When someone in Knysna searches for a plumber, or someone in Sandton searches for an accountant, Google doesn’t start with websites. It starts with a map and three businesses underneath it. Being one of those three is worth more to most local businesses than anything else they can do online, and the most important part of it is free.
This is a rewrite of two guides we published a few years ago, brought up to date for 2026.
What Google uses to rank local results
Google says local results depend on three things, and it’s worth knowing them because every piece of advice below comes back to one of them:
- Relevance: how well your listing matches what was searched. Your business category and description do most of the work here.
- Distance: how far you are from the person searching, or from the place they named. You can’t change this, which is why the other two matter so much.
- Prominence: how well known and trusted you are, judged from reviews, links, mentions elsewhere and your website.
Step 1: claim and complete your Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (it used to be called Google My Business) is the listing that appears on Google Maps and in that box of three. It costs nothing.
- Go to google.com/business, sign in with a Google account the business controls (not a staff member’s personal one), and search for your business. It may already exist, created from public information. If it does, claim it.
- Choose your primary category carefully. It’s the single strongest relevance signal you control. Pick the most specific one that’s true (“Family law attorney”, not “Lawyer”), then add a few secondary categories.
- Verify the listing. Google will ask for a short video of your premises, a phone or email code, or occasionally a postcard. Until it’s verified, it won’t rank.
- Set your address or service area. If customers come to you, show the address. If you go to them, as a plumber or a mobile service does, hide the address and set the towns you serve.
- Fill in everything else: hours (including public holidays), phone number, website, services with short descriptions, and a plain description of what you do and for whom. Write it for people, not for Google.
- Add real photos. Your premises, your team, your work. Listings with photos get noticeably more clicks than those without.
Step 2: get your name, address and number consistent everywhere
Google cross-checks your details against the rest of the web. If your listing says “Shop 4, Main Road” and a directory says “4 Main Rd” with an old phone number, it’s less certain you are who you say you are.
Choose one exact way of writing your business name, address and phone number, then make sure it matches on your website, your Google profile, Facebook, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and the South African directories that matter in your field, such as Brabys, Snupit or your industry body’s member listing. A handful of accurate listings beats dozens of careless ones.
Step 3: reviews, steadily
Reviews are the biggest prominence signal for most local businesses, and they’re what people read before they call you.
- Ask every happy customer, at the moment they’re happiest, with a direct link. Your Google Business Profile gives you a short review link to send by WhatsApp or email.
- Reply to every review, good and bad, briefly and like a person. A calm, helpful reply to a bad review often does more for you than the review did harm.
- Never buy reviews or offer anything in exchange for them. It breaks Google’s rules, and listings get suspended for it.
A steady trickle of recent reviews counts for more than a burst of fifty from three years ago.
Step 4: make your website back it up
Your listing gets you seen. Your website is often what makes the decision, and it feeds the prominence signal too.
- Say where you work, in words. Name the towns and areas you serve on the relevant pages. If you serve several areas well, a page for each with genuinely different content (not the same text with the town swapped) helps.
- Put your name, address and number on every page, usually in the footer, matching your Google profile exactly.
- Add structured data. A small block of code (LocalBusiness schema) tells search engines your business type, address, hours and area in a form they read directly.
- Make it fast on a phone. Most local searches happen on phones, often on mobile data. A slow site loses the visitor your listing just won.
- Make the next step obvious. A phone number people can tap, a WhatsApp link, a booking button. Local searchers are usually ready to act.
Step 5: keep it alive
Google favours listings that look looked-after. Post an update or offer now and then, add new photos, answer questions people ask on your profile, and update your hours before public holidays. Fifteen minutes a month is enough for most businesses.
What to skip
- “Guaranteed page one” offers. Nobody can guarantee a Google position, and the businesses that promise it usually deliver directory spam that has to be cleaned up later.
- Keyword-stuffing your business name. “Smith Plumbing Knysna Best Plumber 24 Hour” might work briefly, then gets your listing suspended. Use your real name.
- A separate listing for every town you serve. One listing per real location with staff. Virtual offices and fake addresses get removed.
Where search is going
More people now ask ChatGPT, Gemini or Google’s AI answers for a recommendation rather than scrolling a list of links. Those tools lean on the same signals: consistent business details, real reviews, and a website that says plainly what you do and where. Get the basics above right and you’re in a good position for both.
If your site is the weak link, or you’d like search built into a new one from the start, that’s part of how we build every website. Book a call and we’ll tell you what we’d change first.
Grant SlabbertDesign and development lead, JuneDay · About us
Web development at JuneDay