How To Rank on Top of Google Business Profile For a Local Business
The idea that you can just move to the top of local search engine results with simple local SEO tools is long gone. There are some powerful local SEO surface-level techniques, but like all competitive fields, the top placements take a little more work that most agencies aren’t willing to tell you about. With the advent of AI content this can be very confusing for most. We’ve put together a list of search engine signals that profoundly impact how your business shows up on top for GBP (previously referred to as GMB Google My Business) and Bing Places For Business.
The Business Name and Titles
The impact of a business name on Google is usually profound and frequently gamed. The name of Google Business Profile through the entity name on your site will directly impact your rankings unusually strongly in local search, and they haven’t patched that since I started playing with Google Business Profile in 2007.
Your page titles on your website should totally reflect what’s going to be written on the page. The random editorial titles I see might be good for driving in what we call clickbait, but they should reflect the content on-page and not be misleading, as Google’s keeping score big time. Titles must align with both users’ and search engines’ signal relevancy, which is why we call SEO the art and science of search. Balancing out the searcher’s intent in a compelling way with persuasive ad copy using effective keywords likely to match the Google search query is critical to getting placed on top of search engines. NavBoost a signal to Google looks at the intent of the searcher and reflects the interactive behaviour of the searcher over a period of time to determine whether or not your site belongs there so be focused! Page titles aren’t what they once were signal-wise for local SEO, but they most definitely are for persuasive copy that encourages people to click through to your page. They should largely mirror your primary page header to avoid being rewritten by Google.
Meta Descriptions, Including Search Intent and Focus Keywords
Meta descriptions are basically mini ads on search engine results below the title that tell people what your page or site is about in a sentence or two. While not a direct ranking signal, the human persuasion component combined with Google measuring the Navboost signal of people interacting with your site for specific search queries makes the meta description ad copy an essential part of authorship for any website. Because of the relevancy to the query from the search results displayed and the appeal of need, a well-written meta description can drive in significantly more traffic. The meta description should be written out compellingly, engaging with the searcher using relevant ad copy that shows the search query’s intent while factoring in primary keywords.
Suppose you don’t write your meta description. In that case, Google is likely to grab a random excerpt from your page that appears incomplete or confuse the user away, leaving your competition looking much more shiny than your page. Google uses search query interaction behaviour history to determine which site should rank where, so you should make every effort to write accurate titles and meta descriptions so people can immediately see whether your site fits their search intent. If your writers have been scattered, bring them back to Earth!
A good meta description is like a paraphrased elevator speech summary of a page, factoring in the unique selling proposition and keywords. Thus, emphasis should be placed on the art and science of local SEO. While meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, the probability of your page being clicked on, if your description is written well, is incredibly high, so paying attention to this is critical as interaction per query is definitely make or break.
Google My Business Page Optimized
Over 56% of mobile user search queries are locally intended. Appearing in the Google Map Pack is a paramount way of showing up for local services and blatantly telling searchers what your business is about. Google verifies businesses in multiple different ways, so being incredibly accurate and articulate here is paramount. A complete Google Business Profile (Formerly Google My Business) is incredibly important and matches the content on your page across the web.
- Add a compelling logo that jumps out at people from alternative search results.
- Add relevant pictures to your search result that amplify your business values.
- Use appropriate categories for your business, particularly the primary, not just to be found. If it’s not relevant to your business, don’t do it.
- Use the identical format for your business name, business address, business phone number across the web. We refer to Name, Address Phone Number frequently in local SEO as NAP and often perform audits to ensure this is consistent.
- Bing Places for Business optimization is the same concept and pulls from various industry site review resources. Consistent hours, offerings and information will ensure no automation messes with your listing.
Local Business Reviews
Local business reviews are the fuel every business needs but aren’t the absolute end-all, fortunately, of what ranks a business on Google local search. We’ve outranked many sites that had 5x the reviews by following best practices across the board, which, in the end, is what separates one business from the next. Unfortunately, the area of local SEO is awfully gamed and poorly monitored by Google outside of algorithmic blatant violations like copying reviews across review sites, which is easily detected.
We’ve noted that recent reviews are as important as the count, allowing new players to rank for competitive terms, assuming at least 2/5 to 1/3 of competitor reviews. Combined with other signals in here, especially highly focused content pages, you will likely rank extremely well. Getting reviews on an ongoing basis is more important than the overall number, which gives new players the opportunity to show up. Just because you have more reviews than your competitors doesn’t mean you do not need to keep the review train going.
Respond to all negative business reviews immediately and show empathy! Reach out to all clients with negative reviews and see what you can do to turn their negative business experience with you around. Do not divulge any confidential client information or argue with negative reviews. You can report fake reviews to Google and have them removed.
Many businesses in the medical industry aren’t allowed to have or ask for reviews yet Google keeps them up there. It, therefore, creates unsaid competition among the medical industry in local SEO for reviews, resulting in completely unfair advantages to those who break the rules. If you’re in the medical industry, unfortunately, you’ll want reviews be
Business Proximity to Customer Base and Search
As the saying goes, Location, Location, Location! More often than not, your business will mainly show for users in your local business area unless there are no other competing bodies further away. Google Business Profile policy dictates that a business should not set up places served outside of a 2-hour drive from the physical location. Most will only be seen within 16 km or 10 miles from the location where the business was set up on Google, even if set as a SAB (Service Area Business). If your business serves nationally, you might consider whether Google qualifies for a Google Business Profile (formerly known as Google My Business).
Customer Service Responsiveness and Replies
The average response time is a metric seen in many local business profiles and a factor one must pay attention to. If you have an open channel of communications that’s not being monitored, it could harm your business and take a long time for your rankings to come back. Whether you’re running Google LSA (Local Service Ads) or just a GBP (Google Business Profile), the response time to inquiries will matter. Behavioural metrics and interaction combined with NavBoost signals in Google’s algorithm will dictate that your response time to clients matters. Respond to even those spammers and hopefully flag them as such.
Highly Focused and Helpful Content
Your website content is the essence of the SERPs (Search Engine Result Pages), and how it’s found doesn’t matter if you’re not saying the right things. A job worth doing is a job worth doing well, and excellence starts with the small details. I’ve watched startups eclipse billion-dollar organizations in their online search presence when focused on answering client needs. This means that on each page, you should create specific, well-researched content that will answer and solve problems for the people likely to find your page, as relevant keywords on your page signal to search engines on what your site is about. If you sell garage doors, for example, you better be talking about how to fix garage door sensors, garage door maintenance and other things people are looking for. Google’s data warehouse is full of prepackaged queries, a history of searches used to find answers to specific things. There are hundreds of signals with Google, but every SEO (Search Engine Optimization) professional will tell you that content is king. Links are earned with excellent content, and while there is low-hanging fruit, saying the right things should be an absolute priority for every business first. In 2025, that content will be used in various ways and technologies, such as voice AI, but your content remains a primary concern. Well-structured and researched content, in my personal experience, has shown to outperform the competition by a ratio of 10:1. We hired the best SEO copywriters and won a bunch of awards as a result.
Keyword Research and Intent Focused
These are the keywords you search to determine which queries people use most frequently to find your industry for relevant results and the problems they’re trying to overcome. Most people publish blatherings about themselves that, while important, don’t often have market-purposed material focused on the consumer’s search. Writing for search intent is as a good DJ plays to the audience, so does the SEO to the searcher. Keywords that people use that match previous searches are a stronger signal that you’re on topic and will probably find the solution to the searcher’s problem. When conducting local SEO market research, we use proprietary custom-built technologies to determine keywords and search intent.
- When optimizing for local searches, you’ll want to use locally relevant keywords like “city name + product offering” or city name + service.” Keywords like this show local intent and are likely specific to the searcher’s intent. You don’t want to mash these into the page and want them to be integrated into different, on-topic pages with reinforcing content that amplifies your value using social proof and local associations. Integrate this organically, and don’t insult the reader. If it reads to SEO-driven and not consumer-result-driven enough, then start over!
- Specific “Long-tail keywords” go beyond your paraphrased search query to use a word like “Best commercial farm real estate brokerage in Alberta,” which is a lot better than just saying, “Commercial brokerage.” Specifics matter; the more specific your page is, the more likely it will convert. While the search frequency on specific keywords might be shallow, the lead conversions on those searches might be really high. We’ve seen search traffic drop significantly as our content improved and sales improved dramatically. Being in front of the right audiences and ranking for the right things matters over showing up for the wrong things driving unimportant vanity metrics.
- Keyword modifiers in keyword research also allow businesses to see what potential customers are already looking for. Words used for specific types of business like red shoes, brown shoes, inexpensive shoes, inexpensive women’s shoes, brand-x shoes on sale and other variations highlight how many opportunities there are to be found for your product service offerings. Beyond typical keywords, you have holiday-relevant searches in whose keyword modifiers which take “Sweater” into “Christmas sweater, Valentine’s Day sweater ideas, wedding appropriate sweaters, women’s fashion 2024 sweaters, sweaters for fall, sweaters best for cold weather, sweater material that doesn’t make you itch appealing to specific pain points. If you are a seasonal business, use keywords like “preparing pipes for winter, how to prep your tractor for summer, comparing the top 5 trucks for the summer boating season, best air conditioners for the lowest cost, how to find a house with a pool.” There are so many keyword opportunities and ways to be found for any business and a plethora of tools like Google Trends to find them.
- If you’re not discussing your product or service offering, someone else will. Just use your own voice and keywords that your customer will likely understand while applying your business values to it.
- Don’t copy the competition exactly, or expect to see your content buried deep if it is not taken down entirely by DMCA removal. While there is no “Google Penalty,” you could most certainly have your page removed from the index for blatant plagiarism.
What’s Ranking For Related Queries (Information Gain)
It’s not enough to just see what keywords are being found in keyword tools. You need to type in keywords and find relevant content and pages on Google similar to what you’re trying to find/rank for to know what’s actually working. Search engines like Google and Bing are often incredibly competitive. Being on topic and using strategies similar to what’s working generally are solid ways to get to the top over the typically noisy sites we see. An immediate way to distinguish yourself is to not overly repeat others’ content, as many make the mistake of doing. Using similar keywords in titles, headers, and content to existing pages helps Google determine exactly what you should be found for, but delivering content to solve problems is better. After all, search engines are just computer algorithms with crawlers and indexers sorting sites into containers. Your site’s pages should fit neatly into the perfect scenario of market-purposed content that reflects the searcher’s exacting needs while solving their problems. That random stock photo of a guy in a polo shirt in a hard hat looking away from your content probably isn’t getting you any sales and may even be hurting your business. Consider writing separate related pages and linking together rather than putting it all on a single page confusing both search engines and visitors.
Google considers us, our pages, and pages as entities to be packaged into a data warehouse. The relationships formed can often be illustrated by how Google organizes search results and the hundreds of patents it publishes.
Regarding content that’s working well right now, consider that less is more. Yes, this page is wordy, but local SEO is incredibly competitive and requires meticulous attention with binary, all-or-nothing, merciless algorithms.
Site Schema
Google uses structured code data from websites to produce search result features and enhancements, rich snippets, rich cards, and enriched results, which are known as rich results. You often find in search results that immediately answer or highlight solutions to answers. If you type into Google the name of a song + lyrics, it will produce the lyrics at the top of the search page. Rich results highlight solutions to a problem and engage users to often click on your site to read more.
Google prefers JSON-LD over microdata and RDFa formats. While some people are taking advantage of this code, there’s no guarantee of what code Google will find relevant or useful, so don’t abuse it. With the advent of AI, it’s recommended that you include this as part of your content strategy as search engines rapidly adapt. You will likely find the search behaviour of query results very dynamic over a year with varying layouts we know as search verticals. Google is testing the best way to give users the best solutions for specific queries in as few clicks as possible while providing the best user experience. That said, for best results, it’s advised to take advantage of low-hanging fruit like this that tends to bump sites up in search results, immediately highlighting your content. It can take a few weeks for rich results to appear in search but once they are they can be measured in Google Analytics a free tool everyone should have on their site for measuring how people are using their site.
Site speed and UX
Alright, this one should go without saying, but if it takes 14-18 seconds to load your website page to engage with your visitors to say hello while they are looking right at you, do you expect them to stick around or consider you credible? Google may even struggle to crawl your site if it is loading that slow, if at all. I’ve seen page speed on so many sites, in particular media-rich dealerships, that take forever to load which absolutely kills sales never mind search presence. Page speed has impacted sites since 2010, and the bar on page speed is only rising. One should aim for sub-2-second load times. In my experience, fast page speed times results in considerable increases in business when sites are navigable, concise, and comprehensive to address people’s primary concerns up front.
https://webmasters.googleblog.com/2010/04/using-site-speed-in-web-search-ranking.html
Here’s a paraphrased small portion of the page optimizations we do to speed up sites:
- Page caching (creates ultra-fast load times by storing as a quick-loading file)
- Sitemap Preloading (preloads the URLS or links from your sitemap resulting in the site loading way faster)
- Prefetch DNS (third-party domains are often used for font styles and content which prefetch DNS speeds up in the way pages load controlling the times the DNS lookup take place effectively speeding up what often lags sites)
- Static File Compression ( takes HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files and reduces the weight of them through minification as lighter files means fast load times)
- Properly Formatting and Compressing Images (Most media is way larger than it needs to be and results in incredibly slow page loads)
- Eliminate page redirects (HTTP, HTTP://WWW , HTTPS, HTTPS:// are all considered different entities which will actually all show different search results if you don’t specify with Google which is the primary using code. I have seen absolute messes crushing businesses with this lately. Moving over to HTTPS has to be done properly and can result in major losses of performance if don’t incorrectly).
- Improve Server Response Time (there’s a whole science behind this alone but excellent hosting on SSD is absolutely essential to a top performing site).
Remove Render-Blocking Javascript (the menus, scripts, and slider banners typically contain Javascript, which really slows down sites by preventing important content from being seen first. We defer these scripts to load after so people aren’t sitting there waiting for your critical content).
Responsive Design and Layout
Since 2012, I’ve not built a single site without a responsive design. A website uses responsive design to adjust its visual layout to the medium it’s on, from cell phones to big-screen televisions. What looks good on a desktop probably isn’t going to provide a very good UX (User eXperience) for a website visitor from a tablet or tablet in particular more remote areas. Google is moving to a search engine built around Mobile First with well over 50% of users coming from mobile. If your site isn’t mobile friendly, then it’s going to likely get buried, and your bounce rate, which is the number of people that immediately leave, is likely to be high. This is a signal to Google to drop your page in the rankings if seen across search queries in more competitive areas like legal and medical fields. If you’ve got two people saying essentially the same thing and you have to decide who to show you’re going to dump the slower of the two.
Dress for success doesn’t just end with employees. A good site will represent you well 365 days a year, and dressing for the occasion with your business site means presenting well for the medium you’re on and with the audience-targeted media that reflects the query or problem they’re trying to solve. Distracting media and copy that doesn’t fit the page for your local SEO campaign should be dropped. A purpose-driven site that focuses on customers’ needs and dumps the ego is a money maker!
Crawlable Website and Site Structure
In performing various technical audits, it’s surprising how many people set up new beautiful websites and forget to turn off the remove from index option in their WordPress settings, which blocks Google. We perform regular technical audits for our clients to help business owners look for opportunities that could give them significant increases in business while also isolating technical site errors that harm them. We recommend that, like doctor checkups, all businesses get a technical SEO site checkup occasionally. The best technical SEOs provide crawl data from an app and know code well enough to see issues. It’s recommended when looking for a technical SEO that they can code. If they can’t code a page, they’re probably not an overly good technical SEO, depending on shallow variables on your site at the very best, missing many opportunities. Here at Making 8 we’ve been scripting since 2001 and know what problems to look for.
Local Links, Backlinks and Local Citations
Primary niche local business citations are filled out with informative information. They should be completely filled out on sites with actual traffic that serve your ideal demographic of customers.
Backlinks are links from other people’s websites to yours. This could be anything from a blogger to a local organization. Google weighs all these links out incredibly differently, and they remain, to this day, one of the stronger signals of authority and are placed high on search engines, particularly on a page-per-page basis. Selecting links to your site is incredibly important, and which ones you allow could mean the difference between failure and success.
Anchor text is the signal to google what a link is about with a directed worded description. Google’s very good at determining what ratio to expect a site to see and when to dismiss this entirely. Anything beyond 1-5% of external anchor text to your site from followed links to your site and your site may be removed from search results. We highly recommend your internal site links have very descriptive anchor text however.
Citations can include any mention of your company without links directly to it. These can be branded terms proprietary to you, numbers, addresses or things frequently associated in content with your company. Names, numbers, and addresses are the most commonly referenced citations. These are important to online branding. Consistent with brand controls it is incredibly important to use the same information across the web. Local citations are critical to being found locally and signal that your site is an actual entity. In terms of eliminating spam, anything after 2012 depends on citations locally and not the silly blog networks some scammers try to sell off as professional.
Listed Hours of Operation
Hours of operation, not just when you’re open but converting those customers. If your local business is only by appointment, you will want to leave it showing as open 24/7. An IVR system and CRM to respond to customers is a big deal in response signals as no form of response is going to do more harm than good. Ideally, having an after-hours response is best, but giving people the capacity to book 24/7 is going to net your business significantly more business. Expect that during the hours you aren’t open your listed services will not show on Google for your Google Business Profile unless all others are also closed. Simple tweaks like this have driven significantly more revenue for our clients in their local businesses.
If you are a physical store and are actually closed then do not leave your business as showing open. We only recommend 24/7 business listings to businesses by appointment only. Pay very special attention to holidays and other hours as people get very upset when they show up to a closed business.
