hinge on other factors, the most important of which is the level of competition for any given search query and location. The domain authority of the business's website has become THE most powerful factor in ranking highly in the Local pack of results displayed in the organic SERPs. Picking the right categories on your Place Page is critical to ranking success. Google knows which search terms are relevant to each of the categories from which you can choose. If you don't include your business in the most relevant categories for what you do and sell, you can miss out on a great deal of targeted search traffic. It's quite easy to rank for a search query that's an exact match to a custom category you create. To make a custom category worthwhile, be certain there is sufficient search volume for that term and that Google usually displays local results for it. There are many factors in the survey which I think may have a small influence on rankings. However, taken alone, their effect is minimal. It is only when many of them are used together that these minor location signals can have a positive effect on rankings. -- Mary Bowling A significant note. Just because a factor is not a ranking factor it may be a best practice for trust or issues of clarity (ie Google fully understanding something about your business). For example Schema.org NAP falls into that category. It is critical, particularly if you have multiple locations identified