Local packHow Google picks the three businesses above the map
The local pack is the block of three listings that appears above the ordinary results for a nearby search. Those three take the overwhelming majority of the taps, and everything below them is competing for what is left.
Google publishes the factors it uses. It does not publish the weightings, and this page is careful about the difference.
The three factors
Relevance, distance, prominence
Google combines all three rather than ranking on any one of them, which is the part that matters in practice: a business slightly further away with a much stronger profile can and routinely does outrank a closer one.
Relevance
How well your profile matches what was actually searched for. This is the factor most within your control and the one most often left half-done: the primary category, the secondary categories, the services listed, the attributes ticked, and the business description. A profile categorised as “restaurant” is not competing for “ramen” in the way a profile categorised as “ramen restaurant” is.
Distance
How far you are from the searcher — or from the place they named, if they named one. This is the factor you cannot move, and it is the reason the same search gives a different set of three businesses two streets away. It is also why “rank number one” is not a coherent thing to sell: there is no single result to be first in.
Prominence
How well known the business appears to be, which Google builds from what is on the web about you rather than only from what you say. Reviews and their ratings feed it, as do mentions and links across other sites, directories and the local press. It is the slowest of the three to move and the hardest for a competitor to copy.
What actually moves
Six things worth doing, in order
Two of the three factors respond to work. The list below is ordered by how much changes for how little effort, not by how impressive it sounds in a proposal.
Fix the primary category first
It is the single highest-leverage field on the profile and it is regularly wrong — often set years ago by whoever claimed the listing, often set to something broader than the business actually is. The primary category decides which searches you are even considered for; the secondary ones widen the net without diluting it.
Fill in everything that is empty
Services, attributes, the description, opening hours, the products list, the booking and menu links. Each empty field is a question Google cannot answer about you and a filter you can be excluded by. Completeness is the cheapest relevance there is, and it is a one-off job.
Make the hours true, including the awkward ones
Special hours for bank holidays, different hours for the kitchen and the bar, seasonal changes. “Open now” is a filter applied before ranking, so wrong hours do not lower your position — they remove you from the results entirely for the duration.
Keep reviews arriving and answered
Volume, rating and recency all feed prominence, and the replies are read by the humans who then decide whether to tap. This is the slowest lever on the list and the one that compounds, which is precisely why most businesses give up on it before it pays.
Add photos on a schedule, not in a burst
A gallery that grows steadily reads as an operating business to a person and as an active profile to Google. Forty photos uploaded in one afternoon two years ago reads as neither.
Get the basics consistent everywhere else
The name, address and phone number as they appear on your website, on directories, on your social profiles and on anywhere that lists you. Contradictions across those sources are exactly the kind of ambiguity that holds prominence down, and they accumulate quietly after a move or a rebrand.
Expectations
What nobody can do for you
Worth stating plainly, because the opposite is sold constantly.
Distance cannot be worked on. If a searcher is standing four miles away and there are eleven businesses like yours between you and them, no amount of profile work puts you in their three. What profile work does is win the searches where you were already a plausible answer and were losing them to a better-kept listing — which, for most local businesses, is the majority of the searches that were ever really available.
There is also no position to buy. Google sells ads that appear near the local pack, clearly marked as ads, and it sells nothing at all inside it. Anyone offering a guaranteed placement is describing something that does not exist.
Rank tracking
Your ranking is not one number
There is no single position to be in, which is why searching for yourself from behind your own counter tells you almost nothing — and why measuring properly means measuring from where the customers are.
Search for your own trade from your own premises and Google builds the results around exactly where you are standing — which is to say, on top of your own business. It is the most flattering measurement you can take, and owners take it constantly, and it is why so many are baffled to be “number one” while the phone stays quiet.
Local rank tracking measures the way customers actually search: from a grid of points around the business — street by street, zip code by zip code — recording where you make the three above the map and where you drop out of them. Repeated monthly, that grid is what movement genuinely looks like, and it is how the work on this page gets checked rather than taken on trust. It is included in the Managed plan, and the free audit includes a first look at where you stand today.
Questions
Local pack, explained
What is the Google local pack?
The local pack is the block of three business listings Google shows above a map for a local search, such as “barber near me”. It appears above the ordinary blue-link results, and the three businesses in it take the overwhelming majority of the taps for that search.
How does Google decide which businesses appear in the local pack?
Google states three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well the profile matches what was searched for, distance is how far the business is from the searcher, and prominence is how well known and well regarded the business appears to be. Google combines all three, so a slightly further business with a much stronger profile can and does outrank a closer one.
Can anyone guarantee a place in the local pack?
No. The results change by searcher, by phrase and by where the phone is standing, and Google sells no way to buy a position in the local pack. Any agency guaranteeing a ranking is either misunderstanding that or hoping you will not check.
How long does it take for local pack ranking to change?
Profile edits are usually reflected within days, but ranking movement follows the underlying signals rather than the edit, so the honest answer is weeks to months. Fixing an outright error — a wrong category, wrong hours, a duplicate listing — tends to show up fastest, because it removes something actively holding the profile back.
Why do I see a different local ranking than my customers do?
Because there is no single ranking, and because you are the worst-placed person to measure yours. Google builds local results around where the searcher is standing, so your position from behind your own counter is not your position from a customer's kitchen four streets away — and on top of that, your own account's history of visiting your site and searching your name leans your results further your way. Searching for yourself from your own premises is the most flattering measurement available, which is exactly why it is the one to trust least.
What is local rank tracking?
Local rank tracking measures where a profile appears in local results from many points around the business rather than from one — a grid of checks across the area, street by street or zip code by zip code, showing where you make the three above the map and where you drop out. That grid, repeated over time, is what ranking movement actually looks like; a single search from the shop is not.
See where your profile actually stands
The free audit compares your listing against the businesses currently appearing above you, and says what they have that you do not.