The three business listings that appear above the normal results are chosen on a different basis from the rest of the page, and understanding that basis explains most of the cases where a good business is missing.
What decides who appears in local results?
Relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your listing matches the search. Distance is how far you are from where the searcher is, or from the place they named. Prominence is how well known the business is, both offline and in what the rest of the web says about it.
Distance is the one nobody wants to hear, because it is not negotiable. If you are eleven kilometres from the city centre and eight competitors are inside it, you will not appear for searches made in the centre, no matter how good your listing is. That is not a fault to fix, it is a market to pick differently.
Is the listing actually verified and eligible?
Check first, because an unverified, suspended or duplicate listing cannot rank and produces exactly the symptom of being invisible. Open the profile and look for a suspension notice, a pending verification, or a second listing at the same address competing with itself.
- Suspension Usually triggered by an address change, a category change, or keywords stuffed into the business name. The appeal process wants evidence: signage, a utility bill, a registration document.
- Duplicate listings Two profiles for one location split your signals and frequently mean neither ranks. Merge rather than delete.
- An address you cannot support A virtual office or a coworking desk is a common cause of suspension, and it is the one people are most reluctant to admit to.
- Service area set, address hidden Legitimate for a business that travels to customers, and a genuine disadvantage against a competitor with a staffed shopfront.
Is the primary category right?
The primary category does more work than everything else on the profile combined. If you are listed as a general contractor and people search for a roofer, you are competing in a different set. Pick the most specific category that describes what you are actually searched for, and put the others in as secondary.
The way to find it is not to guess. Search the term you want to appear for, open the profiles of the three businesses that do appear, and look at what category they use. That is the category Google associates with the query.
How do you build prominence?
Consistent information everywhere it appears, reviews that arrive steadily rather than in batches, and being mentioned on sites that are themselves local and relevant. Prominence is the only one of the three factors you can move at will, so it is where the work goes.
| Work | Effect | Why |
|---|---|---|
| Name, address and phone consistency | High | Conflicting details across directories make the entity harder to resolve, and an unresolved entity ranks below a resolved one. |
| A steady flow of reviews | High | Volume, recency and replies all count. Twenty reviews in one week after two silent years is a pattern, not a signal. |
| Local press and community mentions | High | The strongest form of local prominence, and the hardest to fake. |
| A page per location on your own site | Moderate | Only if each one is genuinely about that location. Templated pages with the city name swapped are recognised as such. |
| Bulk citation submissions | Low | The first twenty matter. The next three hundred are noise, and the batch services often introduce the inconsistencies you were trying to remove. |
| Posting weekly updates to the profile | Low for ranking | Useful for the people who already found you. Not a ranking lever. |
Do you have to ask for reviews?
Yes, and asking is allowed. What is not allowed is buying them, writing them, offering anything in exchange for them, or asking only the customers you expect to be happy. Gating in that way breaks the platform rules and is straightforward to detect from the ratings distribution.
The method that works is unglamorous: ask every customer at the moment the work is finished, with a direct link, and reply to every review including the bad ones. A steady one or two a week beats a campaign, both for how it looks and for what it does.
How do you check your real position?
Not by searching from your own office. Local results change with the searcher's position, so your own view is the least representative one available. Use a grid based rank check that samples positions across the area you serve, and read it as a map rather than a number.
What you will usually find is that you rank first within a kilometre of the premises and vanish by three, which is normal and tells you the real question is not why am I not ranking, it is how far the radius extends and what would widen it.