Google Business Profile rankings suffer when foundational signals are neglected or diluted. The most common culprits are inconsistent name-address-phone (NAP) data across your GBP, website, and citations, which confuses Google's confidence in your location. Duplicate or auto-generated descriptions, thin posts with no engagement, and long gaps between updates all signal low relevance to Google's local algorithm. Review velocity matters more than total count. A business with 8 reviews in the past 30 days will often outrank one with 200 reviews but none recent. Response rate and speed also factor in—profiles that reply to reviews within 24 hours show active management, which Google interprets as trustworthiness. If you're ignoring reviews or only responding sporadically, you're leaving ranking power on the table. Proximity remains the hardest factor to overcome. If your physical location is farther from the searcher's detected position than competitors, no amount of optimization will override that distance penalty in mobile searches. This is why service-area businesses struggle—Google favors brick-and-mortar addresses in the centroid of the search area. Category selection also kills profiles. Choosing a vague primary category like "Marketing Agency" instead of "SEO Agency" or "Internet Marketing Service" dilutes your relevance for specific queries. Google allows up to 10 categories, but the primary drives 60-70% of ranking weight, so precision here is non-negotiable. At Ottawa SEO, we audit GBP health by checking Schema markup alignment between the website and profile, verifying citation consistency across the top 50 directories, and analyzing competitor post frequency. Most weak profiles have 2-3 fixable issues causing 80% of the problem. We prioritize NAP cleanup, weekly posts with location-specific keywords, and a review generation system that produces 4-8 new reviews monthly. For local packs in competitive markets like Toronto or Vancouver, you need all signals firing—there's no single magic fix when proximity and engagement both matter.