How to show up on Google Maps: the 3 rules Google uses

When somebody searches "brake shop near me" on a phone, the first thing they see is not a website: it is three listings with a map on top. That box takes most of the calls, and your site has nothing to do with getting into it. Your Google profile does.

The three rules, and Google publishes them

Google documents what orders those results: relevance, distance and prominence.

• Relevance is how well your business matches what the person searched for.
• Distance is how far you are from whoever is searching.
• Prominence is how well known you are: reviews, mentions, links.

Distance you cannot change. The other two you can, and both of them are worked from the profile — and that is the first thing our Local SEO & social plan does every month.

Start with the category, and almost nobody checks it

The primary category is what tells Google what you are. If a shop that lives on brake jobs is listed as "auto repair shop" instead of "brake shop", it stops existing for half a dozen searches its exact customer is making.

Check it, then look at the secondary ones: they cost nothing and each one opens up new searches.

What NOT to do with the name

Putting "Perez Auto — Brakes and Suspension Lake Jackson" in the name field is against Google's rules and is grounds for suspension. The name is the name. The words that describe what you do belong in the category, the services and the description, which is where Google expects to find them.

The rest, in order of what it pays

1. Hours, holidays included. "Open now" is a filter people actually use, and being closed when it says open costs you a bad review.
2. Services, one by one with their descriptions. That is where the words that do not fit in the name do fit.
3. Recent photos. A profile whose last photo is two years old looks like a business that closed.
4. Attributes: languages you serve in, accessibility, whether the business is Latino-owned. They are free, almost nobody fills them in, and Google lets people filter by them.
5. Reviews, answered. That is the next article.

And one that is gone: the profile's questions and answers. Google retired them. If a guide tells you to answer them, that guide is old.

This does not get finished, it gets kept up

If your town is Lake Jackson, Angleton, Freeport or Clute, each one changes what decides the call: there is a page per town about exactly that.

A profile that is claimed and then abandoned performs about like one that was half filled in. Posting once a month, answering what comes in, and checking that the hours are still true is a good part of the difference between coming up third and coming up first.