You type "plumber Marbella" into your phone and three businesses appear on the map. They are not the three best in town: they are the ones Google has decided match that search, at that point, at that moment. The useful question is not "how do I get there", but "why those three and not the others".
What Google says it looks at (and it is public)
There is no secret formula: Google states in its documentation that local ranking rests on three factors.
| Factor | What it means | How much you control it |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | How well your listing matches the search | A lot |
| Distance | How far you are from the person searching | A little |
| Prominence | How much you are talked about online and in reviews | Quite a lot, over time |
That is why the same business can come first for someone in Puerto Banús and sixth for someone in San Pedro. It is not a bug: it is how the map works.
Working on relevance: the part that depends on you
Primary category
The most direct match between what you do and what people search. "Plumber" is not the same as "renovation company", even if you do both.
Named services
Every service you add with its own description helps you get found for specific searches, not just the generic one.
Description and photos
A hundred honest words and real photos of your work beat five hundred stuffed with repeated keywords.
The website behind the listing
One page per service, with its own text and contact details matching the listing, reinforces relevance and avoids confusion.
Prominence is not bought: it accumulates
It is the slowest part and the one people most often try to shortcut. Shortcuts have a price.
- Recent, real reviews: asked for legitimately after each job, and all answered, including the bad ones.
- Local mentions: traders' associations, local press, sponsorship of neighbourhood events.
- Links from sites in your area: suppliers, partners, sector directories.
- Regular posts on the listing: offers, finished jobs, news. A sign the business is alive.
What does not work: buying reviews, repeating a keyword thirty times or listing services you do not offer. Google detects it and the listing can end up suspended.
A working example
Picture a bathroom renovation company in Marbella with ten years of work and a listing with no clear category, three photos and no reviews since 2022.
The first step is not magic: the right primary category ("bathroom renovation company"), services with their names, twenty photos of real jobs, opening hours and a website with one page per type of renovation. Two months later, someone searching from Nueva Andalucía sees a listing that answers their question. Nobody controls the exact position; what does change is how many of the people who see the listing call.
How to measure it without fooling yourself
- The listing statistics: calls, direction requests, website clicks and the searches that surfaced you. That data is yours.
- Search from different places: your neighbourhood, another part of Marbella and from a phone on mobile data. You will see different results, and that is normal.
- Count real enquiries: what matters in the end is how many people write or call, not a screenshot of a position.
Why Solaris
We treat the Google listing as a business project, not paperwork: categories, services, photos, reviews and website aligned. The Local Pack is €150/month + VAT (listing only) and the Content Pack €250/month + VAT (listing plus articles), with no lock-in, and we publish what we do each month.
Nobody can guarantee you the top spot on the map. What we can do is make your listing the one that best answers what your customers are searching for.