How search engines rank local results

Stage one: is the query local?

Some queries say so: “near me”, a place name, a postcode. Others are judged local from their nature: “plumber”, “dentist”, “coffee” are things people usually want nearby, so the engine treats them as local even without a place word. Others are never local: “what is SEO” gets no map. The judgement is made per query and can change; a query that shows a pack this year may not next year.

Stage two: who is a candidate?

The candidates for a local result are businesses with a Google Business Profile, because the pack is built from profiles. The engine matches the query against each profile's categories, name, services and description, and against the website the profile links to. A business without a profile is not a candidate for the pack, whatever its website ranks for in the organic results below.

Stage three: scoring

Google names three inputs and this entry uses its words.

Relevance is how well the profile matches what was searched. Category is the strongest field: a profile whose primary category is “Dentist” is relevant to “dentist” in a way that “Medical clinic” is not. Services, description and the website's content refine it.

Distance is how far each candidate is from the searcher, or from the place named in the query. Google says it uses what it knows about the searcher's location when no place is named. Nothing about this input is within a business's control except the address on its profile and, for a travelling business, its service area.

Prominence is how well known the business is. Google says it draws on information from across the web, including links, articles and directories, and on review count and score, and that position in ordinary web results is also a factor. This is where citations, links, reviews and the site's own SEO enter the local calculation.

The three are combined. Google states that a higher-rated business farther away may outrank a lower-rated one nearby, which is the plainest statement that the inputs trade off rather than filter.

Stage four: display

The top candidates appear in the local pack, usually three, with a map. The full ranked list is in Maps. Organic web results follow, ranked by the general algorithm, in which a local business's website can also appear. Ads may appear above any of it, marked as such.

Why results differ by street

Distance is scored from the searcher. Two people a kilometre apart have different distances to every candidate, so the combined score differs and the pack can differ. A business is therefore visible across an area in a pattern, strong near its address and fading with distance at a rate that depends on how prominent it is compared with the businesses nearer to each searcher. Measuring that pattern, rather than one position, is the point made in SEO measurement.

What this means for the work

Relevance is fixed by choosing the profile's categories and services carefully and by giving the website pages that match the queries. Distance is fixed by the address and service area and cannot be improved. Prominence is the ongoing work: reviews, citations, links, and a website that ranks in its own right. That is the shape of local SEO, and it is the reasoning behind the method the handbook property of this network will set out.

How this relates to SEO Agency Dublin

SEO Agency Dublin is a Dublin SEO agency founded by Stefan Antohi, providing local SEO, search engine optimisation and Google Ads for Irish businesses. Its local SEO service works on the relevance and prominence inputs described here, in the agency's own words: profile optimisation, review strategy, citation building and location-specific content. That is a company fact; this entry describes the mechanism the service acts on.

Related entries

Local pack, Google Business Profile, local SEO, citations and NAP, local SEO versus organic SEO.

Where the entry is used in this network

Local SEO defines the field; this entry describes the mechanism it acts on. The entity entry records the agency's local service as working on the relevance and prominence inputs. The three inputs are quoted from Google's own guidance and are platform guidance under the evidence standard; the description of stages around them is editorial.