Showing up locally: the work that puts you on the map

For a great many businesses, the search results that matter are not the ordinary blue links at all. They are the map and the three listings beside it, which sit above everything else and take most of the clicks.

That part of search runs on different rules. It cares far less about how much you have written and far more about whether your details are consistent, whether your profile is properly filled in, and whether real people nearby have anything to say about you.

The good news is that it rewards tidiness rather than budget, which is a rare thing in this business.

The profile is the asset

Your Google Business Profile is doing more work than your home page for most local searches, and it is usually the least attended thing a business owns.

The primary category matters more than anything else you will set. It is the single biggest lever on which searches you appear in, and businesses routinely pick something approximate and never revisit it. Choose the one that describes what you mainly do, then add secondary categories for the rest.

Fill in everything. Services, with descriptions. Opening hours, including the special ones at Christmas. Attributes. The description. Every empty field is a question somebody has to answer another way, and a complete profile simply performs better than a sparse one.

Photographs, regularly. Real ones, of the premises, the team, the work, the van. Not stock. This is what somebody looks at when deciding whether you are a real business.

Answer the questions. The questions and answers section is public and anybody can post to it, including people who do not work for you. Seed it with the questions you actually get asked, and check it.

Post occasionally. Offers, news, a job you have just finished. It is not the biggest lever on this page, and it is a signal that somebody is home.

Your details have to match everywhere

This is the unglamorous half, and it is the half that most often quietly holds a business back.

Your business name, address and phone number should be identical everywhere they appear: on your profile, on your website, and in every directory that lists you. Not similar. Identical. “Ltd” in one place and “Limited” in another, an old suite number, a phone number from before you moved, an address with the county in one version and not in another. Each inconsistency is a small doubt about whether these are all the same business.

The usual culprits are old directory entries nobody remembers creating, a listing made by a previous web company, and the number from before you changed provider. Search your own phone number in quotes and see what comes back. It is frequently a surprise.

Do not chase hundreds of directories. A handful of the ones people in your trade actually use, plus the obvious general ones, and then consistency across them, beats a bulk submission service every time. Those services are also how most of the bad old entries got there in the first place.

Premises or patch

Whether customers come to you changes how this works, and getting it wrong causes real problems.

If people visit you, show the address and make sure it is right down to the postcode. If you work at customers’ places instead, you are a service area business: hide the address and set the areas you cover honestly. Listing thirty towns you would technically travel to is not a strategy, and it dilutes the areas you genuinely serve.

Do not invent presence. Renting a mailbox in a town you do not work in, or using a friend’s address, is against the guidelines and it is the sort of thing that gets a profile suspended rather than demoted. Recovering from that is far more painful than never having done it.

Getting the profile verified is its own small ordeal, and it is covered separately later in this series, because there is more to say about it than fits here.

Reviews, since they show up on the map

Local results lean on reviews more visibly than anything else in search, because the stars sit right there in the listing.

The version that works is unremarkable: ask, consistently, at the point somebody is pleased, and make it easy with a direct link. Reply to all of them, particularly the critical ones, because a measured reply to a complaint is read closely by everybody considering you.

What does not work, and increasingly carries a real risk, is anything that manufactures them: buying reviews, incentivising only the happy ones, or leaving reviews for yourself. It is also obvious to customers far more often than businesses think.

The website side of local

Your site still matters, and there are three things worth getting right.

Put your address and phone number in the footer, as text, on every page, matching the profile exactly.

Have a proper page for each place you genuinely work in, if you work in several. Proper means specific: real jobs, real photographs, the things a local would recognise. A page per town with the name swapped is the thing to avoid, and it is covered in the previous part of this series.

Make the phone number tappable and put it where a thumb can reach it. A remarkable share of local enquiries are somebody standing in a kitchen, on a phone, wanting to ring you now.

What to watch

Your profile has its own statistics, and they are more useful than general website numbers for this kind of work. Calls, direction requests, clicks through to the site, and the searches people used to find you.

Direction requests and calls are the ones to care about, because they are somebody deciding to actually turn up or get in touch. Impressions and profile views make a pleasant chart and mean less.

Where to start

Search your business name, your phone number and your postcode, each in quotation marks, and fix whatever those turn up. That is the whole first afternoon and it usually finds something material.

Then open your profile and set the primary category deliberately rather than accepting whatever was chosen years ago. Then fill in every empty field.

Local search is a large part of what we do for the businesses we look after, precisely because it is where their enquiries come from. If you would like somebody to audit your listings and tell you what is inconsistent, get in touch, or read more about how we approach search.

Where these facts come from

The rules about addresses, service areas and representing your business honestly are Google’s own, and worth reading before making changes.

• Google’s guidelines for representing your business on Google (opens in a new tab) cover eligibility, addresses, service area businesses, and the practices that lead to a profile being suspended.
• Google’s prohibited and restricted content policy for Maps contributions (opens in a new tab) sets out what counts as a fake, paid or incentivised review.