The 3 Factors That Decide If You Rank Locally: Relevance, Distance & Prominence

Want to show up in Google’s Map Pack? You’re not alone, but showing up doesn’t happen by accident. Ranking comes down to three core factors: relevance, distance, and prominence.

And no, this isn’t theory. Google confirms it directly.

Here’s exactly what these mean, why they matter, and how you can optimize your business to dominate local search.

Relevance: Are You What They’re Searching For?

Relevance is Google’s way of asking,

“Is this the kind of business someone’s

actually looking for?”


To answer that, it looks across:

  • Your Google Business Profile categories and descriptions

  • Your reviews and responses

  • (yep, keywords in both matter)

  • Your website content, meta tags, and headings

  • Your FAQs, GMB posts, and photos

  • Your citations and backlinks

Relevance is Google’s way of asking,

“Is this the kind of business someone’s

actually looking for?”


To answer that, it looks across:

  • Your Google Business Profile categories and descriptions

  • Your reviews and responses

  • (yep, keywords in both matter)

  • Your website content, meta tags, and headings

  • Your FAQs, GMB posts, and photos

  • Your citations and backlinks

Relevance is Google’s way of asking,

“Is this the kind of business someone’s

actually looking for?”


To answer that, it looks across:

  • Your Google Business Profile categories and descriptions

  • Your reviews and responses

  • (yep, keywords in both matter)

  • Your website content, meta tags, and headings

  • Your FAQs, GMB posts, and photos

  • Your citations and backlinks

How to move the needle:

Let’s say you want to rank for “emergency HVAC repair in Miami.” Here's what matters:

Is that phrase in your business description, reviews, and review replies?

Does your website mention it in headlines, paragraphs, and meta tags?

Do backlinks pointing to your site use that phrase in the anchor text?

Is that term baked into your Google Business Profile, post captions, and FAQs?

Relevance is Google’s way of asking,

“Is this the kind of business someone’s

actually looking for?”


To answer that, it looks across:

  • Your Google Business Profile categories and descriptions

  • Your reviews and responses (yep, keywords in both matter)

  • Your website content, meta tags, and headings

  • Your FAQs, GMB posts, and photos

  • Your citations and backlinks

Distance: How Close Are You to the Searcher?

This one’s pretty simple, proximity matters. Google weighs how far your business is from the person doing the search, especially for queries like “near me” or when location is implied.

But here’s where businesses mess it up:

  • Using MapBox instead of Google Maps on their site (this doesn’t send the right signal back to Google)

  • Ignoring the service area setting in their Google Business Profile

  • Failing to create location-specific pages for nearby areas they want to rank in


How to improve your distance factor:

  • Use embedded Google Maps (not third-party tools) on your contact and location pages

  • Set your service areas accurately inside your GMB dashboard

  • Create neighborhood-specific landing pages. For instance, if you're in Manchester and want traffic from Town and Country, Missouri, build a page like /directions-from-town-and-country with directions, local references, and an embedded Google Map.


Just make sure it's about visibility with real-world action in mind. If customers won’t drive that far, or if your team won’t go there, it’s not worth the SEO energy.

Prominence: Does Google Trust You?

Prominence is all about authority. It's how Google measures your credibility, based on what the internet says about you.

That includes:

  • High-quality backlinks from trustworthy sites

  • Reviews: quantity, quality, and consistency

  • Mentions of your brand on platforms like Reddit, YouTube, Facebook, and forums

  • Profiles on local orgs, directories, and chambers of commerce

  • A well-built, clean, crawlable website


How to build it:

  • Earn links from industry sites (e.g., Avvo for lawyers, Houzz for contractors, Healthgrades for doctors)

  • Get 4–6 reviews per month and respond to all of them, yes, even the bad ones

  • Optimize your technical SEO: fast load times, mobile responsiveness, and schema markup

  • Be active on third-party sites. Your brand should be showing up where customers spend time, not just on Google.

BONUS: The Secret Role of Citations

Citations support both relevance and distance.

  • Industry citations (like Angi, Expertise, or Houzz) improve relevance

  • Geographically based citations (like local chamber websites) improve distance

  • And the “big boy” directories (like Apple Maps, Yelp, and CitySearch)? They enhance relevance, distance, and prominence simultaneously.

A clean, consistent NAP (Name, Address, Phone) across these platforms builds trust. And if your competitors have more of these, or better ones, you’re starting from behind.

You can’t shortcut this

You can’t hack local SEO with shortcuts. But you can win by doing it the right way, building relevance, owning your local distance, and earning trust with prominence signals.