Google describes local ranking as three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. That's accurate but not actionable. What follows is the version that tells you where to spend effort.
Proximity is the strongest factor, and you barely control it
Distance between the searcher and the business is the heaviest single input in local results. A searcher two blocks away sees a different three-pack than one across town. This is why the same business can appear dominant to its owner and invisible to a customer twenty minutes away — both are seeing accurate results for their own location.
The practical consequence: rankings are not a single position. Asking "where do I rank" has no answer without asking "from where." Any report showing one number for a local business is measuring one point and calling it the map.
What you can influence is which location you're competing from, and how well you cover the area around it.
Categories carry more weight than almost anything on the profile
Your primary category is one of the strongest relevance signals available. It determines which searches you're eligible for at all. Get it wrong and the rest of your optimisation is competing in the wrong race.
Two rules that matter more than they sound. Choose the most specific category that genuinely fits — "Emergency plumber" outperforms "Plumber" for emergency searches and doesn't lose you the general ones. And use secondary categories for what you actually do, not for what you'd like to rank for. Stuffing unrelated secondary categories dilutes relevance rather than expanding it.
Reviews: volume, velocity and recency all count separately
Review count matters. So does the rate at which they arrive, and how recent the most recent ones are. A business with 40 reviews arriving steadily outperforms one with 120 that stopped two years ago, because the second pattern suggests a business that may no longer be operating the way it was.
The realistic approach is a consistent, modest ask built into how you finish a job. Bursts look artificial and are treated accordingly.
Responding to reviews matters too — not enormously as a ranking factor, but visibly to the person reading them before deciding whether to call.
NAP consistency is unglamorous and still matters
Name, address and phone number as they appear across the web. Google cross-references your profile against other sources, and inconsistency introduces doubt about which version is correct.
The common failure is not dramatic. It's a suite number present in one place and absent in another, an old phone number on a directory nobody has looked at in years, an abbreviation used inconsistently. Each is minor; collectively they erode confidence in the record.
Audit what exists before building new citations. Cleaning up five wrong listings usually does more than creating twenty new ones.
The profile fields most people fill in once
- Services and products. Individually listed, each with a description. Underused and directly relevant.
- Attributes. Wheelchair accessible, women-owned, appointment required. These feed filtered searches you otherwise never appear in.
- Hours, including special hours. Holiday hours set correctly signal an actively managed profile.
- Description. 750 characters describing what you actually do, in the words customers use.
- Photos, added regularly. Not a one-time upload. Ongoing additions signal an operating business.
Posts, and honest expectations
Google Posts have modest direct ranking impact. They do occupy space in your profile, they do get seen by people already looking at you, and consistent posting is one of the signals distinguishing an actively managed profile from an abandoned one. Worth doing, not worth building a strategy around.
What to do first
If you're starting: verify, then set the primary category correctly, then build a review process into how you finish work. Those three account for most of the achievable difference. Everything else is refinement — worth doing, but not before the foundation exists.