Google publishes its local ranking factors, and there are three: relevance, distance and prominence. Almost everything else circulating as a “local ranking factor” is either an input to one of those three or an inference from correlation studies presented with more confidence than it deserves.
Starting from the documented three makes the rest of the field easier to evaluate.
The three factors
Google’s local ranking guidance defines them plainly.
Relevance is how well your business matches what someone searched. It is largely determined by the information you provide: categories, services, description, and the content of the website behind the profile.
Distance is how far your business is from the searcher, or from the location named in the query. If nobody specifies a location, Google infers one.
Prominence is how well known the business is. Google states this is informed by information from across the web — links, articles and directories — and explicitly names review count and review score as contributors.
What each one actually means in practice
Relevance is a completeness problem. It responds to accuracy rather than cleverness. The primary category decides which searches you are eligible for; services and descriptions add explicit signals; the website behind the profile supplies the depth. Most businesses that believe they have a ranking problem have a relevance problem, and it is usually one wrong field.
Distance is fixed, and honest advice starts there. You cannot rank everywhere from one address. What you can do is win the margin: a business two miles further out beats a closer competitor when it is visibly more relevant and more prominent. That margin, not the impossible cases, is what local SEO buys.
Prominence is the only factor without a ceiling. Relevance is complete once the profile is accurate. Distance is what it is. Prominence keeps accumulating, because it draws on the entire web: coverage, links from local organisations, mentions, and a review profile that grows every month. It is also the slowest to build, which is why businesses that start early stay ahead.
What is not a documented factor
Several things get discussed as factors without appearing in Google’s documentation. That does not always make them worthless, but it does change how much weight to give them.
Posts. Not documented as a ranking factor. Still worth doing for the profile space and the questions they answer.
Social signals. Not documented, and the apparent correlation is largely explained by good businesses doing many things well at once.
Keyword-stuffed business names. These do appear to influence results, which is precisely why Google’s representation guidelines prohibit them and why competitors report them. Building on a rule violation is a strategy with an expiry date.
Behavioural signals such as clicks and direction requests. Widely believed to matter, not documented. Reasonable to assume they reflect quality rather than to be gamed.
How to read the factor studies
Every year several published studies rank local factors by correlation with position. They are useful for orientation and dangerous as instruction, because correlation studies cannot separate a cause from a companion. Businesses with more reviews also tend to be older, better funded and more linked. A study will attribute the ranking to whichever variable it measured.
Treat them as hypotheses ordered by plausibility. Treat the documentation as fact. When the two disagree, follow the documentation.
Where this leaves the work
Because distance is fixed, relevance and prominence absorb everything. Relevance is a finite project you can finish, which is why the profile work in our Google Business Profile guide comes first and shows fastest. Prominence is an ongoing programme, covered in our local search guide, and it is what still separates two businesses a year later.
The full sequence, ordered by impact, is in our local SEO checklist. If you would rather it were run for you, that is our work.
