How Does Google Decide Which Local Businesses to Show First?
It can feel like a black box, though Google is fairly open about this. It ranks local businesses on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. The clever part is that two of those three are squarely within your control. Understand them and local SEO stops being a mystery and starts being a plan.
Google ranks local businesses on three main factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well you match the search, distance is how close you are to the searcher. Prominence is how well known and trusted you are. The best overall match across all three appears first. You cannot change distance, though you have strong control over relevance and prominence, which is exactly where local SEO does its work.
Not a black box,
a known formula
Ranking factors
Relevance, distance and prominence, weighed together to decide the order.
You can influence
Relevance and prominence are shaped by your profile, content and reviews.
Largely fixed
Distance depends on where the searcher is, which you cannot change.
Relevance, distance and prominence
Google does not keep its local ranking logic secret. It states plainly that local results are decided by a combination of three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your business matches what the person searched for. Distance is how far you are from the location of the search. Prominence is how well known and well regarded your business is, both online and in the real world.
What makes this genuinely useful is that the factors are not equal in how much you can affect them. Distance is largely out of your hands. You cannot move your premises to sit next to every searcher. But relevance and prominence are different. You shape relevance through your category, your content and the details on your profile. You build prominence through reviews, citations and the authority of your website. Those two are where the work happens.
That is the whole game. A closer competitor is not guaranteed the top spot. A business that is a little further away but far more relevant and prominent can and frequently does outrank it. The diagram below shows how the three feed into a ranking and which levers are yours to pull.
What each factor
actually means
How well you match
How closely your business fits what the person searched for. Driven by your primary category, the content and services on your profile and site, plus the words that describe what you do. You control this directly.
How close you are
How far your business is from the location of the search. The one factor you cannot really change, short of opening another location. It matters, though it is only one of the three, not the whole story.
How known you are
How well known and trusted your business is. Built from reviews, citations, links and your overall reputation online and offline. The factor with the most room to grow and where consistent local SEO pays off most.
The three pillars
of local ranking
Three inputs feed one ranking. Two of them are yours to shape.
Five ways to win on the
two you control
Why the nearer business
can still lose
Often ranks first
- Highly relevant category and content
- Plenty of recent reviews
- Consistent citations everywhere
- Real authority and links
- Beats distance on the other two
Often ranks below
- Vague or wrong category
- Few or stale reviews
- Inconsistent or missing listings
- Little authority online
- Distance alone cannot save it
Let's make you the
best overall match.
We build the relevance and prominence that let you outrank closer competitors: category, content, reviews, citations and authority. Free quote, from £350 per month.