differ across the web make a business harder to recognise as one entity, which works against exactly the thing prominence is measuring.
What we will not tell you. A number.
No review count unlocks anything. Anybody quoting a target is inventing it. Our guide to reviews and rankings explains why the useful comparison is against your own local field.
Which Ones You Can Actually Influence
None of distance, most of relevance and prominence over time. That ordering should determine where your effort goes. Notice that it is an ordering by controllability rather than by importance.
Why we order it that way. No weighting is published.
Google does not say how much each factor counts. You will find articles assigning precise percentages. Those come from surveys of practitioners rather than from Google, so quoting them as fact is the commonest error in this subject.
Distance. Nothing, short of moving.
Treat it as the shape of the opportunity rather than a problem. It tells you which searches are realistically yours.
Relevance. Almost entirely within your control.
Category, services, attributes and accuracy. This is an afternoon of careful work and it is where the fastest improvement lives.
Prominence. Yours to influence over months.
Reviews and consistent references. Slow, cumulative and the part that eventually separates you from businesses that only did the afternoon of work.
What this rules out. Buying a shortcut.
None of the three responds to payment. Google says so. Where a proposal promises movement without touching category, services or reviews, ask which of the three it claims to be affecting.
What that means for a plan. Order of operations.
Fix relevance first because it is quick and it gates everything else. Then work on prominence permanently. Ranking higher in Google Maps lists the actions in that order.
What This Means For A Service Area Business
A business that travels to customers has no shopfront for anybody to be near, so the factor it cannot change is working against it everywhere except close to home. That is a structural disadvantage rather than something wrong with the listing.
What it feels like. Working fine locally, invisible elsewhere.
Plenty of enquiries from the town you are based in and almost nothing from the ones ten minutes away, despite covering both willingly.
Why the service area does not fix it. It is not a distance setting.
The area you enter tells Google where you are willing to travel. It does not move your premises, so it does not change the distance calculation for somebody searching elsewhere.
What actually helps. The other two factors, harder.
With no premises advantage, relevance and prominence do proportionally more of the work for you. That makes category accuracy and reviews more important for a mobile trade than for a shop.
What the correct settings are. Address hidden, area truthful.
Enter your address and hide it, then set an area reflecting where you genuinely work. Our optimisation guide covers that and what works instead of premises.
What not to do. Manufacture a location.
No virtual offices, no relatives' addresses and no listing per town. These are the commonest suspension causes in exactly this segment.
What It Means For Where You Advertise Your Coverage
If you want work in towns you have no premises in, that is a website job rather than a profile job. The listing cannot reach them, so the effort belongs somewhere the distance factor does not apply in the same way.
Why ordinary results are different. Not governed the same way.
Web pages are not selected on how close their business is to the searcher in the way local listings are. A page genuinely serving somebody in a particular town can rank for that town without you being in it.
What that requires. Real pages about real places.
Content about working in that area, the jobs you do there and the customers you have served, rather than one template with the town name swapped. Our location page material covers where that boundary sits.
Why this matters commercially. It is where the growth is.
Most trades have already taken what the listing can give them within a couple of miles. The next enquiries come from further out, which is a different piece of work with a different cost.
How to split your money. Profile first, then the site.
Complete the profile because it is free and it works near you. Then invest in the website, which is the asset you own and the one that extends the business outwards.
Where that conversation goes. Our local SEO material.
The commercial side of this sits outside these guides and we are happy to have it. The full series is on the Google Business Profile guide.
Distance is
fixed. You
cannot buy
your way in.
Google states plainly that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. So when somebody offers to put you in the pack for towns you have no premises in, they are either describing website work under the wrong name or selling something that does not exist.
What we work on, in this order:
If the answer is that you are simply not close enough, we will tell you that and talk about the website instead.
Every guide.
One profile.
Getting set up, claiming and verifying, optimising the listing properly, suspensions and reinstatement, reviews, reading the performance data and appearing in the local pack and in Maps.
