For any business serving a specific area, three results sit above the map and take a very large share of the clicks. Getting into that three-pack is a distinct job with distinct rules — and much of it has nothing to do with your website.
This guide covers what genuinely moves you into the local pack, in priority order, and flags the popular tactics that are a waste of an afternoon.
How local rankings are decided
Google has described the local algorithm in unusually plain terms. Three factors:
- Relevance. How well your business matches what was searched. Driven mostly by your primary category, your services, and the language on your profile and website.
- Distance. How far you are from the searcher, or from the place they named. You cannot change this — but it explains why you rank in one postcode and vanish in the next.
- Prominence. How well known and well regarded you are: reviews, citations, links, press, and your organic strength for the same terms.
The practical consequence: you compete on relevance and prominence within the distance you have. Two businesses 400 metres apart can have wildly different visibility purely because one has completed their profile properly and the other has not.
Your Google Business Profile, field by field
This is the highest-return work in local SEO and most businesses complete about forty per cent of it.
Primary category
The single most influential setting you control. Your primary category should match what you most want to be found for, not what feels most prestigious. "Emergency plumber" and "Plumber" produce different visibility. Check what the businesses already ranking in your pack use — it is visible in their profiles — and test changes deliberately, one at a time, with a fortnight between.
Secondary categories
Add every category that genuinely applies, and none that do not. Irrelevant categories dilute relevance and can be reported by competitors.
Services and products
Fill these in properly, with descriptions. They give Google explicit text about what you do, and they surface in the profile where customers read them.
Business description
750 characters. Write for a human, include the services and the area naturally, and do not keyword-stuff — it is a common reason for suspension.
Attributes, hours and holiday hours
Complete every attribute available. Set special hours for bank holidays; profiles that show wrong hours get corrected by the public, and repeated public edits erode trust in your data.
Photos
Upload real photos regularly — premises, team, work in progress, finished jobs. Businesses that add photos consistently see more profile interactions, and photos are the first thing a customer compares between three near-identical results.
Q&A and Posts
Seed the Q&A with the questions you actually get asked, and answer them from the business account. Post updates monthly — offers, jobs completed, seasonal advice. It is a small signal and a decent conversion surface.
NAP consistency and citations
NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. A citation is any mention of those details on another website. The job is not to acquire hundreds — it is to make sure the ones that exist agree with each other.
Inconsistency is common and usually accidental: an old suite number, a previous phone number, a name with "Ltd" in some places and not others, an address formatted differently on the profile than on your own contact page.
Where to focus
| Tier | Examples | Priority |
|---|---|---|
| Your own site | Contact page, footer, LocalBusiness schema | Do this first |
| Core aggregators | Google, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook | High |
| National directories | Yell, Thomson Local, Trustpilot, Checkatrade, Which? Trusted Traders | Medium |
| Local & industry | Chamber of Commerce, town directories, trade bodies | Medium — and often the best links |
| Everything else | Bulk submission services | Skip |
Also hunt for duplicate listings, which split your reviews and confuse Google. Search your business name, your phone number and your address separately, and report duplicates through the profile interface.
Reviews: the system, not the scramble
Reviews influence both ranking and, far more visibly, whether anyone chooses you once they see you. Recency matters: forty reviews from three years ago is weaker than twelve from the last six months.
A request system that survives a busy week
- Pick the moment. Immediately after the job is finished and the customer is visibly happy, not weeks later in a newsletter.
- Make it one tap. Use the short review link from your profile, sent by text. QR codes on invoices and vans work well for in-person trades.
- Ask by name, in your own words. Templates that read like templates get ignored.
- Prompt specifics. "If you have a moment, mentioning the job we did and the area would really help other people find us" produces reviews containing service and location language, which is genuinely useful.
- Never incentivise. Offering anything in exchange breaches the guidelines and risks the whole profile.
Replying
Reply to all of them, briefly. For negative reviews: acknowledge, state the fact simply, offer to take it offline, and stop. Future customers are reading how you handle criticism far more closely than they are reading the complaint.
Location pages that are not doorway pages
If you serve several towns, you probably want a page per town. Done badly this is a doorway-page pattern that Google explicitly penalises. Done properly it is one of the most effective things on a local site.
The difference is entirely in the content. A page for each area should contain things that could only be true of that area:
- Two or three real jobs you have done there, with photos and specifics
- Reviews from customers in that area
- Local context — parking, common property types, typical issues, travel time
- Who covers it and how quickly you can get there
- An embedded map and
LocalBusinessorServiceschema with the area served - Internal links from your main service pages and from the area index page
The test: if you swapped the town name for another town, would the page still be accurate? If yes, it is a doorway page and should not exist yet. Better to have three genuinely local pages than twenty templated ones.
Local prominence: links and mentions
Prominence is where most local competitions are actually decided, because everyone has the same distance constraint and many have similar profiles.
The local link sources that work are the ones described in our link building guide, with a local slant:
- Local news coverage of something you genuinely did
- Sponsorship listings — sports clubs, school events, community groups
- Chamber of Commerce and business network member profiles
- Local charity supporter pages
- Supplier "find an installer" pages filtered by region
- Local blogs, "best of" round-ups and community sites
Ten of these beats a hundred generic directory submissions, and they compound: the same relationships tend to produce repeat mentions year after year.
Five local tactics that waste your time
- Keyword-stuffing your business name. "Chester Plumbers | Emergency Plumbing 24/7" as a profile name is against the rules, easily reported by competitors, and risks suspension. It also works less well than it used to.
- Using a virtual office or a relative's address. Fake locations get suspended, and reinstatement is slow and unpleasant.
- Bulk directory submissions. Hundreds of low-quality citations do nothing measurable.
- Twenty templated town pages. Thin, duplicated and treated as doorway pages.
- Obsessing over one ranking check. Your position varies by the metre. Use a grid, look at trends, and judge by enquiries rather than a single screenshot.
A realistic 90-day local SEO plan
| Weeks | Focus | Expected effect |
|---|---|---|
| 1–2 | Grid baseline, full profile rebuild, categories, services, photos | Profile interactions rise almost immediately |
| 3–4 | Citation audit, fix top-tier listings, report duplicates | Data consistency; groundwork for trust |
| 5–6 | Review system live; first batch of requests sent | First new reviews landing |
| 7–9 | Two or three genuine location pages, internal links, schema | Organic local rankings begin moving |
| 10–12 | Local link push: sponsorship, chamber, one press angle | Prominence improves; pack positions follow |
| 13 | Re-run the grid and compare with week one | Evidence of what worked in your area |
Three months is realistic for a town. Competitive city centres take six to nine. If you would rather have it done, that is exactly the scope of our local SEO service.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need a shop or office to appear in the map pack?
You need a verified location. Service-area businesses can hide the street address and define the areas they cover, which is the normal setup for trades. With no address at all you can still rank organically for local terms, but not in the pack.
How long does it take to get into the three-pack?
Profile and category work can move things in two to four weeks. Reviews and citations compound over two to three months. Competitive urban markets take longer.
Does my website still matter for local rankings?
Yes. Your organic strength for the same terms feeds prominence, and your site is where the conversion happens once someone clicks through from the pack.
How many reviews do I need?
Enough to be comparable with the three currently ranking, and arriving steadily. Look at their counts, then aim to beat their rate of new reviews rather than their total.
Should I use a rank tracking tool?
A grid-based local tracker is worth it if you serve several areas. For a single location, a monthly manual check plus enquiry numbers is enough.
Martin Huntbach
SEO strategist & co-founder
Martin has been doing SEO for small businesses since 2009. He runs the technical and strategy side of the studio and has a well-documented weakness for spreadsheets.
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