A client calls me one morning, pleased with himself: "I'm third on Google Maps." Two days later his sales rep types the exact same query from a job site four kilometres away and cannot find him anywhere. Both of them are right.
In local search there is no such thing as one results page. There are as many as there are points on the map. As long as you think in terms of "position", you are optimising blind.
On a proximity query, your position is not a number. It is a surface. And nobody searches from the centre of that surface.
What Google does when nobody says where they are
"Plumber near me", "osteopath", "pizza": these queries contain no place, and yet they carry one. Google's documentation on location is explicit: your location is used to show nearby results even if you did not include a place in your search.
Google estimates that location from several sources: the device itself, the home and work addresses saved in the Google account, recent search activity, and the IP address, the identifier the internet provider assigns to the connection. Two details change how you read the results. When the browser is slow to report a position, Google reuses the last known one, stored in a cookie that lasts six hours. And without precise location permission, Google works with a "general area" of at least three square kilometres covering at least a thousand users, usually far wider outside cities.
Google even gives the example: someone who searched "coffee shops in Chelsea" and then types "nail salon" may be shown salons in Chelsea. Search history moves the measuring point. "Near me" is not a keyword. It is a coordinate dressed up as words.
Why "near you" in your title tags does nothing
I am regularly asked to add "near you" to the title tags of a local site. I turn it down every time.
Google does not match your text against the word "nearby". It matches your address against the address of the person searching. Local results rest mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. None of the three rewards a proximity phrase copied into a tag.
What does work are the words people actually type when they get specific: the exact trade, the neighbourhood, the speciality. "Locksmith Saint-Giniez" beats "locksmith near you", because the first one exists in a resident's head and the second does not.
Distance is not negotiable, the rest is
Distance is the one factor of the three you have no grip on. You will not move your premises, and Google will not bring you closer to the person searching. But at equal distance two businesses do not rank the same, and the whole gap is decided by the other two.
That is how a slightly out-of-the-way practice shows up in a neighbourhood where it has no address: relevance and prominence make up for the metres. The real work is widening that tolerance radius, not gaining one place at the exact spot where you already rank first.
| What Google looks at | What you can actually do | The mistake I see most often |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | A primary category that completes the sentence "this business is a…", not "this business has a…", and as few categories as possible | Stacking categories to cast a wide net, which dilutes the signal instead of widening it |
| Distance | Nothing on distance itself. Document on the website the areas you genuinely cover | Slipping town names into the business name |
| Prominence | A steady flow of reviews, links and mentions from local players, coverage in the local press and directories | Only asking for reviews after a complaint, so only ever collecting lukewarm ones |
| Searcher's location | Nothing. But you can measure it at several points and accept being invisible elsewhere | Judging your visibility from your own desk, five metres from your shopfront |
| Business type | Declare storefront or service area honestly, with permanent signage if the address is shown | Keeping a visible address when nobody is received there, which invites suspension |
No storefront: what a service area really allows
For a tradesperson, an emergency repair service or a caterer, the question comes up fast: how do I rank in ten towns when I only have one garage? Google frames this tightly, more tightly than most people expect. Its documentation on service areas states that you can no longer define your area as a radius: you declare it by cities, postcodes or other areas. Twenty areas maximum. The boundaries should not extend beyond about two hours of driving time from your base. And a business with no storefront gets a single profile for the entire territory it covers.
Another rule that gets ignored: if you do not serve customers at your address, Google asks you to remove it from the profile. The guidelines for representing your business add that a displayed address must come with permanent fixed signage bearing the business name, and that a virtual office or an unstaffed co-working desk is not eligible. This is not a visibility trick, it is a condition for the profile to exist at all.
What a service area does not do: move the point from which distance is calculated. It says where you travel, it does not teleport you. To exist in a town where you have no address, the lever is the website: one page per area that deserves to exist, with real jobs, real lead times, photos taken on site. I covered the mechanics in my article on local pages at scale. The rule fits in one sentence: if the page says nothing about the town, it has no business being there.
The most expensive mistake
Stuffing the business name with trades and town names. Google states plainly that the name must be the real-world name, the one on the signage and the paperwork, and that any added information can result in suspension of the profile. The examples in the documentation leave no room for doubt: "Equinox near SOHO" and "Midas Auto Service Experts" are refused, "Equinox SOHO" and "Midas" pass. A suspension means disappearing from the local pack entirely for weeks. Google also states that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. Anything that looks like a shortcut is one.
Measuring: a grid, not an average position
This is where most dashboards lie by design. Search Console's average position is the topmost position of your page, averaged across every impression. Google itself notes that the position you actually observe can differ from that average. It gives two variables as examples: search history and location.
In local search that average blends dozens of different places. An average position of 4.2 can cover "first within six hundred metres, invisible beyond". You will never know which, and that is the only piece of information that tells you where to put the effort.
What I set up instead: a grid of measuring points over the area that actually matters, five to seven kilometres around the premises, not the whole county. The same keyword queried at every point, once a month, at the same time of month. The output is no longer a number, it is a patch on a map: the radius within which you exist. The metric you track becomes the share of points where you sit in the top three.
You then cross that with the Business Profile statistics, calls, direction requests, clicks to the website, and with organic traffic to the local pages. Three sources, one dashboard: that is the principle behind all my measurement work. Expect two to three months before the grid visibly moves, longer if the profile has just been created. The goal changes nature: you stop trying to climb and start trying to widen.
What I look at first on a local account
Three things, in this order. The primary category on the profile, because it is the single most decisive setting and the one most often rushed, and because it can be fixed the same day. Then the rhythm of reviews, not the star rating: ten reviews spread over a year weigh more than forty collected in a fortnight. Finally the consistency between profile and website, on the name, the address, the opening hours, the services listed.
The rest comes after, and those are longer jobs: local links, neighbourhood pages, press coverage. I covered the work on the profile itself in my guide to the Business Profile, and the underlying logic is the same as in all my organic search work: fix the foundations before spending anywhere else.
In the crucible: turning an address into a radius
An address is a point. It is all you own at the start, and that point will not move. Local search is the craft of turning it into a surface, a territory where your name comes up even a few kilometres out.
That work shows on a map, never in a rankings report. A well-kept profile sets the centre, reviews and local links give it depth, the website pages hold the edges. Three jobs, one goal: make distance cost you less than it costs your neighbour. That is exactly what I go after in my local search work.
What radius are you visible in today?
I measure your keywords on a grid of points around your address, show you the map, and tell you which settings widen the patch. You leave with a plan of attack and a dated map, not an average position.