You’re not in the top three. What to fix first.

Most advice about local visibility is a list of twenty things. Lists of twenty things do not get done. Here are five, in order, and the order is the useful part.

First: make sure you are measuring the right search

Before fixing anything, check what you are being judged on. Google files every business under a category, and that category is often not what customers type. A place selling healthy lunches gets filed as a restaurant; its customers search for something far more specific.

This matters more than any fix below, because it changes the answer. You can be eighth for the category Google gave you and second for the phrase people actually use, or the reverse. Measure the phrase your customers say out loud, not the label you were assigned.

1. The reviews nobody answered

Every unanswered negative review is read by the next customer, and read as an answer: nobody is home. A reply turns the same review into proof that someone is paying attention, which is what the reader was actually trying to find out.

Start with the low ratings, oldest first. Then the rest. One afternoon covers a year for most small businesses.

2. Pace, not total

People fixate on their review count. What moves is the pace: how many arrived recently, compared to the businesses ranking around you. Four hundred reviews and none in eight months reads as a place that used to be busy.

The fix is unglamorous and works: ask, in person, at the moment the customer is happy. Not by email a week later.

3. The fields you filled in once and never returned to

Services, attributes, the description, the categories beyond the first one. Most profiles were completed the week they were created and never touched again. It is fifteen minutes, it is free, and it is the single most boring item on this list, which is exactly why your competitors have not done it either.

4. Hours, especially the unusual ones

The quiet killer. Holiday hours nobody updated, a closure that is not reflected, a Sunday that changed in spring. Someone drives over, finds a locked door, and you get a one-star review about something you would have fixed in thirty seconds.

Set the special hours for the next few months now, while you are thinking about it.

5. Photos, and only now

Photos matter, and they are last on purpose. They help someone choose you once you are on screen; they do far less to get you on screen. Fixing photos while five negative reviews sit unanswered is decorating a room nobody is walking into.

Then do the part almost nobody does

Measure after. Most of this advice is given, followed, and never checked, so nobody finds out which of the five actually moved anything for their business, in their street, against their competitors.

Take a measurement before you start and another two weeks later. If the line moved, you know what to do more of. If it did not, you have saved yourself from repeating it for a year.