How to show up in Google’s local results

What the local results actually are

Search for a service and a town and you get a map with three businesses above the ordinary blue links. That block is drawn from Google Business Profiles, not from websites, and it is ranked on three things Google has been fairly open about: relevance (does the profile match what was searched), distance (how close you are to the searcher), and prominence (how well known and well reviewed you are).

Two consequences follow immediately, and they explain most of the confusion about local search.

The first is that there is no single ranking. Someone standing outside your door and someone three miles away see different results. “We are number one” is only ever true from a particular spot, which is why checking it on your own phone in your own shop is misleading.

The second is that your website is not what ranks here — your profile is. The website supports it, and it matters enormously for the blue links underneath, but a business with a superb website and a neglected profile will lose this block to a competitor with the reverse.

In the order worth doing it

1. Claim and finish the profile

Most profiles are perhaps 60% complete, and the missing 40% is free ranking. Work through all of it: the primary category, every secondary category that genuinely applies, your services written out individually, your service area, opening hours, a description, and the attributes.

The primary category is the single highest-leverage field on the whole profile. “Dentist” and “Cosmetic dentist” produce different results. Pick the one matching what you most want to be found for, and add the others as secondary.

2. Get the basics identical everywhere

Your business name, address and phone number should be written exactly the same way on your website, your profile, and every directory that lists you. “Street” in one place and “St” in another, an old phone number on a directory from 2019 — these inconsistencies quietly cost you, and they are tedious rather than difficult to fix.

One thing not to do: stuffing keywords into your business name. “Smith Plumbing — Emergency Plumber Oxford 24/7” does work, which is why people do it, and it is against Google’s guidelines and can be reported by a competitor. Suspension costs you more than the trick gains.

3. Reviews, steadily and forever

This is the part people most want to skip and it is the part that moves prominence most.

What works is a steady trickle rather than a burst. Twenty reviews in a week followed by silence for a year reads as a campaign; two or three a month for two years reads as a functioning business. The practical answer is a one-tap review link handed over at the moment of payment, while the customer is pleased and standing in front of you.

Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, briefly and without defensiveness. Prospective customers read the replies more carefully than the reviews — a measured answer to an angry review is more persuasive than ten five-star ratings.

What you cannot do is incentivise them. Offering a discount for a review is against Google’s policies and increasingly obvious to everyone reading.

4. Photographs, regularly

Real ones, added every few weeks rather than twelve at setup and never again. The premises from the street so people recognise it, the inside, your team, your work. Profiles with current photographs get more clicks and more calls, and activity is itself a signal that you are trading.

5. Then the website

Now your site earns its place, both supporting the profile and competing for the ordinary results underneath:

• A real page for each service. Cambelt change, EICR, balayage, dental implants — one page each. This is the single most effective thing a website does for local search, and a bulleted list on a homepage does none of it.
• Your address and phone number in the HTML, as text, not inside an image, and matching the profile exactly.
• Structured data telling Google your business type, services, hours and location. Boring, invisible, and it helps.
• Loads fast on a phone. Most of these searches happen on mobile data, often in a hurry.
• Pages for the towns you serve, if you serve several — but genuinely different pages. The same paragraph with the place name swapped has been discounted for years and can do harm.

What makes no difference

• Posting to your profile daily. Posts are useful for announcements. There is no evidence they move rankings, and the effort is better spent on reviews.
• Buying directory listings in bulk. A handful of relevant, real directories helps. Three hundred bought for £99 does nothing and occasionally harms.
• Meta keywords. Unused by Google for roughly twenty years. Still sold.
• Paying for “guaranteed number one”. Nobody can guarantee a position that differs by where the searcher is standing. Anyone promising it is either misinformed or counting on you not checking.

How long it takes

Finishing the profile sometimes produces movement within a fortnight, because you are filling in things Google was missing. Reviews and prominence are slower — expect to judge it fairly at three to six months of consistent effort.

If you are in a competitive town against firms with four hundred reviews, longer, and the honest strategy there is to be more specific rather than more general: win EV charger installation in your town rather than electrician.

If you would rather not do it yourself

Profile setup is included in every one of our plans, the review link and the per-service pages come with Business and above, and ongoing local work is part of Growth. The guide above is what we would do, in the order we would do it — so if you want to work through it alone, it should be enough to get you most of the way.