Google Maps SEO.

By relevance, distance and prominence — the three factors Google names in its own documentation for local results, weighted together. A business further away can overtake a nearer one if its relevance and prominence signals are markedly stronger. Conversely, proximity alone wins nothing if the profile does not match the search.

• Relevance is the match between the search and your profile. It comes mainly from the primary category, the additional categories, the service list and the description — and from whether your website occupies the same subject.
• Distance is the gap between the searcher's location and your address, or the centre of your service area. This factor cannot be optimised.
• Prominence is how well Google knows your business across the web as a whole: reviews and your replies to them, mentions in directories and regional sources, links, articles, association and trade pages.

Because distance is fixed, all of the work shifts onto the other two. That is not bad news: relevance can be improved substantially in a few hours, and prominence is precisely the part competitors rarely pursue systematically.

Because it explains why two equally good profiles perform differently — and why any ranking guarantee in the local block is dishonest. There is no single position in the local pack. There are as many positions as there are places people search from.

An example from our own neighbourhood: a practice in Zollikon can hold first place for a search made in Zollikon and not appear at all for the same search made from Zurich district 4, because a dozen closer practices sit in between. Both are true at the same time. Checking from one location therefore measures nothing you can rely on. Measuring here means running the same search from many points around the location and building a map of your own visibility out of the results.

What follows in practice. First, define your realistic catchment area before you formulate expectations. Second, for areas outside that radius the route is dedicated pages on your website and classic rankings, not the map — which is why we build location pages such as SEO Agency Zurich or SEO Agency Winterthur. Third, addresses where nobody works are not a solution. Google checks, and a suspended profile costs months.

In this order, because each step makes the next one more valuable: category, services, core details, photographs, posts. Completeness is not an end in itself — every field you fill in is one more anchor point for a search to attach to.

• Primary category. The single most consequential setting in the whole profile. Choose the category your customers would use, not the one your commercial register entry suggests. As a cross-check, look at which category the businesses currently showing for your target search have chosen.
• Additional categories. Only what you genuinely offer. Every extra category dilutes the primary one a little, so use them sparingly and deliberately.
• Company name. Exactly as it stands on your door and on your invoices. Additions such as "Plumbing Zurich cheap" breach the guidelines, get reported and are reset.
• Services and description. This is where the terms people actually search for belong. Since the public questions-and-answers section disappeared, this field is the place for information that used to live there.
• Opening hours including public holidays. Wrong hours cost twice: a missed enquiry and a bad review about the locked door.
• Your own photographs. The exterior with the house number, the interior, the team, finished work. Stock imagery is recognised instantly, and it fails to answer the only question photographs are here to answer: can I see where I have to go, and does it look trustworthy?
• Posts. Short regular updates keep the profile active. A profile that stays unchanged for months sends no freshness signal at all.

A step-by-step guide with examples sits in our article Optimising your Google Business Profile. The definitions are in the glossary under Google Business Profile and Local Pack.

By asking systematically, asking everyone without exception, and giving nothing in return. Reviews are the strongest prominence lever and at the same time the area where most profiles come to harm — usually not out of bad intent, but out of convenience.

What works: a fixed point in your process where the question is asked, with the final invoice or at the closing conversation. A direct review link that leads to the form without any searching, as a QR code on the invoice, the delivery note or a business card. A short personal message rather than a mail merge. And a reply to every single review, including the bad ones — factual, without justification, with one concrete next step.

What does harm: buying reviews, offering discounts or free work in exchange, steering only happy customers towards the review form while diverting unhappy ones to an internal form, or having employees review you. Google removes such reviews, and on repetition the profile is restricted. The damage always lands on the business, never on the agency that suggested it.

One honest note about the average: a flawless five-star average across hundreds of reviews reads as less credible to many people than an average around 4.6 with visible criticism answered calmly. A bad review with a good reply is sales material.

NAP stands for name, address and phone — and consistency means those three details are written character-for-character the same everywhere. Google links mentions across the web to your profile. Contradictions weaken that link, because the system cannot tell reliably whether it is looking at one business or two.

For Swiss businesses the sources that matter in practice are these: local.ch and search.ch as the two large directories, the commercial register entry, the website with its legal notice, the Google Business Profile itself, the association or guild page for your trade, sector portals with a booking function, and map services outside Google. The usual stumbling blocks: "Strasse" against "Str.", with and without the legal form, old post-box addresses left over from before a move, and telephone numbers written three different ways.

In practice that means: fix one spelling, write it down, and align every listing to it. The effort is one-off and the result holds for years. For businesses with several locations, each location page additionally needs the matching structured data so the attribution stays unambiguous — the same logic that supports visibility in AI answers, described on GEO Agency Zurich and in the glossary under NAP.

The most visible change of the recent past is the removal of the public questions-and-answers section from the Business Profile. Google discontinued the corresponding interface at the start of November 2025 and then removed the feature from profiles. In its place is an AI-generated answer assembled from the profile, from reviews and from the linked website.

The consequence for daily work is unspectacular but important: there is no longer a semi-public place to park frequently asked questions. What your customers need to know — parking, accessibility, languages, payment methods, emergency hours — now belongs in the attributes, the service list, the description and above all on the website. That raises the value of a website that answers these questions explicitly instead of hiding them in a PDF price list.

Second, freshness carries more weight. Profiles where nothing has happened for months — no new photographs, no posts, no answered reviews — look weaker beside actively maintained ones. Third, the layout of the results page is shifting: where an AI summary appears, the classic hits slide downwards while the local block keeps its prominent position. For local businesses that moves the priorities further towards the profile.

There are four situations in which work on the map result does not solve the problem — and in which we advise against it. They are here because they usually do not come up in a sales conversation.

• Without a permissible profile, nothing works. A Google Business Profile requires either an address with customer contact or a service area with customer visits. Purely digital providers with no in-person contact do not meet that. For them the map is not a channel but a dead end.
• It does not replace capacity. More visibility means more calls. If nobody answers, or the next free slot is six weeks away, extra calls become extra bad reviews.
• It does not compensate for your location. A site in an industrial zone will never appear as often for city-centre searches as a site in the city centre. That is geography, not optimisation.
• It does not work immediately. Profile changes take effect quickly; prominence grows slowly. If you need jobs this week, run search ads and work on the profile in parallel — the more honest route, described on AdWords Agency and Google Ads Agency Zurich.

One point of principle on top of that: the profile belongs to Google, not to you. It can be restricted, merged, or temporarily suspended because of a faulty report by a third party. Your own website therefore stays the only surface nobody can switch off for you — which is why we always build local visibility on both legs.

With the figures from your own profile and with measurement points around your location — not with a search in your own browser. Your own search shows a result distorted by location, login status and history, and is therefore worthless as evidence.

From the profile statistics we use four values: views split by search and map, calls, direction requests and website clicks. Calls and direction requests are the most meaningful of the four, because they represent demand directly. Alongside those come the search terms people used to reach the profile — the most common source of category and service corrections.

The second part is spatial measurement. The same search is run from a grid of points in the radius around your location, producing a picture of the area in which you appear in the top three and where you drop out. From that map you can derive where additional prominence signals are needed and where the realistic radius ends. How we turn that into ongoing management, and what it costs, is set out on Local SEO Agency.