Search for a trade or a local service and Google gives you three businesses on a map before it gives you a single ordinary result. Those three take the majority of the clicks. Everyone below is competing for what is left. Most small business owners we speak to have a Google Business Profile, filled it in once, and have no idea why a competitor two streets away outranks them. The answer is usually boring and fixable.
What Google says it is doing
Google has only ever confirmed three pillars for local results: proximity, relevance and prominence. Proximity is how close you are to whoever is searching. You cannot change it, and it matters more than anything else, which is why a business in the next town rarely appears no matter how good its marketing is. Relevance is how well your profile matches what was typed. Prominence is how well known and well regarded you appear to be. Beyond that, Google says nothing. What we have instead is BrightLocal's annual survey of local search practitioners, which weights the factors driving the local pack roughly as follows: the Google Business Profile itself at 32%, reviews at 20%, on-page signals at 15%, behavioural signals at 9%, links at 8%, citations and personalisation at 6% each, and social at 4%. Read that distribution again. Half the weight sits in two things you fully control and can improve this month.
Your primary category is the single biggest lever
In the same research, the primary category ranks as the number one individual local pack factor. Not reviews. Not your website. The category dropdown you filled in when you set the profile up and have not looked at since. Get it exactly right rather than approximately right. "Electrician" and "Electrical installation service" compete for different searches. A bakery that also does coffee will rank very differently as "Bakery" than as "Coffee shop". Pick the one that matches the money you actually want, set the rest as secondary categories, and check what category your top three competitors are using. That last step takes ten minutes and frequently explains the whole gap.
Reviews carry a fifth of the weight
Volume, recency and rating all count, and so does whether you reply. A profile with 40 reviews where the most recent is from 2023 looks dormant next to one with 25 that includes three from this month. The practical fix is a process rather than a campaign. Ask at the point the customer is happiest, which for most trades is the moment the job is finished and before you have sent the invoice. Send a direct link to the review form, not instructions to search for you. Reply to every review including the bad ones, because a measured reply to a one-star review reassures the next reader far more than the absence of complaints would. Do not buy reviews. Google is better at spotting them than the people selling them claim, and a suspended profile costs you every position at once.
Your name, address and phone number, written identically everywhere
Citations only carry about 6% of the weight, so this is not where the leverage is. But the consistency of them matters more than the number: businesses with matching name, address and phone details across directories are around 40% more likely to appear in the local pack. In the UK this goes wrong in predictable ways. The registered name at Companies House differs from the trading name. The address is written with the county on some listings and not others. The postcode has no space in it on one directory and a space on another. The phone number appears as 0161, +44 161 and 0161 with spaces, across three different sites. Pick one exact format. Use it on your website footer, your Google profile, Yell, Bing Places, Facebook, Checkatrade or your trade equivalent, and anywhere else you are listed. Write it down somewhere so whoever creates the next listing copies it rather than retypes it.
If you visit customers rather than receive them
Set your profile up as a service area business and hide the address. Plumbers, mobile mechanics, cleaners and consultants working from home routinely publish a home address they did not intend to publish, then wonder why proximity is pinning them to a residential street rather than the town centre they work across. Define the service area by the towns and postcodes you genuinely cover. Listing thirty areas you would technically travel to dilutes relevance without helping.
The on-page 15% that most sites waste
Your website still matters, and the most common failure is having one page that lists eight services across four towns. Google cannot rank that page for anything specific because it is not about anything specific. One page per service, and where you genuinely have a presence, one page per town. Real content on each, not the same paragraph with the place name swapped, which Google has recognised as a pattern for years. Put your name, address and phone number in the footer in that exact agreed format, and add LocalBusiness schema so the details are machine readable.
What to do this week
None of this is fast. Local rankings move over weeks, not days, and proximity will always cap how far you can reach. But the businesses sitting in the three pack are rarely doing anything clever. They are usually just doing this consistently while their competitors do not.
- One. Check your primary category against the three businesses currently outranking you.
- Two. Fix your name, address and phone format everywhere it appears, starting with your own footer.
- Three. Set up a routine for asking for reviews at the end of every job, with a direct link.
- Four. Reply to every review you have, including old ones.
- Five. Split your one services page into a page per service.
Related reading
- Once people do find you, the next question is whether the site converts them: five things we check when a site has traffic but no enquiries.
- The on-page 15% in more depth, including schema and Core Web Vitals: the technical SEO checklist for 2026.
- Asking for reviews after every job is exactly the kind of repeated task worth automating: what UK small businesses should automate first.
Want to know where you stand?
Send us your business name and the search terms you want to rank for. We will check your profile, your citation consistency and your top three competitors, and send back a written summary of what is holding you back. Free, and no obligation to work with us afterwards. Book a free consultation at devsioservices.com/contact, or read about our approach to SEO and local search at devsioservices.com/services/seo.
