There isn’t one top of Google. There are four, and they work differently. So the first answer to how to be on top of Google search results is another question: which top do you want?
For a business that serves a local area, we’d aim at the map first. That means a complete, accurate Google Business Profile, steady reviews, and a website with a clear page for each service you sell and each town you serve. Then you wait, because it takes months and nobody can buy a shortcut. Google says so itself.
How to be on top of Google search results that bring calls
Search for your trade on your phone and look at what appears before you scroll. You’ll usually see some mix of these:
- The local pack, the map section that shows up when someone wants a business nearby. It draws largely on Google Business Profiles.
- Organic results, the ordinary website listings. These depend on your website.
- Paid results, the sponsored listings from Google Ads. You pay for each click.
- AI Overviews, a summary Google writes above everything else for some searches.
The local pack is the most practical place for most local businesses to focus, because it leads to calls and requests for directions. Organic results matter too, especially for people comparing options before a bigger purchase. Ads put you on the page sooner, for as long as you pay. We wouldn’t chase a separate trick for AI Overviews. They draw on the same clear pages and accurate business information.
Being first for one word isn’t the goal either. A septic company in Hatfield doesn’t need to top “septic.” It needs to appear when someone in town types “septic tank pumping near me” with a full tank. Which jobs do you want? Which towns can you reach without losing half the day to driving? Those answers pick the searches worth your effort. Your own company name tells you little, since that person already knows you exist.
Start with your Google Business Profile
If you want to appear on the map, the profile comes first. Google’s help page, Tips to improve your local ranking on Google, says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. It also says that “businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results.”
In practice that’s a correct name, address, phone number and hours, the categories that describe what you do, a list of services, photos of real work, and an occasional post. We often find that a business has moved, changed its hours or added a service without the profile catching up. That’s the cheapest fix there is.
Reviews belong here too. The same page says “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.” Google doesn’t say how many, and we won’t invent a number. A steady habit of asking happy customers does more than one burst of requests a year.
You can’t change where the searcher is standing. Distance is one of the three factors, so a shop in Lansdale won’t show up for every search made in Allentown, whatever work goes into the profile. Our guide on ranking in the Google map pack goes deeper.
Make the website say the same thing
The website and the profile should tell the same story about who you are, what you do and where you work. Four things carry most of the weight:
- The same business name, address and phone number on the site, the profile and every directory listing.
- A page for each service and each area you really serve, with something specific to say about it.
- Fast pages that work properly on a phone.
- A clear path from the home page to any service in a click or two.
You may also hear about schema markup. That’s a small piece of code that labels your business details so search engines can read them reliably. It’s a technical term for a fairly simple idea.
Picture a fence company in Richboro whose site has a single page listing wood fences, vinyl, gates and repairs in one paragraph. Someone searching for a vinyl fence estimate has almost nothing to land on. Splitting those services apart is often the first thing we’d look at in our SEO work.
Then there’s the writing. Google’s guidance, Creating helpful, reliable, people-first content, says its ranking systems “are designed to prioritize helpful, reliable information that’s created to benefit people.” It adds that the systems look to reward a good page experience, which is why speed and phone layout made the list above.
For a small business, helpful means answering what customers ask before they hire you. What does this cost, roughly, and what changes the price? How long does the job take? When is a repair enough? One page that answers one of those well is worth more than ten that repeat a keyword.
What takes time, and what nobody controls
A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Google’s local ranking page counts how many sites link to a business as part of prominence, so links still signal that a company is established. The useful ones come from real relationships: your chamber of commerce, a trade association, a supplier, a local news story. If someone offers hundreds of links in a few weeks, pass. They reflect no relationship, and they do nothing for the customer deciding whether to call.
Ranking isn’t a one-time project. Competitors keep working and pages go stale. Google’s account of how it tests Search says it ran over 700,000 experiments in 2023 that led to more than 4,000 improvements. The figure is a few years old, but it explains why a site left alone tends to slip.
How long does it take? That depends on where you start, how crowded your trade is in your area, and how steadily the work gets done. Visibility usually builds over months, and we’ve written about how long SEO takes to work.
Nobody can promise you a position by a date. Google’s local ranking page says there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, and that applies to us as much as anyone. Some of the work needs you: photos of your work, word when a service or area changes, and your read on the inquiries. If traffic goes up and the calls are all for work you don’t do, we haven’t reached the goal. Only you can tell us that.
Check your own map results this week
Search your main service plus your main town on your phone. Note which of the four results you appear in and which competitor sits above you. Then open your Business Profile and check the hours, categories and phone number. It takes about twenty minutes and costs nothing.
If you’d like a second pair of eyes, request a free SEO audit, or show us the site and tell us which calls you want more of. We’ll say what we’d do first and why. Your first consultation is free.