Local SEO in DuPage County, IL, and why you rank in one town and not the next one over.

Google names three things, and everything else sits underneath them.

Google says openly that local results are ordered on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how closely what you are matches what got typed. Distance is how far you sit from wherever the search was made. Prominence is how well known the business is, on its own site and everywhere else.

Nearly every question an owner has about local search turns out to be a question about one of those three, asked without the vocabulary for it. Why does a shop halfway across the county beat me. Why did things slip after somebody changed a category. Why does my position move when I drive somewhere. Each has a dull, answerable cause.

Two of the three can be worked on directly. The third cannot be worked on at all, and pretending otherwise is where most of the money in this industry quietly goes.

Distance is measured from the person, not from the county.

This is the one that confuses everybody and it is worth reading twice. The map does not rank businesses for a place. It ranks them for a point — wherever the phone was standing at the moment somebody searched.

Which means there is no single answer to where do I rank. You rank one way from your own parking lot and another way from four miles up the road, and both of those results are real. An owner checking from behind the counter is looking at the most flattering version in existence, and a competitor across town is looking at an equally honest one that happens to say the opposite.

It also means nobody wins a county. Somebody searching from one end of DuPage and somebody searching from the other are having two separate conversations with the same search engine, and expecting one business to sit on top of both is expecting the map to do the one thing it was built not to do.

So the useful question is which searches are reachable from where you stand.

The building cannot be moved. What can be done is to be truthful about the radius and then take everything inside it, rather than spending a year on results that were never available to begin with.

For a place with a counter, that radius is smaller than owners want and wider than they fear. For a business that travels to the customer, the arithmetic differs — the listing hides the address and publishes the towns covered instead, and distance is weighed against that area rather than against a storefront. It is not a loophole and it will not put you everywhere.

For anybody working across a broad slice of the county, the answer is more pages rather than more pins. One profile, one location, and writing that speaks properly about each place you genuinely serve.

Relevance is mostly the category, and the category is mostly ignored.

The primary category on a Google Business Profile decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all. Not how high — whether. It is the most consequential field in the entire listing, and it is usually chosen once, quickly, by whoever happened to set the thing up.

Beneath it sit the secondary categories, the service entries and the wording of every page on the site. There is nothing to game here and no trick being withheld. It is a slow, literal business of using the words your customers use, in enough places, often enough that nothing important has to be inferred.

Prominence is the slow one, and most of it is other people's doing.

Prominence is how known you are. Reviews are the visible portion, and the pattern counts for more than the total — a listing gaining a few every month reads very differently from one that gained forty some years back and has been still ever since.

The rest is everything said about you in places you do not control. A directory entry, a chamber listing, a supplier's page, a local write-up, a mention with no link attached at all. None of it is for sale, and any of it that is for sale is not worth owning.

What can be done is to keep the asking automatic behind finished work, answer everything that arrives in your own voice, and make certain the details published about you agree with each other wherever they appear. Then it accumulates, slowly, in the direction you wanted.

What goes in writing, and what never will.

Placement in local results is not sold by Google, so it cannot be sold by us either. A guarantee about a position on that map is a promise concerning somebody else's product.

Here is the standing arrangement offered in its place.

• The profile worked on every month rather than opened when something breaks — categories, services, photographs, hours, posts
• A review request behind every finished job, and every review that lands answered
• One page written or rewritten each month, chosen from the words people really used to reach you
• The published details about you kept identical everywhere they appear
• Page speed and dead links watched, because a page that quietly breaks quietly stops being shown
• A written account of what changed and what moved, sent in the flat months as well as the good ones

How long it takes, and how to tell without fooling yourself.

Profile work can register within weeks, because completing categories, services and photographs hands the search engine facts it was already hunting for. Pages are slower — three months before there is anything fair to judge, and longer wherever several established businesses are already competing for the same handful of positions.

Checking it by searching for yourself is close to useless, for the reason set out further up. Read what the profile itself reports instead: how many people called, asked for directions or tapped through to the site, and whether those move the right way across a quarter rather than across a week.