Google Business Profile
The one profile setting that decides most of your ranking
Your primary category outranks almost everything else you can change, and most businesses picked it once and never looked again.
Read it
The map is its own ranking
When somebody nearby searches for what you sell, Google shows two different things. There is the map pack near the top, usually three businesses with a little map beside them, and then the ordinary blue links underneath. They are ranked by different rules.
Your website does most of the work for the blue links. Your Google Business Profile does most of the work for the map. A lot of the business owners I talk to have been quietly working on the wrong one for a year.
The map pack is where the phone calls come from. Someone looking for a plumber at nine at night is not reading your about page. They are tapping the first number they see.
Three things decide it
Google says local results are ranked on relevance, distance and prominence. That sounds vague until you translate it.
- Relevance is whether your profile says you do the thing being searched for. Not whether you do it. Whether your profile says so.
- Distance is how far you are from the person searching, or from the town they typed. You cannot move your shop, and this is where people waste the most effort.
- Prominence is how well known Google thinks you are. Reviews, recent activity on the profile, and whether your name, address and phone number match everywhere else on the internet.
Two of the three are yours to move. Spend your time there and ignore the one you cannot change.
What to do with that
Start with relevance, because it is the fastest. Open your profile and read your primary category out loud. If you install metal roofs and it says "contractor", you are competing in a different race than the one you meant to enter. Then list your services one at a time rather than as a single paragraph. Google can only match you to a search it knows you serve.
Then prominence. Ask for reviews and answer every one of them, including the good ones. Post something weekly, even a photo of a finished job. Activity is a signal, and it is the first thing almost everybody drops.
Distance you work around rather than fix. If you want calls from a town twenty minutes away, you will need more reviews and more relevance than the business sitting in the middle of it. That is the trade, and it is worth knowing before you spend money.
How to tell where you stand
Guessing is the expensive part. Run a free scan of your profile and it will tell you which of these three you are losing on. Most of what it finds you can fix yourself in an afternoon.
