A new piece of research has just given local businesses something they rarely get: hard proof of what actually moves the needle on Google Maps rankings, rather than guesswork dressed up as strategy.
Local SEO software company Whitespark analysed 1.8 million Google Business Profiles across 4,209 categories and cross-referenced this against ranking positions. The results confirm a few things we have long argued with clients, and they overturn a habit that catches out a huge number of business owners: picking a broad category because it feels safer.
We have pulled apart the findings below and explained what they mean if you run, or manage the marketing for, a local business.
Generic categories are quietly sabotaging your rankings
Here is the instinct most business owners have when setting up their Google Business Profile: pick the biggest, broadest category available, on the theory that casting a wide net catches more searches.
The data says the opposite is true.
Businesses that chose a specific primary category (for example, “Personal injury attorney” rather than just “Attorney”) averaged a rank position of 45.8 and appeared in the top 10 results 12.5% of the time. Businesses that stuck with a generic category averaged rank 50 and only reached the top 10 in 9.2% of searches. That is a 36% gap in top-10 visibility between businesses that took ten seconds longer to think about their category and those that did not.
The reasoning behind this is straightforward once you see it laid out:
- Less competition. There are far fewer “Hawaiian restaurants” fighting for visibility than there are restaurants in general.
- Better intent matching. Someone searching “plumbers” wants plumbers, not a generic list of contractors that happen to offer plumbing among a dozen other services.
Restaurants are the clearest illustration of this. In the study, Tapas restaurants averaged a rank of 28.8 with 32.1% of listings reaching the top 10, while businesses that simply categorised themselves as “Restaurant” averaged rank 49.7 with only 10.1% reaching the top 10. Same industry, wildly different outcomes, based purely on category specificity.
The lesson: if your Google Business Profile is trying to rank for everything, it will end up ranking for very little. This is precisely the sort of detail we check first during any local SEO audit, because it is often the single fastest fix available on a client’s account.
Pairing the right additional categories with your primary category
Once the primary category is sorted, additional categories offer a second lever, and this is where most Profiles are left half-finished.
The study found that pairing a specific, relevant additional category with the primary category correlates with meaningfully stronger rankings, improving average position by anywhere from 6 to 17 places compared with businesses running a single category alone. Electricians who also added “EV charging station contractor” and vets who added “Emergency veterinarian service” saw some of the strongest gains recorded in the dataset.
There is an important caveat worth being upfront about: correlation is not causation. Business owners who bother adding well-chosen additional categories are, generally speaking, the same business owners who are asking for reviews, keeping their listing updated, and paying attention to their wider website SEO. The category itself is unlikely to be doing all the work in isolation.
What the data does make clear is that a lazy, catch-all additional category adds no value at all. “Service establishment” was flagged in the research as actively unhelpful; nobody has ever typed “service establishment near me” into Google, so there is nothing for that category to match against.
Why a fully completed profile outranks a half-finished one
The second major finding concerns Profile completeness itself, scored across five basic elements: a website link, a business description, opening hours, photographs, and verified/claimed status.
The relationship between this completeness score and ranking position was consistent and significant across the entire dataset:
| Completeness score (out of 5) | Average rank | Appearing in top 10 |
| 0 | 62 | 4% |
| 1 | 58 | 5% |
| 2 | 54 | 7% |
| 3 | 50 | 9% |
| 4 | 47 | 11% |
| 5 | 43 | 13% |
Moving from a bare, unclaimed listing to a fully completed one improved average ranking position by roughly 19 places and more than tripled the likelihood of reaching the top 10. Industries where local competition is fiercest, such as home services and professional services, already tend to have the most complete Profiles, which itself tells you something about how competitive businesses treat this as a baseline requirement rather than an afterthought.
What this means for your business
None of this is a reason to overhaul your entire marketing plan overnight, but it is a strong argument for treating your Google Business Profile as a genuine ranking asset rather than a box to tick once and forget about. In practical terms, that means:
- Auditing your current primary category and asking whether a more specific option exists that better matches how customers actually search.
- Reviewing your additional categories and removing anything generic or irrelevant, while adding specific categories that genuinely describe services you offer.
- Filling in every available field on your Profile: website, description, hours, photographs, and verified status.
- Treating the Profile as ongoing work, with regular reviews, fresh photographs, and Google Posts, rather than a one-off setup task.
A well-optimised Google Business Profile is one part of a wider local visibility strategy, and it works best alongside a properly structured website, consistent citations, and a genuine reputation management approach. This is exactly the combination we build into every local SEO campaign we run for clients across trades, healthcare, hospitality and professional services.
If you are not sure whether your current category selection or Profile completeness is holding your rankings back, get in touch and we will run a full audit against exactly this kind of data.Source data: Whitespark’s study of 1.8 million Google Business Profiles, reported by Darren Shaw for Search Engine Land.
Graig Upton
Graig Upton is a UK SEO and Google Ads consultant with 23 years of hands-on digital marketing experience. Google certified in Ads, Analytics and Conversions, he has helped businesses ranging from local providers to national brands - including Nando's and Financial Times - dominate search and scale their leads. Based in Preston, working with clients across the UK.