Proximity: the ranking factor you cannot change, and what to do instead

Google names three things that decide local ranking: relevance, distance and prominence. Two of them are yours to work on. The third is decided by where the person searching happens to be standing at the time.

Almost every unproductive conversation about local SEO comes from not separating these properly.

The three, in plain terms

• Relevance: how well you match what was searched. Your category, your services, what your site is about. Entirely within your control.
• Distance: how far you are from the searcher, or from the area they named. Not within your control at all.
• Prominence: how well known and well regarded your business is, drawn from across the web, mostly through reviews and mentions. Slow, and entirely within your control.

What this breaks

Checking your own rankings

You search from your premises, where you are closer to yourself than any competitor is, and you look excellent. Your customer searches from three suburbs away and you are not there.

Neither result is wrong and neither is a fair measure. A single ranking number for a local business is a sample of one point on a map, and it is always the most flattering point available.

Comparing yourself to a competitor

The competitor who beats you consistently may simply be nearer the centre of the area everyone searches from. That is not something they did, and it is not something you can undo by working harder on the same things they did.

Judging whether your SEO is working

Work that widens your visibility by two suburbs is a substantial result, and it is completely invisible in a report that checks one location. Plenty of good work has been cancelled because it was measured with the wrong instrument, which is why what a useful report contains matters more than how often one arrives.

So what do you actually do

You cannot move your business, and moving it would be a very expensive ranking tactic. What you can do is make the other two factors strong enough that distance stops being decisive as quickly.

That is the whole strategy, and it is worth stating plainly because it is unglamorous: prominence is what buys you distance. A business with a hundred reviews, a set of genuine local mentions and a site that clearly does one thing well will hold positions further from its pin than an identical business without those. Not infinitely further. Further.

You cannot change how far away you are. You can change how far away you can still win.

Three things that follow from this

1. Pick your ground before you spend

Sort your last hundred jobs by suburb. There will be a cluster. That cluster is where distance is already working for you, and it is where effort compounds fastest. Winning it completely is worth more than being ninth everywhere, and it is the ground a business with no shopfront has to hold before expanding at all.

2. Measure across a geography, not at a point

A grid of results across your service area shows the shape of your visibility rather than a number. It is the only measurement that reflects how the factor actually behaves, which is why rankings measured across a geography is one of the five numbers worth reporting at all.

3. Stop treating distance as a failure

Finding the edge of your reach is useful information, not bad news. Beyond it, the honest answers are paid advertising, referral relationships, or accepting that work from there arrives another way. All three are real strategies. Pretending the edge does not exist is not.

What does not work

• Declaring a larger service area. It describes where you work; it does not extend where you rank.
• Building a page for every suburb. Thin pages do not overcome distance and they carry their own problems.
• Renting an unstaffed address closer to town. It breaches the guidelines and it is one of the most common causes of suspension.
• Putting your target suburb in your business name. Same answer, plus a name that disagrees with your signage.

If you travel to customers rather than having them come to you, this factor shapes everything about your strategy, and the service area guide goes further into what to do about it.