What Google says about local results
Google's Business Profile help says local results are mainly based on three factors. Relevance is how well a profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far the business is from the person searching. Prominence is how well-known the business is, including how many websites link to it and how many reviews it has. Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.
Setting up a firm's profile the way Google asks
- Real name onlyGoogle's guidelines say the business name should reflect the real-world name, and that adding service or location information to it is not permitted. "Smith Law" is fine; "Smith Law Raleigh DUI Lawyer" is not.
- Practitioner profilesAn individual practitioner may have a dedicated profile if they are public-facing and can be reached at the verified location during stated hours. Where several practitioners share one office, the organization gets its own profile, separate from theirs.
- One profile per personGoogle says a practitioner should not have multiple profiles to cover different specializations.
Make the profile and the site agree
An assistant that finds your firm in two places with two different addresses or practice lists has a reason to hesitate. From our testing, firms whose name, address, attorneys, and practice areas match across the site, the profile, and directories are named more consistently. Treat that as a working hypothesis. Access matters too; see how ChatGPT decides which lawyers to mention. Reviews sit on the profile, covered in whether Google reviews affect AI recommendations. The Raleigh market guide shows how a firm's pages can describe the same service area its profile does.
Go deeper
The GEO guide for law firms covers consistent facts and the rest of what helps a firm get named.