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When customers search for businesses like yours, are they finding you – or your competition? Rich Brooks breaks down what really matters in local SEO today, form optimizing your Google Business Profile and collecting customer reviews to improving your chances of landing in Google’s coveted map pack.
How to Get Into the Google Map Pack: Local SEO That Matters Now
Search for “men’s barber” and you don’t need to add a town name or “near me.” Google assumes you want a haircut, not a career change, and it hands you a map with three businesses on it. That box is called the map pack, and if your business isn’t in it, you’re probably invisible to that searcher.
Three listings is not a lot of real estate. If you’re number four, you might as well be number one hundred and four. (Think Highlander, except there can be only three.)
I recently rebuilt flyte’s local SEO webinar from scratch, which meant a few weeks buried in Google’s documentation and the latest research. Here’s what matters, in the order I’d tackle it.
What Local SEO Is, and Who Needs It
Local SEO is everything you do to show up higher when someone runs a local search. That includes the map pack, the regular organic listings below it, and paid options like local service ads. I’m skipping paid today, but if your competitors have a head start, a little ad spend can make a real difference.
If you run a retail shop, a service-area business like an HVAC company, or anything tied to tourism, this applies to you. We get a lot of visitors in Maine, and people from away searching for somewhere to eat, drink, sleep, or shop decide fast. You want to be on that list.
Here’s the problem with local organic results: Google tends to favor big, established names, so that section is often packed with chains, guides, and media sites. For most small businesses, the map pack is the best shot.
The Three Pillars: Relevance, Distance, Prominence
Google says it weighs relevance, distance, and prominence. Relevance is how well your Google Business Profile matches the search (your profile, not your website). Distance is how far you are from the searcher, and you can’t do much about that, even with a food truck. Prominence is how well known you are, which you can nudge but not rush.
That leaves relevance as your biggest opportunity, and it starts with your Google Business Profile.
Claim and Fix Your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile is the biggest lever you can pull. Search for your business name, and if the knowledge panel on the right says “Own this business?”, click it. Google may verify you by postcard, phone call, or video chat, so follow whatever it asks for. Once it’s yours, you can edit it at business.google.com or straight from search results while logged in.
Google’s documentation tells you what it wants, but it keeps some of the algorithm secret so everyone can’t game the system. That’s why you should also look at Whitespark’s Local Search Ranking Factors report, where 47 local SEO experts scored 187 factors based on what they see in the field. Put the two together and you get a pretty clear picture of your to-do list.
Near the top of the list:
- Your primary category. Seems obvious, but it’s important to get right. A client of ours recently bought a competing business that was listed as a tent rental company. It installed awnings on houses.
- Keywords in your business name. A locksmith with “locksmith” in its name tends to beat one without. Please don’t stretch this. Google is strict that your listing name match your real business name, so flyte new media can’t become “flyte branding, web design, and digital marketing” without getting flagged. The penalty can be losing your local traffic overnight.
- A physical address in the searcher’s city. Great if you see clients on site. Harder if you’re a service company or you want to rank in a nearby town. The rule exists to protect local businesses, but it can be a hurdle, so you’ll need to do a lot of other things well to level the field.
Proximity is also high on the list, but again, not in your control.
Reviews: Aim for Steady, Not Sudden
Once your profile is filled out, reviews are the next big piece. Respond to every one, whether it’s glowing, lukewarm, or ugly.
Don’t try to collect a hundred reviews by Friday. It looks unnatural, and unnatural is exactly what Google flags. A consistent trickle beats a flood.
Make asking part of how you work. Your profile has a button that generates a review link you can send to customers. When appropriate, remind customers what they told you they liked. If an HVAC customer raved about their new heat pump, invite them to mention it, because the keywords in reviews help Google match you to the right searches.
If you have a high volume of customers, software can automate the asking. We use GatherUp with some clients, at roughly $100 a month, and it makes sense once you’re talking to a hundred or more customers a month, like a restaurant or coffee shop. An architect with a handful of clients a month can skip it and just ask personally after a project wraps. One caution: Google’s guidelines say you shouldn’t only solicit happy customers, so check the current rules before you lean on any tool that filters by sentiment.
Keep Your Profile Busy
Photos, videos, answered questions, and Google Business Profile posts all signal engagement. The more time people spend on your profile, the more Google tends to reward you, all things being equal. We did posts for a while and then drifted away from them, so consider this a note to self.
Don’t Ignore Your Website
On-page signals are the top factor for local organic results. That’s the harder place to rank, but it’s still worth chasing. Three moves help.
One page per service. At flyte, that means branding, web design, and digital marketing, plus pages for subcategories like local SEO, paid search, and email marketing.
One page per real location. The word “real” is doing the heavy lifting there. Fifty towns with fifty “unique” pages where only the town name changes is thin content, and it can get you penalized. If you have one location and a big service area, mention your key towns but skip the copy-and-paste pages.
If you have three pizza shops in three towns, give each its own page with details that matter to that spot. One surveying company I looked at showcased work across towns and mentioned lakefront property rules. Adding the specific regulations for each town would have been even better, for readers and for rankings.
Consistent NAP. That’s name, address, and phone number. Google knows “Street” and “St.” are the same thing, so don’t sweat that. Do sweat different phone numbers across directories, your website, and your social profiles. It confuses Google, and it makes AI search less confident about recommending you.
Earn Local Links
Off-site signals count too. Get on local best-of lists, join the chamber of commerce if it links back to you, and sponsor youth sports or community events. Every local link tells Google you’re a legitimate result.
Your Next Steps
- Search your business name and claim your Google Business Profile if you haven’t.
- Check your primary category. Does it match what you do and what people search for?
- Set a review routine: ask after every finished project, and reply to every review.
- List your services and locations, then confirm each real one has its own page.
- Compare your name, address, and phone number across your website, profile, and social accounts.
- Pick one local link to go after this month, like a chamber membership or a sponsorship.
Transcript From Rich Brooks’s Episode
Welcome to another episode of The Agents of Change podcast, the podcast that’s here to help you reach and engage more of your ideal customers online. My name is Rich Brooks. I’m your host, and this is episode 641, powered by flyte new media.
Here at flyte, we’re coming up on our 30th anniversary, and after nearly 30 years of creating content, as you can imagine, we’ve got a lot of content. Because of the type of industry that we’re in, digital marketing, a lot of that content goes stale, often sooner than we would like. In fact, we’re in the process of redoing our website right now, and a big part of the project is looking at all the debris that’s built up on our current website.
Some of that is public-facing, and some of it’s just behind the scenes. But we’re looking at all the pages, all the forms, all the blog posts, the landing pages, the thank you pages, and we need to determine what should be updated, what should be merged, what should be migrated, and what should be left behind and maybe never spoken of again.
One of the types of content that we regularly create are webinars. The problem being in an industry that is as fast-moving as digital marketing is that content goes out of date quicker than we’d like. So part of our process here at flyte, and something we talk about in our weekly marketing meetings, is which of our blog posts and which of our webinars need to be updated?
There are a number of factors that go into it, including is the information still valuable to a visitor on our website? Is it still relevant for what we’re doing as a business? Are search engines still serving up that content, or do they feel it’s gone stale and there’s better results out there? All of these reasons dictate whether or not a blog post gets rewritten or a webinar gets re-recorded.
Now, recently, we’ve been looking through all of our content, as I mentioned, and especially this on-demand content, which is basically our recorded webinars, and trying to determine what needed to be updated. One of the topics was local SEO. We hadn’t updated our local SEO webinar in a couple of years, and things have definitely changed.
Some of that was due to AI and AI search, although that hasn’t impacted local search as much as it’s impacted organic search. In any case, it fell to me to redo our local SEO webinar, which I delivered recently. Because things had changed since the last time we did something on local SEO, and because we hadn’t really talked about local SEO in a while here on the podcast, I thought that for today I could share with you some of the biggest takeaways from my research into local SEO.
Now, while local SEO doesn’t impact every business out there, if you’re a local business, it absolutely does. That could mean a retail store. It could mean a company with a service area like an HVAC repair shop, or it could be something that’s related to the tourism industry, which we have a lot of here in Maine.
When people from away are looking for places to eat, drink, sleep, or shop, you want to show up when they’re doing relevant searches as well. With that in mind, let’s dive into what matters now in local SEO.
First off, let’s define what we mean by local SEO. When I’m talking about local SEO, I’m talking about the actions that you can take to appear higher when somebody does a local search. And those search results can appear in the map pack, which you’ve undoubtedly seen this before. You do a search for something like men’s barber. You don’t even need to say the town. You don’t even need to say ‘near me’. Google just understands that if you’re looking for a men’s barber you’re probably looking for something nearby. You’re not looking for information about becoming a men’s barber. You’re just looking to find somebody to cut your hair. So whether or not you give a town name or you say near me, or you basically just say that, Google recognizes that there’s local intent.
And one of the things it’s likely to show you is what’s called the map pack, which has three listings and a map. It might have four listings if an ad shows up there, but basically, you’re seeing that. So it’s local results can appear in the map, but they can also appear in the regular organic listings as well. Local SEO includes the map pack as well as the organic listings, but local search visibility can include paid search ads that show up in the map pack, but it can also include local service ads or LSAs.
Now, we’re not going to be getting into paid results today, but I just want to recognize that if you’re serious about getting seen in local results, especially if your competitors have a head start on you, spending some money on paid search or on LSAs can make a world of difference. In my opinion, any local business can score in the local pack.
Although the challenge here is only three businesses get listed organically, so if you’re number four, you might as well be number one hundred and four. So the local pack is our best opportunity. It often appears at the top of the page. Further down that page, the results we see are organic. But because Google tends to recommend large established businesses over smaller companies, a lot of times the results in the local organic sections are guides or big media companies or chains.
So really, for most of us, our best opportunities is hitting that map pack. Now, the research that I’m sharing with you today comes from Google’s own documentation, as well as the local search ranking factors report that’s put out semi-annually by White Spark, and of course, our own experience working with local businesses here at flyte for nearly three decades.
Google’s own documentation tells us what they’re looking for, but it’s not the teacher’s edition. It doesn’t give us all the answers we need, which is why that local search results report is so important because it surveys some of the top local SEO experts and determines what they’re actually seeing out in the field and how things have changed.
So when you combine those two resources, you can get a pretty accurate picture of what you should be doing in local SEO. And I’m going to try and distill that all down today on what you should be focused on. Let’s start by talking about what Google is looking for. By its own definitions and by its own documentation, it talks about three pillars: relevance, distance, and prominence.
Relevance is how well your Google business profile matches what somebody’s searching for. So again, your Google business profile, not your website. Distance refers to how far each business is from where the prospective customer is searching. Now, that’s not really something you can control. Even if you have a food truck which moves regularly, that’s just something that’s out of your control, so we’re not going to talk too much about it.
And lastly, prominence, or how well known your business is. Prominent places, established businesses are more likely to show up in the search results. There’s not much you can do about that either, although we can talk about a few tactics to increase your online visibility and prominence. One thing that everybody seems to agree on is that your Google Business Profile is your biggest lever that you can pull to increase your online visibility.
So the first thing you need to do is make sure that you actually have control over your Google Business Profile, and that starts by what’s called claiming your account. If you’ve never done this before, basically the easiest way to do it is to just search for your business by name in Google, and then when it pops up in what’s called the knowledge panel, which is off to the right-hand side, which often includes photos and a map and details about your business, if it says, “Own this business?” question mark, that’s your opportunity to begin claiming your business.
And there’s a process for this, and I’m not going to get into it here, but you can follow what the requirements are, and it might include a postcard, it might include a phone call, it might include a video chat. Whatever it is you need to do, but you need to take ownership of your Google Business Profile so you can make changes to it and optimize it.
Once you’ve claimed your profile, then you can go ahead and start making edits to it. There’s a couple of ways that you can get there. One is by visiting business.google.com, or again, if you’re logged in as your business to Google, you can just do a search on your company name, and now in addition to the knowledge panel, you’re also going to see your business on Google right at the top of the page, and that’s going to give you options on editing and improving your Google Business Profile.
Now, this is where that local SEO survey report comes in because we don’t want to just necessarily follow exactly what Google tells us. We should follow what the experts are sharing with us, and basically what this survey did is it talked to forty-seven experts in the field. It gave them a hundred and eighty-seven different factors that impact local SEO and asked them to rank it, and it was a very involved survey.
I’m just going to mention a few of the top results, and the number one way that you can improve your Google Business profile, and therefore your local search visibility, is by choosing the right primary category for your business. Just the other day, I was talking to one of our clients, and they had purchased a competing business, and that competing business was listed as a tent rental company, and in fact, what that company did is provide awnings on houses.
So although this seems obvious, a lot of people don’t set this up correctly. So the number one thing you can do is make sure that is in alignment with the business that you are and what people are searching for. Number two is about proximity, which again, you can’t really change. Number three was keywords in your Google Business profile, which means that all things being equal, if you’re a locksmith and the word ‘locksmith’ is in your company name, you’re going to do better than a locksmith that doesn’t have the word ‘locksmith’ in your company name.
And before you run off and just drop a bunch of keywords into your company name in your Google Business profile, Google is very strict about the fact that you can’t do that. So flyte new media has to be flyte new media. It can’t be flyte branding, web design, and digital marketing. That’s going to get flagged. That’s going to get you penalized, and you’re suddenly going to get no traffic from local search.
Number four is about having a physical address in the city where somebody’s doing the search. And that’s great if you have a physical location where you see clients. It’s a lot trickier if you are a service company where you’re not actually seeing clients there or if you want to rank for a nearby city even though your location is somewhere else. These are challenges and they’re set up specifically that way to help local businesses, but this can be a hindrance for service-based businesses. And all I can say is you’re going to have to do a lot of other things right so you can balance that playing field.
A lot of the other things in the top ten and twenty when it comes to these importance of what you should be doing next have to do with reviews. So go through your Google Business profile. Do all the edits you can possibly do, and then the next step is really going out and getting reviews from customers.
Now, getting reviews as a business on some level happens naturally. When people have a good or bad experience with your business, they go online, they leave reviews. And Google does look at reviews from all over, but it does seem to prioritize reviews on the Google platform. Now, when you’re logged into your business profile, one of the things that you’ll see there is the ability to respond to reviews, which is a great thing to do. Whenever anybody leaves you a review, good, middling, or bad, you should respond to it.
Now, knowing that reviews are important, you might be thinking, “Let me go out and get a hundred reviews tomorrow.” That’s probably not a good idea. It doesn’t feel natural, it doesn’t feel organic, and that’s the very kind of activity that Google is going to flag. So it’s more about getting a consistent cadence of reviews.
So what you should be doing is making it part of your policy to reach out to customers and push them or ask them to leave reviews for you. And within your Google Business profile, one of the buttons there is about getting reviews. And one of the things that I’ve struggled with over the years is showing people how they can leave a review on Google, because it is not the most intuitive way possible.
But now, and I don’t know how long this has been going on, honestly, is there’s a button there where it will generate a link that you can share with customers so they can leave reviews. Now, Google says that you really shouldn’t be sending out these links only to people who are going to leave you good reviews. But let’s be honest, you’re not going to be talking to a customer who had a really bad experience and then sending them this link.
There’s also some software out there, and we use a piece of software with some of our customers called Gather Up, which basically automates the process of surveying customers. And if you get a good review, the response is, “Please use this link to go leave a review on your favorite platform.” If you get a middling or a poor review, that actually gets redirected back to customer service on your team so that you can try and remedy the situation.
This software obviously has a cost. I think it’s about $80 to $100 a month, and so it’s worthwhile if you have a lot of customers that you’re trying to get in touch with, like a hundred or more per month. If you’re a restaurant or a coffee shop, that might be true. But if you’re an architect, you’re probably only going to have a few clients a month that you’re dealing with, maybe even fewer, so you probably don’t need to use software in that case.
In that case, and this is how I do it at flyte, is just following up with customers after a project has been completed or after a certain amount of months on an ongoing project, I just touch base with them. And if they say things like, “Hey, I really enjoyed working with your team,” or, “I really like the results I got from the SEO you did,” that’s something where I might send them a link and say, “Hey, would you mind leaving a review for us?”
And one key thing is if you have the opportunity is just remind them what they said, because Google is also looking at the keywords in those reviews to make sure that it’s matching up with the right type of company. So if you’re an HVAC company and you did something really good when it came to the heating, you might ask somebody to talk about the heating or the air conditioning or the heat pump you installed or whatever it is. Because the more keyword-rich that review is, the more beneficial it might be to you as well.
Within your Google Business profile, you can also do things like upload photos, upload videos, answer questions, and even do Google posts, Google Business Profile posts, which is something that we did back for a while and then we got away from. But it is that activity and that engagement that Google’s looking at when it comes to how likely they are to rank you near the top of the local search results.
So the more that you can invest in getting people to spend a little bit more time with your Google Business profile, by adding more photos, by including videos, by doing regular Google Business posts, the more likely it is that they spend more time there. That sends a signal to Google that they’re more engaged, and Google is going to likely reward you, all things being equal, by ranking you higher in the local results.
So again, your Google Business profile is the number one lever you can pull to improve your visibility in local search, and specifically in the map pack on Google. But as we discussed, it’s not the only thing that’s going to help you. And there’s things you can do on your own website that will improve your visibility.
These are called on-page signals, and it’s the number one factor in local organic results. And again, local organic is what appears in the regular organic results when there’s a map pack there. And again, it’s difficult to rank there because Google tends to prioritize bigger companies, more established companies. But it’s not impossible to rank there, and that can be a good place to catch some more traffic as well.
So on-page signals are definitely important, and there’s a lot of value there as well. So what are some of the things that you should do on your website? One of the things that you might not be thinking of in terms of its value for local search, but it is very important, is one page per service.
So if you offer multiple things… for flyte, our main categories are branding, web design, and digital marketing, we should have a page on each one of those. And in fact, we do. And in fact, we have a page for some of the subcategories there. So under marketing, we might include things like SEO, local SEO, paid search, paid social, content marketing, email marketing, and so on.
Another thing you can do on your website is have one page per real location. Now, I stress the word ‘real’ for a reason. So we’ve all seen those websites where there’s a service area, it might include fifty towns, and suddenly you can see that there are fifty unique pages. And I use the word ‘unique’ loosely here because basically it’s the same page, but they switched out one town name for another town name. That’s often considered thin content, and Google is not looking for that.
Now, if you have a physical location, maybe you own a pizza joint and you have three different locations and they’re in three different towns, then yes, absolutely you should have a page for each one of those locations. But if you just have one business location and then you have a big service area, Google does not want to see a page for each one of those, and it can even be something that might get you penalized.
So if you only have one location, you can certainly mention some of the more important towns that you service, but you just shouldn’t have a unique page for each. And if you do have multiple locations, make sure that the pages for each one of those locations are unique. Don’t just swap out town names. Give really relevant information.
One of the examples that I brought up in the presentation was about a surveying company and some of the different work they had done in different towns. They had a whole portfolio section, and they even reference some of the different rules about whether it’s a lake-facing property or not, and that’s great. But if they had gone into even more detail about what some of the regulations were for that specific town or that specific area, it would have been even more beneficial both to the user but also to them to rank higher in the search.
Another important thing for your website, your Google Business Profile, and everywhere else you appear on the web is to have identical or rather consistent NAP information, NAP being an acronym meaning name, address, and phone number. Now, Google can tell the difference between street spelled out and St., so you don’t need to worry about that level of detail. But I’ve definitely seen companies that have different phone numbers listed in different directories and then different on their website, and that’s where things get confusing. That’s also bad when it comes to AI search because AI wants to provide accurate information, and if it sees discrepancies, it’s probably not going to feel confident to give that as an answer.
So you really want to make sure that your website, your Google Business Profile, and all of your social media profiles, and really anywhere you show up on the web, has consistent NAP information.
One other area where you can make a difference and increase your search visibility on local searches is in what’s called off-site, so things that are happening outside of your website. And this is about getting on localized best of lists, about becoming members in local chambers where they link back to your website or other local organizations. And then consider sponsoring sports like youth sports or local events or local programs where they’ll link back to you as a sponsor. And all of those local links are another signal to Google that you are a good result, and they should be serving you up when people are looking for a type of business like yours when it comes to local search.
So if you’re a local business and you do a search and you’re not appearing in the map pack and you’re not seeing yourself on page one, just as a quick recap, the biggest levers, the most important things that you can do are first to optimize your Google Business Profile. Then to go to your website and optimize all of those things that we talked about, having a page for each service, having a page for each real location, and making sure your NAP information is consistent. And then work on attracting relevant links, local relevant links back to your company’s website.
Now, of course, all of this does take time and energy, and if this is not where your passion lies for your business or you just are too busy or it’s not something that interests you, we’re here to help. You can certainly reach out to me. I’d be happy to talk about your local search visibility and what you can be doing specifically for your business and what we could help you with if that’s the case. And you can just reach out to me through our flyte new media website at takeflyte, F-L-Y-T-E .com, or you can reach out to me through the Agents of Change website.
And as always, I am active on LinkedIn, and I am the Rich Brooks there, and I’m pretty easy to find. And even if you don’t need any local SEO, why don’t you come find me on LinkedIn and we’ll connect, and it’ll just be a good opportunity for us to get to know each other.
Show Notes:
Rich Brooks is the President of flyte new media, digital agency offering branding, web design, and digital marketing located in Portland, Maine. He is also the founder of the Agents of Change. He’s passionate about helping small businesses grow online and has put his nearly 30 years of experience into the book, The Lead Machine: The Small Business Guide to Digital Marketing.