What does relevance mean in local search?
Whether your business is plainly the thing the person asked for. Google reads your website, your Business Profile categories and the words in your reviews, and matches them against the search. A heating engineer whose site says female gas engineer Huddersfield in plain text is highly relevant to that search, which is why Dolphin Heating is number one for it. A site that says heating solutions for the region is relevant to nothing in particular.
Relevance is the part you control completely, and it is usually the cheapest thing to fix.
How much does distance matter?
A great deal for the map results and less for the ordinary listings. The map pack is drawn from businesses near the searcher, or near the town they typed, so a Halifax firm will struggle to appear in the Leeds map however good it is. The ordinary listings underneath are more forgiving: a strong page about Leeds work can rank there from a Halifax address.
You cannot move your building, so distance is managed with the website: a page for each town you serve, and a service area on the profile that matches the truth.
What is prominence and how do you build it?
Prominence is how well known the business is, measured through reviews, links, mentions and the strength of the website. The number and quality of Google reviews counts, and so does what they say. Mentions on other sites, from suppliers, trade bodies, local press and directories, count. So do the signals on your own site: named projects, photographs, case studies, people.
Bond Brickwork is prominent for commercial brickwork because years of project pages, drone photography and consistent naming of real sites have added up. Nothing about it was quick.
Why does the map pack show different businesses from the listings?
Because they are two different systems weighing the three factors differently. The map pack is a Business Profile ranking, heavily weighted to distance and to the profile itself: categories, reviews, photos, opening hours, how complete it is. The listings underneath are a web page ranking, weighted to the content and authority of the page. A business can be in one and absent from the other, and most West Yorkshire firms we look at are exactly there.
Winning both means working on the profile and the page as one job.
Do reviews affect local rankings?
Yes, in both count and content. Recent reviews from real customers help, and reviews that mention the service and the place help more, because they feed relevance as well as prominence. A steady flow matters more than a burst. Never buy them and never write them yourself: Google is good at spotting both, and the suspension that follows costs more than the reviews were ever worth.
Ask every customer at the end of a job, and make it easy with a direct link. That alone is more than most of your competitors are doing.
What can a West Yorkshire business do about all three this month?
Fix relevance first: say exactly what you do and where, on the site and on the profile, in the words customers use. Then match the service area and the location pages to the towns you really work in. Then start on prominence, which is slower: a review request after every job, photographs of every project, and a case study when a job is worth one. Measure each town separately so you can see which factor is holding which town back.
