How to win the map pack without buying a single link
Local rankings are decided by relevance, distance and prominence. Two of those you can influence directly, starting this week.
Relevance is a settings problem
Most profiles underperform because the primary category is wrong or too broad. The primary category carries more weight than almost anything else you control, so it deserves genuine research rather than a quick guess during setup.
Fill every service, add real attributes, and write the description for a person deciding between you and two competitors rather than for a keyword tool.
Prominence is an activity problem
Profiles that are actively maintained outperform dormant ones. Weekly posts, fresh photos, answered questions and prompt review responses all signal a business that is operating and paying attention.
Reviews matter, and the pattern matters more than the average. A steady trickle of recent, detailed reviews beats a burst of ten from three years ago.
Distance is the constraint you cannot argue with
You will not rank in the map pack for a suburb twenty kilometres away just because you serve it. What you can do is build genuinely useful service area pages on your site, so you capture that demand through organic results instead.
The unglamorous part
Citation consistency. Your name, address and phone number matching everywhere they appear is dull work that removes ambiguity, and ambiguity is what stops Google trusting your data.
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