When someone searches “near me”, Google only highlights a handful of businesses. What decides which ones, and what depends on you. Google ranks local results by three official criteria: relevance, distance and prominence. Your Google Business Profile matters as much as your website: category, opening hours, photos and reviews make the difference. Name, address and phone number must be strictly identical everywhere they appear. A network with several locations needs one page per location, not a single “contact” page. Google’s three criteria, and the one beyond your reach Google says so in its official help: local results are mainly based on three criteria. Relevance: how well your profile matches what the person is looking for. Distance: between your business and where the person is, or the place they specified in their search. And prominence: how well known your business is, online and in real life. You can’t work on distance: a restaurant in Maârif won’t get any closer to a user searching from Aïn Diab. The other two criteria, however, depend largely on you. That’s where the difference is made between two businesses located the same distance away. Your Google Business Profile, your shop window on Maps The business profile, formerly Google My Business and now Google Business Profile, is often the first thing a customer sees of you, before even your website. An incomplete profile sends a weak signal, to Google as much as to the customer. The primary category: it’s the most decisive setting. Choose the most specific one (“Gym” rather than a general category), then add secondary categories only if they truly match your business. Opening hours, including special hours for public holidays and Ramadan: a profile that says “open” in front of a closed door costs you a customer, and often a negative review. Photos: the storefront, so people recognise you from the street, then the inside, the team, the products or services. Real, recent photos. The description, services and products, written with the words your customers use, without stuffing keywords. Name, address, phone: identical everywhere Google cross-checks what it finds about you: your profile, your website, directories, social networks, booking platforms. If your address is written three different ways and an old number is still lingering in a directory, you blur the signal. Take stock once and for all: the exact name of the business, the full address, the main phone number. Then copy them identically everywhere. On your website, write them as text, not just inside an image, and add LocalBusiness structured data so search engines read them unambiguously. Avoid this Adding keywords to your profile name, for example “Cheap Gym Rabat Agdal” instead of the real name, goes against Google’s guidelines and can get your profile suspended. The name must be the one the business actually uses. Reviews: ask for them, and above all reply Reviews count for prominence and, even more, for the customer comparing two profiles. Google recommends inviting your customers to leave a review and replying to them. A negative review answered calmly and precisely is often more reassuring than a perfect rating left without a reply. Ask for the review at the right moment, right after a successful service, with a direct link to the review form. Never offer anything in return: Google forbids offering a discount or a gift in exchange for a review. Reply to every review, positive and negative, picking up on what the customer mentioned. Several locations? One page per location For a brand with several locations, the temptation is to link every profile to the website’s home page. It’s a missed opportunity. Each profile should point to its own page: address, opening hours, directions, team, services offered at that specific place. These pages shouldn’t be copies where only the city name changes. What makes them useful, and therefore well ranked, is information specific to the place: the nearest car park, public transport, services available only there, photos of that particular location. Track what your profile brings you Google Business Profile provides its own statistics: profile views, direction requests, calls, clicks to the website. Add tracking parameters (UTM) to the website link in your profile: in your analytics you’ll be able to tell visits from Maps apart from those coming from regular search.