Nikhil Menon · Head of Marketing
7 min read
For a business with a physical location, ranking in the three-result map pack is worth more than ranking first in the normal results. It sits higher, it shows your phone number, and people tap it without ever reaching a website.
Google weighs three things: relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change distance. So the work is entirely in the other two.
Most profiles we audit are 60% filled in. Every field is a relevance signal:
Review count matters. Review recency matters more than most people realise — a business with 40 reviews spread over the last year usually outranks one with 200 reviews that stopped in 2023.
Build a simple habit: ask every satisfied customer, at the moment they are satisfied, with a short link. Respond to every review including the bad ones, calmly and factually. A well-handled one-star review persuades more readers than a five-star one does.
Never buy reviews. Google's detection is far better than it was, and profile suspension takes months to reverse.
Your Name, Address and Phone must match character for character everywhere they appear — your website, JustDial, IndiaMART, Facebook, industry directories. "Shop 12, Lajpat Nagar 2" and "Shop No. 12, Lajpat Nagar-II" read as two different businesses to an algorithm.
Audit them once, fix them once, and it stays fixed.
Profiles with recent photos get measurably more engagement, and engagement feeds prominence. Real photos of the actual premises, staff and work — not stock images. A handful every month beats fifty uploaded once.
If you serve multiple areas, one page per area works — but only if each page is genuinely about that area. Duplicating a page and swapping the locality name is a well-known pattern and it does not work any more. Each page needs local specifics: real projects, real landmarks, real details.
Sponsorship of a local school event, membership of a trade association, coverage in a regional publication. A handful of genuinely local links outperform dozens of generic directory listings.
For a new local client we do the profile completely, fix NAP everywhere, start the review habit, and only then move to content and links. The first three are cheap, fast, and produce most of the movement. Agencies that lead with content and links on a half-empty profile are selling you the expensive part first.
Head of Marketing at Corewebbers, New Delhi. Google Ads & Meta certified. Has managed over ₹40 crore in ad spend for Indian brands.
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