Factor 2 — Proximity + review prominence dominate LOCAL markets

Claim: For local businesses, physical distance to the searcher dominates and is largely fixed; review volume, recency, and rating are the strongest factors a business can actually move.

Google's stated three pillars: relevance, distance, prominence.

Key sub-findings:

• Proximity ~55% of local-pack weight (Whitespark 2026 + Search Atlas ML, independent corroboration). See Proximity dominates local-pack and is uncontrollable — ~55% of weight in sister brief Research brief: SMB widget difficulty-to-work mapping — three tiers of work for three sizes of gap (June 2026).
• GBP is the single largest controllable lever (Whitespark 2026 — GBP 32%).
• Reviews now ~20% of local-pack weight (up from 16% in 2023); review RECENCY rising in importance. Sterling Sky case study: rankings rose/fell with steady review flow.
• Keywords in business name confer real (somewhat exploitable) advantage — controlled Hawkins test moved a listing from unranked to position 4 with a service-term name change.
• DEBUNKED tactics: GBP posts don't affect ranking; description not used; service-area settings don't expand ranking radius. See Sterling Sky controlled tests — GBP posts, geotagged photos, description keywords DON'T move ranking in sister brief Research brief: SMB widget difficulty-to-work mapping — three tiers of work for three sizes of gap (June 2026).

How local difficulty differs from national:

• Geographically bounded — you compete only with businesses near the searcher. More enterable for a small operator than national organic.
• Proximity caps optimization — no amount of SEO overcomes being far from the searcher.
• Map filtering — when multiple businesses share a category + location, Google filters out all but the strongest at default zoom.

Timeframe: A new GBP in a moderately competitive category typically needs 3-6 months of consistent work; weeks in low-competition/rural; longer in contested urban (lawyers, dentists, locksmiths).