Nobody outside Google has the real ranking formula, and anyone who shows you a tidy table of exact "ranking weights" is selling something. What we do have is pattern recognition from working on a lot of profiles across a lot of trades, plus Google's own public guidance. So treat this as informed experience, not a lab result: here's roughly what carries the most weight, in the order we'd worry about it, and a few things that matter less than people assume.
What we'd fix first, in rough order
- Your primary category. Nothing else comes close. Get this right and the rest has a chance; get it wrong and you're capping your ceiling no matter how hard you work the other fields.
- How many reviews you have, with diminishing returns. The jump from a handful of reviews to fifty changes everything. The jump from five hundred to a thousand barely registers. If you're starting low, this is where your effort pays back fastest.
- How recent those reviews are. A steady flow over the last few months tends to do more than a big pile that all arrived two years ago. Freshness signals a business people are using right now.
- How many categories you've claimed. Listings carrying five or more relevant categories tend to beat those scraping by on one or two. It's free reach most businesses never collect.
- Your description and services. Not magic, but the words on your profile are part of how Google decides what you're relevant for. Filled-in service descriptions especially, since almost everyone leaves them blank.
- Photos, posts, Q&A, and replies. Individually small, collectively a signal that this is a live, tended profile rather than a billboard someone put up once.
If your eyes glaze at a list like that, here's the short version: category and reviews are the engine. Everything else is tuning.
The things that surprise people
A local phone number seems to help. Profiles using a local area code often seem to do better than the same business on a toll-free line. We can't prove why, but the working theory is that a local number reads as one more small proximity signal. It costs nothing to use one, so we do.
Service descriptions earn more than service names. Those little description boxes under each service appear to get picked up for long-tail searches, not just the service title. Hardly anyone fills them in, which is exactly why doing so quietly pulls you ahead.
Consistency beats bursts. One post a week, every week, seems to outperform four posts on a Monday followed by a month of silence. Google appears to reward the business that keeps showing up, the same way a regular customer trusts the shop that's always open when it says it will be.
Attributes are wildly under-used. The little feature checkboxes barely take ten minutes, yet most profiles leave half of them blank and miss the "near me + feature" searches they unlock.
What seems to matter less than people fear
A few things people lose sleep over don't appear to move the local needle much once your category and reviews are sorted. How old your business is. Your website's domain authority. Piling up citation number two hundred when you already have plenty. Citations absolutely matter, but the value is in having a solid, consistent core of them, not in chasing every directory on the internet. If you're spending weekends submitting to obscure listing sites while your services section sits empty, you've got the effort backwards.
How to use any "ranking factors" list, including this one
Lists like this are a map, not the territory. Your market, your competitors, and your starting point decide what actually moves you. The honest method is dull but it works: change one meaningful thing, give it a few weeks, watch your Map rankings and your calls, then change the next. Resist the urge to overhaul everything at once, because when something improves you'll have no idea which change did it. Slow and deliberate wins this game.