The SiteRoot team6 min read
Someone in Coburg types "electrician near me" at seven in the morning. Three businesses come up in a box with a map on it, then a list of ordinary blue links underneath. There are considerably more than three electricians in Coburg. Something picked those three in about a fifth of a second, and it picked differently for the person standing two suburbs away.
Google does publish how that works, at least in outline, and it is worth knowing because most of what gets sold as the answer is guesswork on top of it. For local results Google names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. It says it weighs them together rather than in order, so a business a bit further away can appear ahead of a closer one if it matches the search better or is better known. That is the important structural point: there is no single ranked list of electricians in Melbourne sitting on a server somewhere. The list is assembled fresh for each search, for each person, from wherever they happen to be standing.
What are the three things Google says it weighs
Relevance is how well what you have actually published matches what was actually typed. Not what you do. What you have said you do, in words, somewhere a machine can read.
Distance is how far you are from the searcher, or from the place named in the search. Type "electrician Coburg" and it measures from Coburg. Type "electrician near me" and it measures from the phone.
Prominence is how well known the business appears to be, judged across the whole web rather than from your own site. Reviews, directory entries, being mentioned in places that have nothing to do with you. It is the one people ignore, because it is the one you cannot edit on a Tuesday night.
Why does the result change depending on where someone is standing
Because distance is computed from the searcher, every search is a different search.
This has a consequence that catches a lot of owners out: you do not have "a ranking". You have a different result in Coburg, in Brunswick and at the far edge of the area you drive to. Sitting in your own office typing your own trade and seeing yourself first tells you very little, both because you are standing at your own address and because Google has watched you click your own site before.
If you want to check something honestly, check it from the other end of your service area, on a phone that is not signed in to your account. It is a rougher picture and a truer one.
What does relevance look like in practice
It looks like sentences.
The most common gap we see on an existing site is a services page that lists six services as a row of icons with two words under each, and never once spells out in a sentence what any of them involves or who they are for. The visitor can infer it. A machine reading the page has six two-word labels to work with, against a competitor who wrote three paragraphs about switchboard upgrades.
The other half of relevance is place. If you drive to Reservoir, Preston and Thornbury, those words should exist on your site in a sentence someone would actually say, not stuffed into a footer list of forty suburbs you have never been to. The forty-suburb footer is an old trick and it reads exactly as badly to a person as it does to anything else.
There is also a quieter piece. Google publishes a list of specific business types, with entries like Plumber, Dentist and Electrician among them, and a page can carry a small block of facts naming which one it is, along with the phone number and the address. A visitor never sees that block. It does not make anything rank. What it does is remove a guess: instead of a machine inferring your trade from your hero photo, you have stated it.
What makes a business prominent
Almost none of it happens on your website, which is the uncomfortable part.
Prominence is built from other places on the web treating you as a real, established business. Reviews accumulating over years. A listing in a trade association directory. The local paper writing about a job you did. A supplier's "find an installer" page naming you. A sponsor's line on a junior footy club site. None of that is a website task and none of it can be done in an afternoon.
What you can do is be the kind of business people mention, and then make sure that when someone does mention you, the details they copy are correct. The slow, unglamorous version is the only version that works. Anyone offering to build prominence for you quickly is offering to buy links, which is a different product with a different risk attached.
If the map box does the work, why does the website matter
Because the listing in the map is a rung, not a destination.
The profile answers one question: is there someone. Your website answers the one immediately after it, which is whether you are the right someone for this particular problem, in this suburb, at this hour. That second question is where the job is actually won or lost, and it is answered on a page you control rather than in a box you do not.
There is also a feedback loop worth understanding. The website a profile points at is part of how Google works out what that business is and whether it is real. A profile pointing at nothing, or at a page that has been broken since March, is a profile with less behind it.
What can you actually control
Honestly, a short list. It is still worth doing, because most businesses do not do it.
- The words on your pages, with each service described in sentences rather than labels.
- The suburbs you really work in, named in normal prose.
- Contact details that are identical everywhere they appear, down to the spacing of the phone number.
- A separate page for each significant service, rather than one page listing all of them.
- A site that loads and works on a phone with two bars of signal in a driveway.
- Being mentioned, over time, by other people.
What you cannot control: distance, which is fixed by geography, and the position itself, which is assembled per search and is not yours to own.
Where SiteRoot comes into this
We build the controllable half in by default, because it is mechanical and there is no reason for an owner to have to think about it.
Every site we build describes each service in real sentences rather than icon labels. It carries a block of facts naming the specific business type Google publishes for that trade, with the contact details alongside. It publishes a file listing every page on the site for search engines to read, refreshed every time you publish a change, so a new page is not waiting to be stumbled on. It publishes an llms.txt file, which is a plain text summary of the business that AI tools can read directly. Phone numbers are tap-to-call links. Enquiry forms email you at your own address. Images load as the visitor scrolls to them. We watch that the site is up and that its certificate has not lapsed.
None of that is a promise about where you appear. Nobody can make that promise, including us, and the three factors above are the reason why: two of them are not ours to touch.
