Distance is the half nobody mentions
Google has said in its own documentation what it weighs for local results, and there are three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what somebody typed. Distance is how far you are from them when they type it. Prominence is how well known you are.
Two of those three you can change this week. The third is where your business physically sits, and no amount of money moves it.
A firm on the Broadway with a half-finished profile will still beat a better firm in Southend on a search made in Leigh, because one of them is a mile closer and Google can measure that.
That is not unfair and it is not a trick. It is Google guessing that somebody searching in Leigh would rather not drive to Rayleigh. The useful question is not how to beat distance — you cannot — but what to do with the two you can move.
Start by finding out
The Digital Health Check is £9.99 and takes about thirty seconds. It tells you what is wrong before anybody tries to sell you the fix.
Check what’s wrong — £9.99 →What you can actually change
Relevance — your profile matching the words people use
The commonest fault we find is a primary category that quietly describes the wrong business. Not wrong in a way anybody notices reading it; wrong in the sense that Google has filed you under a heading nobody types. Behind that: services listed one by one rather than buried in a paragraph, a description written for a person rather than for a search engine, and hours that are right this week.
Prominence — reviews, and being mentioned in real places
In the map results this is mostly reviews. Not a campaign — a habit, one sentence at the end of every job. It is also whether your name, address and phone number say the same thing everywhere Google finds them. When your website, your profile and an old directory entry disagree, Google has three versions of you and no reason to trust any of them. That one is invisible from the inside, because you already know which is right.
Service area, and the thing not to do
If customers come to you, your pin is your pin. If you go to them — a trade, a mobile service, anything with a van — you can set a service area instead, and that is where SS9 belongs: named properly, as the area you actually cover.
What you must not do is put a Leigh address on a profile you do not trade from. A mail-handling address or a friend’s spare room is one of the commonest causes of a suspended listing, and a suspension costs you everything the listing was earning while you appeal it. Google asks for a location staffed during the hours you say you are open. That rule is worth reading twice before anybody offers to “sort your address out”.
What it costs, all of it
The Digital Health Check — £9.99
The measurement. About thirty seconds, and it tells you what is wrong rather than what we would like to sell you. Start here.
DIY Fixes — £29.99
Your faults turned into jobs, in the order that matters, with the clicking written down. What is on the list.
OG Does It — £69.99
The same list with us doing the doing, and a written note of what changed. What we fix.
Google Profile Setup — £29.99
If there is no profile to fix in the first place, that is a different job.
OG WIN — from £200 a month
One goal, agreed in writing, with monthly progress against it. No buy button on that one deliberately.
Leigh is not Southend, and the difference matters
Old Leigh, the Broadway, Leigh Road, the station — a business here is usually an independent, and often one where the owner is also the person answering the phone. That changes what is worth doing. A shop with fifty covers a week does not need the same work as a firm chasing commercial contracts across Essex, and selling both the same package is how agencies make their margin.
It also means the local knowledge is not a garnish. Nelson Road is SS9 and sits at the Leigh end; Nelson Street is SS1 and is the other side of town. Put one where the other belongs on a listing and you have created exactly the citation mismatch this page spends a paragraph warning about — and it is the sort of thing somebody who has never been here gets wrong and never notices.
If you want the short version: find out what is actually wrong for £9.99, and decide after that. There is more on SEO across Southend if you trade both sides of the line.
What you get
- A measurement before a sale — what is wrong, in plain English, for £9.99
- The three things Google says it weighs, and which of them you can actually change
- Your service area and your details set so SS9 searches know you are in SS9
- Work in the order it pays, not the order it is easiest to invoice
- Somebody who knows the difference between Leigh Broadway and Southend High Street
What this is not
- It is not a way to fake being somewhere you are not. Google is good at catching that and the penalty is worse than the problem
- It is not a retainer by default. Most Leigh businesses need an afternoon of work, not two hundred a month
- It is not a promise of first place. Distance is half the game and nobody can move your shop
Common questions
Can I rank in Leigh if my business is in Southend?
Partly, and it depends what you do. If customers come to you — a shop, a salon, a restaurant — distance is weighed hard and there is a limit to how far a pin travels. If you go to them, you can set a service area covering SS9 and compete properly. What you cannot do is put a Leigh address on a profile you do not trade from; that is the commonest cause of a suspended listing.
What does Google actually use to rank local results?
Google states three: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what was typed. Distance is how far you are from the searcher. Prominence is how well known you are — reviews, mentions, citations. You can change two of those three, and most people work on none of them.
How much does it cost?
£9.99 to find out what is wrong. £29.99 if you fix it yourself from our list, £69.99 if we do it. Ongoing work against an agreed goal is £200 a month and starts with a conversation. Nobody should quote you a monthly figure before they have looked at your listing.
Do reviews really matter that much?
In the map results, yes — they are most of what prominence means at a local level. It is not a campaign, it is a habit: one sentence at the end of every job and a link that takes two taps rather than eleven.
Are you actually in Leigh?
Southend, and the registered office is at the bottom of every page on this site so you can check rather than take our word for it. Most of our work is across the SS postcodes. We are telling you where we are because a firm that will not is the first thing this page is about.
The rest of what we do
- Digital Health Check — £9.99
- DIY Fixes — £29.99
- Google Profile Setup — £29.99
- Domain and Email — £39.99
- OG Does It — £69.99
- OG WIN · Direct — £200
- OG WIN · Growth — £500
- OG WIN · Partner — £1,000