What is the local pack?

The local pack occupies a space of its own on the results page. Google inserts it when it reads the query as someone looking for a nearby business, either because they typed a city or a neighbourhood, or because the word itself implies proximity, such as “dentist” or “locksmith open now”. The block shows a map and a short list of listings, usually three, each with name, category, average rating, opening hours and buttons to call or get directions.

It should be kept apart from the organic results. The blue links point to web pages and are ordered by signals from the site. The listings in the local pack come from business profiles and describe physical entities, not documents. A company can hold the local pack without a single well ranked page, and the reverse holds too: owning the first organic page grants no automatic access to the block.

It is not Google Maps either. Maps is the full product, with its own search, its extended listing and its navigation. The local pack is the window Google opens onto that index from general search. Clicking “more places” takes the user out of the SERP and into the extended local listing, with many more listings and with filters the block of three does not offer.

Google orders local results using three factors it has made public: relevance, distance and prominence.

Relevance measures how well the listing matches what is being searched for. What counts here is the primary category, the secondary categories, the description, the services and the products loaded into the profile. An incomplete listing forces the system to guess what the business does for a living, and that guess rarely favours whoever caused it.

Distance calculates the gap between the business and the point the search is made from. If the user does not share their location, Google estimates it from the information available. This factor explains why the local pack changes when you cross the street and why no single position exists: every point on the map produces a different order.

Prominence reflects how well known a business is. Google infers it from data inside and outside the profile, among it how many websites link to the company and how many reviews it has collected. A famous museum shows up in local results even though nobody optimised anything, because its prominence comes from the real world.

The three factors work in combination, not as a list of independent requirements. Google notes that a business further away can end up ahead of a closer one if it matches the query better. And it draws an explicit line: there is no way to request or pay for a better position in local results.

The local pack decides who the user calls. On queries with local intent it sits at the top of the screen, above the first organic result, and delivers the whole action without leaving Google: phone, route, opening hours and reviews. A good share of those searches is settled inside the block itself.

A concrete decision about where effort goes follows from that. A business whose customers turn up in person gets more out of its business profile, its reviews and the consistency of its data than out of chasing the first organic position for a generic word. A business with no in-person service and no travel to the customer falls outside this ground, because Google requires in-person contact with customers before it accepts a listing.

The way you measure changes too. The organic position of a URL fits into a single figure. The local pack position depends on the point the query is made from, so it has to be measured across a grid of locations around the business. Anyone reporting “we come out first” without saying where they measured from is reporting very little.

• Choose the primary category of the profile carefully and add only the secondary ones that match services you actually provide.
• Fill in opening hours, services, attributes, service area and photos, and review them whenever something changes. A half filled profile loses relevance against a complete one.
• Publish the NAP (name, address and phone) on the website in the same format as in the listing, and keep it identical across the directories you appear in.
• Ask for reviews continuously and reply to all of them, negative ones included. The volume of reviews is part of the prominence Google calculates.
• Create a dedicated page for each location, with different content on each, and link it from the corresponding listing.
• Mark up the company data with LocalBusiness structured data and check that it agrees with what the profile says.

• Putting keywords or the city into the business name when they are not part of the real sign outside. Google treats that as unnecessary information and can suspend the listing.
• Registering a virtual office, a P.O. box or a rented address the business does not operate from. None of the three earns a profile.
• Creating several listings for the same location, one per service for instance. Google explicitly forbids more than one profile per location.
• Leaving the profile frozen after sign-up: holiday hours never updated, old phone numbers, reviews left unanswered.
• Measuring the position from the office and assuming that is the result everybody sees.