How the map pack is put together

The three results with the map above them go by several names. Map pack, local pack, three pack. Whatever you call it, it is the most valuable piece of screen real estate a local business can occupy, and the rules for getting into it are different from the rules for ranking a page.

Google publishes a short explanation of how local results are ordered: relevance, distance and prominence.¹ That is genuinely all the official detail there is. Bing's help for Bing Places describes nearly the same model, with popularity in place of prominence.² It is vague, but it is not wrong, and each of the three turns into different work.

Relevance

Relevance is the question of whether your business matches what was searched for. In practice it is dominated by your categories, and specifically your primary category, followed by how plainly your services are described on the profile and on your site. Google publishes no weights, so that ordering is my judgement from audits.

This is the part you control most directly, and the part most often left wrong. A business that describes itself in language nobody searches with is invisible for reasons that have nothing to do with quality. The fix is usually a day of work and it is why the category check is second on my audit list.

What to work on

• The primary category, chosen by looking at what the businesses already ranking are using.
• Secondary categories, added carefully. They widen what you can appear for and they can dilute if you add everything plausible. Google's guidelines ask for as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business.³
• The service list, written in the words customers use, not trade vocabulary.
• A real page on your site for each significant service, so there is something to be relevant with.
• The business name as it appears on your signs and paperwork. Adding keywords to it breaks the profile guidelines, which require the real-world name and warn that unnecessary information could get the profile suspended.³

Distance

How far you are from the point the search came from. Not from the town centre, and not from your own front door. From wherever the person happened to be standing.

This is the factor you can do least about and the one that most often explains a confusing result. A business can hold the top spot within half a mile and be absent three miles out, in the direction where most of its customers live. Checking your rank from one location, which is what most tools do by default, gives you a number that is true and unrepresentative.

You cannot move your building, but you can affect how far your visibility reaches. A business with strong prominence holds its position further out than a weak one at the same address. Distance sets the gradient. Prominence sets how slowly you fade.

Prominence

How well known the business is, judged from whatever Google can observe. Reviews are the visible part: how many, how recent, how highly rated, and increasingly what they say. Google's ranking help says outright that more reviews and positive ratings can help.¹ Beyond that it is the ordinary evidence of a business existing in the world. Mentions in local press. Listings in the directories that matter for your sector. Links from real sites. Sponsorships. Being the answer when somebody asks in a local group. Bing is more explicit than Google here: it estimates popularity from web signals, including positive reviews and ratings on sites such as Yelp and TripAdvisor and how often the business is mentioned across the web.²

Prominence is the slowest of the three to move and the most durable once it has moved. It is also the hardest to fake, which is deliberate. Buying reviews is the shortcut and it is a bad trade. Paid reviews break Google Maps' content policy,⁴ in the UK writing or commissioning fake reviews is now banned by law,⁵ and the penalty can be a profile suspension, with reinstatement a slow and unpleasant process.

What the three-factor model leaves out

Quite a lot. It says nothing about how heavily each factor is weighted, and the weighting clearly varies by sector and by query. A search with obvious urgency behaves differently from a considered one. It says nothing about the filtering that removes businesses judged too similar to one already shown. And it says nothing about the volatility that occasionally reorders local results for a fortnight and then puts them back.

It is still the right model to plan against, because each of the three factors points to different work.

Where to start

Relevance first, because it is fast, cheap and most often wrong. Then measure across a grid so you can see the real shape of your visibility. Then commit to prominence as an ongoing habit and not a project, because it is the only one of the three that compounds.