Guide
For local search, your Google Business Profile beats your website.
Google Business Profile signals account for roughly a third of local pack ranking — more than the website contributes. A complete profile with steady reviews will outrank a better website attached to a neglected one.
This is the most under-served part of local SEO, because it doesn't live on the website and so nobody treats it as their job. It is also free, and most of the work is a single afternoon.
Google describes local ranking as resting on three things: relevance, distance, and prominence. Distance you cannot change. The other two are largely decided by your profile and your reviews.
Get the primary category right
This is the highest-leverage single field in local SEO, and it is frequently wrong. Your primary category tells Google what queries you are eligible for at all — a business categorised as 'Marketing agency' will struggle to appear for 'web designer' no matter what the website says.
Look at what the businesses currently ranking above you have chosen. Pick the most specific category that genuinely describes the main thing you do, then add secondary categories for the rest. Do not add categories for things you don't actually offer; it dilutes relevance and invites the wrong enquiries.
Complete every field, including the ones that look pointless
Services, service areas, hours, attributes, description, opening date, photos. Completeness is itself a relevance signal, and a fully filled profile consistently outperforms a sparse one for the same business.
For a service-area business without a storefront, set the service areas honestly. Listing thirty towns you'd technically drive to is the profile equivalent of a city-page matrix — it dilutes rather than extends your reach.
Reviews are the lever, and asking is the whole trick
Review count, average rating, recency, and whether you reply all feed prominence. It is the highest-return activity available to a local business and it costs nothing but the asking.
The businesses that accumulate reviews are almost never the ones with better service — they're the ones who ask every time, immediately, with a direct link. Get the short review link from your profile, save it somewhere you can paste from, and send it while the work is still fresh. Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, because that reply is read by everyone who comes after.
Keep your name, address and phone identical everywhere
Your profile, your website, Facebook, Instagram, Apple Maps, trade directories. Same spelling, same formatting, same phone number.
Inconsistency here is a genuine drag on prominence, because it makes it harder for Google to be confident that all these references describe one business. It's tedious and unglamorous and it works.
Photos, and then more photos
Real photographs of real work, added continuously rather than in one batch at setup. Profiles with active photo streams see more engagement, and engagement feeds the behavioural signals that feed prominence.
Phone photos of finished work are fine. They outperform stock imagery comprehensively, because stock imagery signals that there may be no real work to show.
Then, and only then, the website
None of this makes the website irrelevant. The site is what converts the click into an enquiry, it's what ranks in the organic results below the map pack, and it's what an AI assistant reads when someone asks for a recommendation.
But the order matters. A perfect website attached to an empty profile loses to a mediocre website attached to a profile with two hundred reviews, and the profile is a fraction of the work.
Common questions
I don't have a storefront. Can I still have a profile?
Yes. Set it up as a service-area business, which hides your address while letting you define the areas you serve. You still have to give Google a real address during verification, but it isn't shown publicly.
Does posting to the profile help?
It helps engagement and keeps the profile looking active, and it costs a few minutes. Treat it as maintenance rather than a ranking strategy — it is well below categories, reviews and completeness in terms of return.
Someone left an unfair review. What should I do?
Reply calmly and factually, because the reply is for everyone who reads it later, not for the reviewer. You can request removal if it breaches Google's policies, but genuine-but-negative reviews generally stay. A steady flow of new reviews dilutes an old bad one faster than any appeal.
If you want a second pair of eyes on your profile, it's a quick thing to look at and the fixes are usually immediate. Most of what's wrong with a local business's search presence is sitting in fields nobody has opened in two years.