People looking for a service near home rarely go past the first screen. A map appears with three businesses, and the decision happens right there. For a local business, getting into that list is worth more than any position on page two.
This article explains how Google assembles that list and what you can actually influence.
How Google builds the local pack (relevance, distance, prominence)
The block with a map and businesses is known as the local pack. According to Google own documentation, three factors decide who appears: relevance, distance and prominence.
Relevance is how well your profile and site match what was searched. A business listed as "law firm" stands little chance in a search for "employment lawyer" if nowhere does it say that it practices employment law.
Distance is the proximity between the searcher and the registered address. It is the factor you control least and the one that surprises most: a business in the Santa Efigênia district of Belo Horizonte may not appear to someone searching in Barreiro, and that is not a penalty, it is geography. Which is why a small business with a single address should stop dreaming of covering the whole city and work its own region properly.
Prominence is how well known the business is, online and offline. This covers mentions on other sites, news coverage, directories, links pointing at your site, and the number and rating of your reviews.
There is no button for "rank higher on the map". What exists is filling everything in accurately, being cited in trustworthy places, and accumulating honest reviews over time.
Google Business Profile: the fields almost everyone leaves empty
The Google Business Profile is the most important local SEO asset, and the most poorly filled in. Most profiles stop at name, phone and address.
Worth completing, in order of impact:
- Primary category, chosen carefully, because it weighs heavily on relevance. Pick the one that describes what you do most, not the broadest one. Then add genuine secondary categories.
- Services, item by item, each with a short description. It is a field that accepts real detail and almost nobody uses.
- Service area, if you travel to the client. A provider based in Contagem can list Betim and the wider Belo Horizonte metropolitan area.
- Hours, holidays included. A profile with wrong hours earns bad reviews for reasons that have nothing to do with the service.
- Attributes: accessibility, parking, payment methods, video consultations.
- Photos that are real and recent: the storefront (it helps people find the door), the interior, the team, finished work. Avoid stock imagery.
- Questions and answers: you can publish your frequent questions and answer them on the profile itself.
- Website link pointing at the right page. With a single location the homepage is fine; with more than one, each profile should point to that location page.
A profile is not a set-and-forget thing. Holiday hours, new photos and review responses are recurring work, and they fit neatly into a maintenance routine.
Consistent NAP: name, address and phone identical across the web
NAP stands for name, address and phone. The rule is tedious and simple: those three details must be written exactly the same way everywhere your business appears.
Inconsistencies that hurt: writing "Av. Afonso Pena, 1500 - Suite 302" on the site and "Avenida Afonso Pena 1500 ste 302" on the profile; using a mobile number on the site and a landline on social media; leaving the old address in a forgotten directory after moving offices.
Do the exercise once of writing the canonical version into a file, abbreviations, commas and all, and use that version everywhere: the website (footer and contact page), the Business Profile, social accounts, directories, trade association listings, and any marketplace where the business is listed.
After moving, search for the old address on Google and fix whatever shows up. An old address still circulating is one of the most common reasons a profile stalls.
Reviews: how to ask without breaking Google guidelines
Reviews count toward prominence and, more than that, decide the click when three businesses sit side by side. Precision about the rules matters here.
Asking for reviews is allowed. Google explicitly says businesses may ask customers for reviews. What the guidelines prohibit is offering any incentive in exchange: a discount, a gift, a prize draw, cashback, free delivery, a benefit on the next purchase. It is also prohibited to ask only the customers you know were happy, filtering out the unhappy ones first (the practice known as gating), to buy reviews, and to write reviews about your own business or a competitor.
What works within the rules is asking at the right moment, with no friction. Ask right after delivery, while the experience is fresh. Ask in person, or by a short message containing the direct review link for your profile, so nobody has to go hunting. Ask everybody, not only the happy ones: a natural distribution is more believable than a wall of five stars, and the same point applies to social proof on your site, as covered in the article on the anatomy of a landing page.
Answer all of them, negative ones included, and answer briefly. The reply is not for the person who complained; it is for the next people who will read it. A reply that acknowledges the problem and says what was done is worth more than a high rating with silence.
LocalBusiness schema
Schema is a markup vocabulary that describes, in a form search engines read without ambiguity, what a page contains. For a local business the type is LocalBusiness, or a more specific subtype where one exists, such as Dentist, Restaurant or LegalService.
Worth declaring: name, full address, phone, website, opening hours, geographic coordinates, price range and the link to the Google profile. The recommended format is JSON-LD, added once, on the page representing that location.
Two cautions. First, the schema must describe what is visible on the page: marking up hours that appear nowhere is exactly the kind of thing that causes trouble. Second, star rating markup has its own rules and is a favorite target for penalties when used to rate yourself. Do not mark up a rating you wrote.
After publishing, test it with the Google rich results test. The rest of the technical side of the site is in the technical SEO checklist.
Geographic intent without keyword stuffing
Here lives the most common mistake: repeating "renovation company in Belo Horizonte" fifteen times on the same page. It does not raise rankings and it makes the text unreadable.
What works is content that would only make sense written by someone who actually operates there. A piece on permit timelines at the Belo Horizonte city hall, an explanation of the quirks of properties on the city hillside neighborhoods, a parking guide near your office in Savassi. That kind of page attracts local searches because it answers local searches, not because the city name is repeated.
If you serve several cities in the metro area, create one page per city only when you have something to say about each: travel time, timelines, specific conditions, work completed there. Twenty identical pages with the city name swapped are precisely the kind of thin content search engines ignore.
Geographic signals that help without forcing: city and district in the contact page title, the address in the footer of every page, an embedded map on the contact page, and mentions of real districts and landmarks in the copy where it fits. Text stiffened by repetition improves with the rules in the article on writing your own website copy.
The mistakes that sink local rankings
Some problems cost position faster than any optimization recovers it.
- A fake address or a mailbox used to fake presence in another city. It is the most serious violation and can suspend the profile.
- A padded name on the profile, along the lines of "Company Name - Best Renovations in BH". The field is for the real business name, the one on the storefront.
- Duplicate profiles, created by different employees over the years. Two listings for the same address split the reviews and confuse the search engine. Request a merge.
- An unverified or unclaimed profile, where anyone can suggest edits and you never find out.
- A slow site on mobile, which is where nearly every local search happens. Worth measuring with the Core Web Vitals article.
- A site down during business hours, or an expired certificate, which destroys the trust of a visitor who came from the map.
- The wrong category, or one that is far too broad, picked in a hurry when the profile was created and never revisited.
None of this produces results in a week. Local SEO is accumulation: a complete profile, identical data everywhere, reviews arriving slowly, and content only someone in the city would write.
If you want your profile, site and markup aligned for searches in your region, talk to ALB Seven. We work in Belo Horizonte and we know the ground.