Relevance, distance, prominence — and which you can move
Google states the local ranking factors plainly: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is fixed by geography and by the searcher's position, which is why a competitor three streets closer will beat you on a generic query no matter what you do. The work therefore concentrates on the other two, and the single highest-leverage field is the primary category on the Business Profile — it decides which queries you are eligible for at all.
Prominence is built the same way authority is built in classic SEO, with two local additions: review velocity and citation consistency. Reviews arriving steadily matter more than a large historical total, and contradictions between listings — an old suite number, a retired phone line — fragment the entity and quietly reduce how often you are shown. Consistency is the goal; volume of listings is not.
Entering the pack is worth more than climbing inside it, which is why the ladder in the results collapses so sharply at "not in the pack". A business absent from the three-result block competes only in the classic organic results below it, where local intent produces a fraction of the actions. That is the gap most local programmes are actually being paid to close, as our local SEO guide explains in depth.
Multi-location arithmetic
Across a network, the numbers compound in a way single-site owners underestimate: a small improvement per location multiplied by forty locations is usually a larger prize than a heroic national campaign, and it is far cheaper to achieve. The constraint is governance, not tactics — keeping forty profiles accurate requires an owner, a template and a monthly check, or they drift within two quarters.
Beware of averaging. A network's performance is almost never uniform: a handful of locations in dense areas carry most of the demand, and a long tail sits in low-competition towns where you may already hold position one and have nothing to gain. Run this simulator on segments — dense urban, suburban, rural — rather than on the whole estate, and spend where the gap is real.
Location pages deserve the same discipline. A page per site with a real address, real staff, real hours and information only that site could provide is an asset; a template where only the city name changes is a doorway page that Google's guidelines specifically target and that increasingly fails to be indexed at all. If you need help at scale, the directory lists SEO specialists and agencies by country and city who do multi-location work.
- Get the primary category right before anything else
- Measure actions (calls, directions, messages), not just sessions
- Prioritise entering the pack over climbing within it
- Keep NAP data identical everywhere; contradictions cost more than gaps
- Segment a multi-location estate before modelling it
- Never publish city pages for places you have no presence in