I’m Keith Groben. Owners ask me all the time why a worse competitor outranks them on Google. Usually they assume it’s a secret, or money, or some trick. It isn’t. Google has told us, in plain terms, what it looks at. There are three factors, and you can influence most of them yourself.
What does Google use to rank local businesses?
Three things: relevance, distance, and prominence.
Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone searched. If a person types “emergency plumber” and your profile says “plumbing contractor” with no detail, you’re a weaker match than the shop that spelled out exactly what it does. Categories, services, and an accurate description do this work.
Distance is how close you are to the searcher. You can’t move your building, but you can make sure your address, service area, and map pin are correct so Google places you where you actually are.
Prominence is how known and trusted your business looks. Reviews are a big part of it — the count, the rating, and how recent they are. So is activity: posts, fresh photos, and a profile that looks tended rather than abandoned.
What can an owner actually control?
More than most people think. You don’t touch relevance and distance by guessing — you set them with accurate information. Pick the right primary category and add the secondary ones that fit. Fill in your services. Keep your name, address, hours, and service area correct.
Prominence is where steady effort pays off. Ask for reviews and keep them coming. Post to your profile. Upload real photos of real work. Each of these is a signal Google can measure, and each one tells it your business is active and trusted.
Why does a neglected profile lose to a worse competitor?
Because Google can only rank what it can see. A profile set up two years ago and never touched — wrong categories, no posts, stale photos, a handful of old reviews — reads as inactive. A competitor who tends theirs every week looks more relevant and more prominent, even when their work is worse than yours. Google isn’t judging craft. It’s judging signals. The neglected profile sends weak ones.
The good news: every one of these is fixable, and you can find out exactly where yours stands.
See where you stand
The audit is free — a Google Business Profile agent trained on Google’s full 186-page support documentation and kept current every month. It scores your profile against these actual ranking factors and hands you a specific fix checklist — highest-leverage items first. A few minutes, no commitment.