Short answer
Google names three things: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is how far you are from whoever is searching, and nothing can change it. So a profile that is not ranking is usually a relevance problem, meaning the category and services are wrong or incomplete, or a prominence problem, meaning too few reviews and too little mention elsewhere. Fix the category first. It is the single biggest lever.
Almost every answer to this question online is a list of twenty tips. Google publishes the actual factors, and there are three.
Relevance, distance, prominence
Relevance is how well your profile matches what was searched. This is the one most within your control and the one most often left half-done.
Distance is how far your business is from the person searching. You cannot influence it, you cannot pay for it, and no agency can move you closer to someone. This is the honest reason a business in one suburb struggles to appear for searches in another.
Prominence is how well known you are — reviews, mentions, links, the general weight of evidence that you exist and matter.
If you take nothing else: a ranking problem is nearly always relevance or prominence, because distance is fixed.
Start with the category, because it is the biggest lever
The annual local ranking surveys consistently put the primary category at or near the top of what moves a listing in the local pack.
Most businesses pick something approximately right on day one and never look again. Approximately right is the problem — Google matches searches to categories quite literally.
Spend half an hour on it rather than three minutes. Look at what the businesses ranking above you have set. Change the primary category if it is wrong, and add the others as secondary. Do not add categories for work you cannot deliver: it produces enquiries you have to turn down and reviews you will not like.
Then finish the profile
Completeness is a trust signal and it is free. Most competitors do about half.
Services, each with a description. Hours you will actually answer. A proper description written for a human. At least ten real photos. Attributes. Opening date. A booking link if you have one.
Photos are worth a specific note: original ones. Stock images are obvious and add nothing.
Then reviews, which are the slow compounding one
Review signals are a meaningful share of local ranking, and close to all of whether a stranger calls you rather than the listing above.
Going from zero to five matters far more than twenty to twenty-five. Below about five you look untested, whatever your work is like.
Three things that matter more than volume: ask at the moment the client is happiest rather than when you send the invoice, send the short link directly instead of making them search, and reply to every single one. A thoughtful reply to a critical review sells better than a five-star, because it shows a stranger what happens when something goes wrong.
Never incentivise a review. It breaches Google's policy and risks the profile entirely.
Things sold to you that do nothing
Geotagging your photos. Google strips EXIF data on upload. Original, relevant photos help. Their metadata does not.
Keyword-stuffing the business name. "Uplof Digital Marketing SEO Agency Mumbai" is a guideline violation. Competitors report it, and profiles get edited or suspended.
A second profile for another city. Duplicates get both suspended. One profile, service areas.
Twenty service areas. No ranking benefit, and an implausible radius looks like exactly what it is.
Paying for local pack position. Not a product. Ads are a separate, labelled slot.
What I would fix first
In this order, and stop when you run out of time: category, then services, then the first five reviews.
Almost nobody gets past the first two, which is why the first two are usually enough to move.
If you are also wondering why the calls are not converting
Ranking is only the first handover. A profile that ranks, sends a call to a number nobody answers, and loses the customer is a different problem — and a more expensive one, because you paid attention to get there.
That is the same gap covered in the rest of the posts: the places an enquiry disappears between being interested and being a customer. If you want yours traced rather than guessed at, send me your details.