the three signals Google uses to pick the map results

Google publishes the three things it ranks the map on, and every ranking trick you have ever heard of is one of them wearing a costume.

Hi,

Every few weeks somebody sends me a new ranking trick. Post daily. Add every town to your service area. Get listed on every directory there is. Some of them work a bit, some are harmless, some get listings suspended. The way to tell them apart is to know what Google says it actually measures, because it is not a secret. Google publishes it on its own help page for local ranking, and there are three things.

Relevance. How well your listing matches what the person typed. Google reads your primary category, your services, your description and your website to decide. If someone types "sump pump repair" and none of those places says sump pump, you are not relevant to that search, no matter how good you are at fixing them.

Distance. How far your business is from the point the person searched from, or from the place they named. This one you mostly cannot change. You cannot move the shop. What you can do is make sure Google knows exactly where you are and which areas you serve, so it does not guess wrong.

Prominence. How well known your business is, online and off. Reviews and the rating, how often new reviews arrive, mentions of your business on other websites, links to your site, and how well the site itself ranks on its own. This is the slow one. It builds over months and it is the hardest to fake.

Now run the tricks through the three. Posting every day: a small prominence signal, the listing looks active. Adding every town in the state to the service area: does nothing for distance, because Google still measures from where you are, and it spreads a new listing thin. Buying reviews: a prominence shortcut that Google removes and punishes. Once you know the three, you can tell which advice is worth an hour of your time.

Here are the three working at once. Two dentists in Quincy. One has fixed the category, listed every service, and gets new reviews every month from patients who mention the town. The other has more reviews in total, but the newest is from years ago, the category is generic and the website title is just the practice name. From most of Quincy the first one wins, even though the second has the bigger pile, because the first one is more relevant and more recently prominent. Move the search to the street the second one sits on and the second one wins, because distance took over. Same two businesses, different answer, and all three signals were at work.

The lesson is that there is no trick. There is relevance, which you fix in weeks by telling Google exactly what you do. There is prominence, which you build in months with a steady pace of reviews and mentions. And there is distance, which you accept and work around by being honest about where you are.

I wrote the long version, with what moves each one, in how Google picks the top 3 on Maps. Read that, then read the next trick someone sends you and ask which of the three it is.

Talk soon,
Brandon

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