Your listing is what people see before they ever reach your website. We set it up properly, keep the details accurate, handle the reviews, and sort it out when Google takes it down. We work with businesses across the UK, with a team member based in County Durham.
Google names three things it uses to order local results: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how closely you match what was typed. Distance is how near you are to the person searching. Prominence is how well known and well reviewed you are.
The 2026 Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors survey asked 47 local search specialists to weight these signals. Proximity came out highest at roughly 55 percent, but proximity is not something you can change. Profile signals came next at around 32 percent, and those sit entirely in your hands.
Weightings from the Whitespark 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey. Figures reflect expert weighting of each signal group and do not total 100.
Of everything you can change yourself, the primary category carries more weight than any other field. It tells Google what your business fundamentally is. Choose the wrong one and you compete in the wrong set of results, no matter how tidy the rest of the listing looks.
The usual mistake is picking something broad because it feels safer. A joiner in Spennymoor who selects Contractor instead of Carpenter has entered a much larger pool for searches that were never meant for them. We work through the full category list with you, set one primary that matches the service you most want calls for, then add secondary categories only where you genuinely offer that work.
| Field | What goes wrong | What it should be |
|---|---|---|
| Business name | Extra service words or a town name bolted on | Your real trading name, nothing added |
| Primary category | Something broad chosen to cover everything | The one service you most want calls for |
| Service area | Half the country listed to widen the net | The places you genuinely travel to |
| Address | A home address shown when nobody visits it | Hidden, with the service area set instead |
| Description | Words repeated to try to rank | Plain writing on what you do and who for |
Suspensions have been running in waves. Search Engine Roundtable tracked a surge in late 2025 and another in May 2026 tied to account level restrictions, and a mass action on 27 April 2026 that hit large numbers of service area businesses at once. Plenty of those businesses had done nothing wrong that week. Older listings get rescanned and flagged years after they were created.
There are two states and the difference decides what you do next. A soft suspension leaves you visible on Search and Maps but locks you out of managing anything. A hard suspension removes the listing altogether, so the calls stop that day.
We compare the listing against Google guidelines field by field and check the edit history. Appeals fail most often because only the obvious problem was fixed.
Every breach is corrected before anything is submitted. A partial fix gets refused and the second appeal is harder than the first.
Registration documents, a utility bill, signage photos, insurance. Once the evidence form opens there is a 60 minute window to submit, so it is prepared beforehand.
Short and factual. What happened, what was fixed, what is attached. Repeated appeals and rapid edits make the listing look unstable.
One thing to avoid while you wait. Do not create a fresh listing for the same business. Duplicates breach the guidelines, confuse the review, and can take down both the new listing and the original along with every review it had earned.
Reviews have grown in weight, moving from around 16 percent of ranking influence in 2023 to roughly 20 percent in 2026 in the Whitespark data. They also decide something newer. Assistants such as Gemini, ChatGPT and Perplexity pull heavily on listing data when they answer local questions, and fewer businesses appear in those answers than in the ordinary map results. The set is narrower, so the gap between being named and being left out is wider.
Steady beats sudden. A regular flow of reviews across three months reads better than fifty in a fortnight followed by nothing. Ask straight after the job while the customer still remembers it, reply to all of them, and never buy any. Bought reviews are one of the clearest routes to a suspension.
Claiming, verifying and completing every field, including the ones most listings leave blank.
One primary category chosen against your highest value service, with secondary categories where the work is real.
Your name, address and phone matched across the website and directories, because one mismatch splits your record.
Requests going out after jobs, replies written for you, and flagging anything that breaks Google policy.
Real photographs of real work, added regularly rather than stock images uploaded once.
Common questions answered on the listing before someone else answers them wrongly.
Alerts on edits, ranking movement and suspensions, so you hear it from us and not from a customer.
Diagnosis, correction, evidence and appeal, on listings we manage and ones we did not build.
Pricing
Listing work is quoted on what your profile needs. A new listing that has never been claimed, a suspended one that has to be recovered, and a healthy listing that just needs looking after each month are three different pieces of work. You get a fixed figure in writing before we start.
Setup and verification
A new or unclaimed listing
Quote
One off, plus VAT
Ongoing management
A listing you want looked after
Quote
Per month, plus VAT
Suspension recovery
A listing Google has taken down
Quote
One off, plus VAT
Why it is not a set price
Google treats a plumber covering three towns very differently from a shop with one front door. Distance is the heaviest signal in local search, so the number of locations you serve changes the work more than anything else does.
What we will not do
Buy reviews, create listings at addresses you do not trade from, or keyword stuff your business name. All three break Google policy and all three get listings suspended. We will say so if another agency offers them.
Distance is the heaviest signal in local search, which makes your service area a decision worth getting right rather than guessing at. We work with businesses across the UK and know the North East corridor particularly well.
Many appeals settle within a few working days. Complex cases, or ones refused and resubmitted, can run two to three weeks. The single biggest influence on speed is submitting a complete, well documented appeal the first time rather than a quick one you have to repeat.
It happens often. Google rescans older listings and runs enforcement waves, so a breach that sat unnoticed for years can surface now. Account level flags also cascade to every listing a user manages. The cause is usually a name, address or category issue that predates you noticing anything.
No. Adding service words or place names to the name field breaches the guidelines and is one of the most common reasons for suspension. It can bring manual edits, suppressed rankings or removal. If your registered trading name genuinely contains a place name, that is fine, because it is real.
Not directly. Weekly posts, offers and events lift clicks and enquiries from people already looking at your listing, but the evidence does not show them moving map pack position on their own. Treat them as something that converts attention rather than something that creates it.
Yes, if customers never come to you. Showing a home address while serving people elsewhere can breach the guidelines. Hide it and set a service area covering the places you actually travel to. That applies to most trades and consultants across County Durham and Tyne and Wear.
It splits your record. When your details differ between the listing, your website and directory entries, Google becomes less certain the entries describe the same business, and that lost confidence shows up as reduced visibility. Fixing the inconsistency is unglamorous and one of the higher value jobs available.
Steadily, after completed work, all year round. Pace matters more than total. A consistent trickle over months looks natural, while a burst followed by silence stands out. Ask in person, follow up by email or message, and make the link simple to reach.
Yes. Most of what we take on already exists, often set up years ago by somebody who has since left the business or by an agency nobody can reach now. We can request access, or work with you to recover ownership where the original account is gone.
Yes. Website signals carry meaningful weight in the same research, and the listing points at your site. It is also the only part of this you own. A listing can be suspended overnight, but nobody can switch off a website you control.
Usually more so. Single location businesses compete on a small set of signals, and profile quality is where the difference shows. Larger competitors often leave listings half finished, which is exactly the gap a well kept one exploits.
Send us your business name and the town you work in. We will look at the listing, tell you what is holding it back, and what it would take to fix. No obligation either way.