Top Tips for Authority Network Auditing in 2026
Optimizing your Google Service Profile is necessary however works best as part of a detailed SEO strategy. Get specialist aid from premier digital marketing agencies or explore cost effective SEO services for small companies.
GSA SER global sitelistYou can download the PDF and start making changes. Or, share it with your SEO so they can work on the report.
Seventeen profile metrics get offered as local ranking elements: the Google Company Profile associates supposed to associate with where a service lands in the regional pack. Localo, the regional marketing platform specialists and firms use to track and enhance client profiles at scale, tested each of them versus 16,098 Google Company Profiles, position by position.
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Organized research studies, including our own analysis of 2 million Google Company Profiles, respond to "what do the leaders do?" This one breaks the same concern down position by position: what a page-one profile looks like, what a position # 1 profile appears like, where each factor stops tracking with position, and the 2 borders where rankings drop suddenly rather than gradually.
The mean # 1 profile has 79 evaluations; at # 11+ it's 25. Photos separate # 1 from # 2 as sharply as evaluations do: 44 versus 36, and they're the half of that set you don't have to wait on customers to provide. A best 5.0 ranking ranks worse than a 4.9: 53.6% versus 69.1% top-three rate, what we call the 5.0 Paradox.
And review velocity, review length, reply rate, reply length, description length, and keywords in evaluations produce no pattern a specialist can act upon. This is observational data, and position is influenced by much that a profile can't capture: proximity, authority, live search context. Read the findings as "what top-level profiles appear like," not "what causes leading rankings." The Google Service Profile ranking factors that separate top-level profiles from the rest are listed below.
: Photo count is the variety of images published to a profile, and it is the only element with no measurable ceiling, still climbing up at 500+ images.: Typical score is the mean star score across a profile's reviews, and it is the flattest line in the research study, with a perfect 5.0 ranking even worse than a 4.9.
: Additional classifications are the secondary categories beyond a profile's primary category, and six of them reveal the greatest top-three rate at 69.1%.: Citations are mentions of an organization's name, address, and contact number throughout external directories, and their payoff front-loads, then stops at approximately 2127.: Social network links are the platform profiles connected to a Google Company Profile, and they pay up to about 5 links, with Facebook the strongest single addition at +13.2 pp.
