How to rank in the local pack in your town.

What Google is weighing

Google describes local ranking as a combination of three factors. Everything practical follows from them.

• Relevance. How well your profile matches what was searched. Driven by your categories, your services and what your website says you do.
• Distance. How close you are to the searcher, or to the place they named. You cannot change where your office is, which is exactly why the other two matter so much.
• Prominence. How well known and well regarded you are — reviews, mentions elsewhere on the web, and your general standing in ordinary search results.

Start with the Google Business Profile

This is free, it is the largest single lever, and most agencies have it half-finished. Work through it properly once.

• Categories. Set the primary category to the one that matches your main business — usually Real estate agency, or Letting agent if lettings is your core. Add secondary categories for the rest. The primary category carries far more weight than the others, so choose it deliberately.
• Name. Use your actual trading name. Stuffing the town into it breaks Google's guidelines and can get the profile suspended.
• Address and hours. Must match what is on your website, exactly. Keep bank holidays updated.
• Services. List them out — sales valuations, lettings, property management, block management. This directly feeds relevance.
• Photos. The office, the team, the window display. Add them regularly rather than all at once.
• Products and posts. Underused by agents. Posting recent instructions or sold properties keeps the profile active.
• Q&A. Anyone can answer questions on your profile, so seed the obvious ones yourself — fees, valuations, areas covered.

Then reviews, and keep going

Reviews are the clearest prominence signal you can influence, and for a vendor choosing between three agents they are often the deciding factor.

What matters is not just the total. A steady flow beats a burst — twenty reviews collected over a year looks healthier than forty collected in a fortnight, which looks bought. Ask at the natural high point: completion, or the day a let is agreed. Make it one tap from a text message. And reply to every review, including the poor ones, because that reply is read by future vendors more than by the person who left it.

Then the website underneath it

The profile does not stand alone — Google cross-checks it against your site.

• Consistent name, address and phone number. Identical everywhere: your site, your profile, your directory listings. Small differences make it harder for Google to be confident they are the same business.
• A real page per area you cover. Not thin copies with the town name swapped. Write about that area properly — the streets, the housing stock, what sells there, what you have sold there. One good area page beats ten templated ones, and templated ones can be treated as spam.
• Structured data. Mark up your business details so the name, address, phone and opening hours are machine-readable.
• Speed. Local searches are overwhelmingly done on phones. See our piece on why agency sites lose people in the first five seconds.

The order to do it in

If you are starting from nothing, this sequence gets results fastest:

1. Claim and fully complete the Google Business Profile, categories first.
2. Get your name, address and phone consistent across your site and the main directories.
3. Set up a repeatable way to ask every happy client for a review.
4. Write proper pages for the two or three areas you most want instructions from.
5. Fix site speed on mobile.
6. Then keep posting, keep collecting reviews, and review your rankings monthly.

None of it is quick. Local rankings move over months, not days. But it compounds, and unlike portal advertising you are not renting the position — once you are in the pack, staying there costs far less than getting there.

If you would rather not do this yourself, it is part of what we handle. Ask for a site review and we will show you where you currently stand against the other agents in your town.