How to get your business on Google Maps (and into the Local Pack)

Search for your service and your town. Three businesses appear in a box with a map, star ratings and a call button. Everyone else is below the fold, and most people never get there. Those three slots are worth more than page one of the normal search results for almost every local business I work with.

What the local pack is and why it beats your website

The local pack is the block of three business listings Google shows above the standard results for anything with local intent. "Electrician near me", "solicitor Bristol", "accountant for small business Leeds". It pulls from Google Business Profile, not from your website.

That distinction matters. Your website can be ranking on page three while your profile sits in the local pack, taking calls. The two systems are related, and your site does feed into local ranking, but the profile is doing the heavy lifting.

The listing also does something your website cannot. It shows opening hours, a tap-to-call button, directions, photos and reviews all in one place, before anyone clicks through to anything. A customer can decide to call you without ever seeing your homepage. For a plumber or a takeaway, that is the entire transaction.

How to get your business on Google Maps in the first place

Go to google.com/business and sign in with a Google account you actually control. Use a business email address if you have one, and avoid using a personal account belonging to a member of staff who might leave.

Search for your business name first. Google may already have created a listing from public data such as directories or Companies House, in which case you claim it rather than create a duplicate. Duplicates cause problems later and are tedious to merge.

Then you verify. Google needs to confirm the business is real and that you run it. Video verification is now the most common route: you record an unbroken clip showing your location or work van, your equipment or signage, and evidence you have access, such as unlocking the premises. Postcard and phone verification still exist for some categories. Video is usually the fastest, and the whole thing takes a few days.

One decision to get right at setup. If customers come to you, list your address. If you travel to them, set yourself up as a service area business and hide the address, then list the towns you cover. Listing a residential address publicly when you do not receive customers there is a common own goal.

Your primary category decides what you show up for

Google gives you one primary category and up to nine secondary ones. The primary category is the single biggest thing you control in local ranking, and most small businesses pick it carelessly.

If you are a plumber who does a lot of boiler work, "Plumber" and "Heating contractor" pull in different searches. If you are a solicitor, "Solicitor" is broad, while "Conveyancer" or "Family law attorney" targets the work you actually want. Look at the businesses currently ranking for your target search and check what category they use. You can see this in their profile source data or with a free browser extension.

Then fill in everything else. Services, products, business description, opening hours including bank holidays, and attributes such as wheelchair access or free parking. A profile that is 40% complete competes badly against one that is finished.

Photos matter more than people expect. Real photos of your work, your team and your premises, uploaded regularly, rather than ten stock images added once at setup.

Distance, relevance and prominence: how Google ranks local results

Google publishes its local ranking factors, which is unusual, and they are worth reading in full. The official guidance names three: relevance, distance and prominence.

Relevance is how well your profile matches what was searched, which is where categories, services and your description do their work. Distance is how close you are to the searcher, and you cannot change it. Prominence is how well known and well regarded the business is, drawn from reviews, links, mentions elsewhere on the web and your general web presence.

The practical consequence of distance is that a business in a town centre will outrank you for town centre searches even if your profile is better. Fighting that is a waste of energy. What works instead is building relevance and prominence so you rank across a wider radius, and creating pages on your own site for the specific towns you serve, with real content about work you have done there.

Renting a virtual office address to appear in a city centre is one of the fastest ways to get a listing suspended.

Reviews do more for local visibility than almost anything else

Reviews feed prominence, and they feed the human decision that follows. BrightLocal's annual Local Consumer Review Survey has found year after year that the large majority of consumers read online reviews before using a local business.

Volume, recency and rating all count. Twelve reviews from four years ago look worse than twelve from the last six months, because a stale profile suggests a business that may not still be trading.

A few things that work:

• Ask in person at the point the customer is happiest, then follow up with a direct link by text
• Reply to every review, including the bad ones, in a calm and factual tone
• Never offer discounts or incentives for reviews, which breaches Google's policies

The reply is public and future customers read it. A measured response to a one star review often does more good than the review does harm.

The mistakes that get profiles suspended

Suspension is brutal. Your listing disappears from Maps and search, and reinstatement can take weeks of back and forth with a support team that gives very little away.

The usual causes are avoidable. Stuffing keywords into the business name, so "Smith Plumbing" becomes "Smith Plumbing Emergency Plumber Leeds 24 Hour". Using an address you do not occupy. Setting up multiple listings for the same business at the same address. Listing a business at a co-working space or PO box.

Your name field should contain your real world business name, the one on your sign and your invoices. Nothing else.

Keep the profile active once it is live. Post occasionally, add photos, update hours before holidays, and answer questions in the Q&A section yourself before someone else answers them wrongly.

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