What decides who shows up in the map pack?
Google says it outright, which saves everyone a lot of speculation. Local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Local ranking factors Relevance is how well your profile matches what somebody typed. Distance is how far you are from them when they typed it. Prominence is how well known you are, which Google describes as including links to your business and the number and rating of your reviews.
Distance is the one you can't move. You're where you are, and no amount of clever work changes that. Which means the whole game is really the other two, and funnily enough those are almost entirely in your control and almost entirely neglected.
How do you actually improve relevance?
Fill the Google Business Profile in, properly, all of it. Google's guidance is blunt about businesses with complete and accurate information being more likely to show up. Edit your business information Primary category chosen precisely rather than approximately. Every service listed as a service instead of buried in a paragraph. Real opening hours, including the public holidays. Photos of your actual work rather than something off a stock library.
Then make the website agree with the profile. If the profile says you do switchboard upgrades, there should be a page about switchboard upgrades, and it should say where you do them. A service area business that lists twelve suburbs and then has one page saying it services the greater metro area has told Google precisely nothing it can match against a suburb name.
- Set the primary category exactly, not approximately.
This is the single highest-leverage field on the profile and most people pick something close enough. An electrician who picks Electrician ranks for electrician searches. One who picks Contractor competes with builders, plumbers and landscapers for nothing in particular. Add secondary categories only for things you genuinely do.
- List every service as a service.
There's a services section, and it's separate from your description. Switchboard upgrades, smoke alarm compliance, EV charger installation, each as its own entry with its own couple of sentences. A service buried in a paragraph is invisible to the matching, and this is free.
- Set your service area honestly, then stop.
List the suburbs you will actually drive to. Adding forty because they sound good doesn't extend your reach, and Google is reasonably good at working out where you really operate from where your jobs and reviews come from.
- Fill the hours in, including public holidays.
Special hours for Christmas, Easter and the King's Birthday take five minutes once a year. A profile showing open when you're shut generates one angry review, and a profile with no hours reads as abandoned.
- Upload your own photos, on a schedule.
Real jobs, shot on your phone, a few every month. Not stock, not the same six from 2023. The profile is the only place many customers will ever see your work, and a stale gallery says the business is stale.
- Make the website agree with all of it.
Every service listed on the profile should have a page on the site that says the same thing, and the business name, address and phone number should match character for character everywhere they appear. That consistency is what lets a search engine decide two mentions are one business. Local ranking factors
What moves prominence?
Reviews, steadily, forever. Not eleven in one week and then silence for a year. Prominence is partly a function of how many reviews you have and how good they are, and a review page that has gone quiet reads to a customer like a business that has gone quiet, even when the truth is you have been flat out the entire time.
The thing is, the mechanism that works isn't remembering to ask, because nobody remembers. It's making the ask automatic, so a text goes out after every completed job with the direct link in it, the short one Google generates off your profile rather than a link to your listing. Get your review link Set that up once and a steady trickle builds itself while you get on with the actual work.
Do incentives for reviews work?
Please don't. Google's content policy prohibits offering payment, discounts or free goods in exchange for a review, and treats incentivised reviews as fake engagement, which can mean reviews removed and restrictions on the profile. Prohibited and restricted content
And in Australia there's a second and much heavier reason. The ACCC is clear that creating fake or misleading reviews breaches consumer law, and that where an incentive is offered at all it has to be offered regardless of whether the review turns out positive or negative, and disclosed. ACCC on online reviews This isn't an etiquette question. It's a regulator with enforcement powers, and it isn't worth the risk when asking properly works.
What about the suburb pages everyone talks about?
They work brilliantly when they're real and they're worthless when they aren't. A page for a suburb that names actual jobs you did there, the conditions you run into in that area, real photos from those jobs, is a page worth having. Forty pages generated off one template with the suburb name swapped out is a pile of near-duplicates that won't rank and may well drag on the rest of the site.
The honest test I use is simple. If you deleted the suburb name from the page, would it still say anything specific about anywhere? If not, don't publish it. Six real ones beat forty hollow ones every single time.
How long does any of this take?
Profile work can move things within weeks, because it's a data problem and Google reads it quickly. Reviews accumulate at whatever rate you finish jobs. Content and links are the slow part, and anyone promising you page one in thirty days is either getting lucky, telling porkies, or quietly targeting a phrase nobody actually searches for.
The steadier way to think about it, and the way I talk about it with clients, is that you're building something that's set up to be found and then letting it compound. You aren't buying a spike. Local search is one layer of a bigger system, and the whole system for a trade business shows where it sits at your size.
How many suburb pages should I have?
As many as you can make genuinely different, and no more. If you have done real work in six suburbs, write six real pages. Forty templated ones won't rank and can drag on the rest of the site.
Does my address have to be public?
No. A service area business can hide the address and list the areas it covers instead, which is the right setup for anyone working out of a home or a yard.
Do citations and directories still matter?
Consistency does. The point isn't the link, it's that your name, address and phone match everywhere so a search engine can tell it's all the same business.
