Whitespark analyzed 1.8 million Google Business Profiles spanning 4,209 categories and found that businesses whose primary category exactly matches a search term outrank near-adjacent categories in nearly every industry tested. Founder Darren Shaw published the findings on Search Engine Land, framing them as data a local SEO team can act on immediately. Specificity, not just completeness, produced the clearest gap in the dataset.
For a “hair salons” query, profiles categorized as Hair salon averaged rank 49.9 and reached the top 10 for 11.3 percent of listings, ahead of Hairdresser, Beauty salon, Barber shop, and Nail salon. Whitespark reports the same pattern recurring across nearly every category pair it tested. That consistency is the study’s strongest signal: Google’s local ranking system rewards the label that matches the query, not the closest neighboring label.
Specificity beats a generic label even outside literal query matches. Across the full dataset, businesses using a specific primary category (Whitespark’s term for anything more precise than an umbrella label like Restaurant or Attorney) reached the top 10 for 12.5 percent of listings, versus 9.2 percent for generic ones. That is a roughly 36 percent relative gap. Within restaurants alone, Tapas and Hawaiian listings averaged ranks in the high twenties, while the generic Restaurant category averaged 49.7.
Additional categories add a smaller, second lift. Whitespark found that pairing a primary category with a well-matched additional one, Veterinarian with Emergency veterinarian service, for instance, improved average rank by 6 to 17 positions compared with profiles carrying only the primary. One addition actively hurt: Service establishment, a generic label Whitespark says almost nobody types into a search bar.
Whitespark is upfront about the limits of its own analysis. The firm, which also sells local SEO software, states plainly that correlation is not causation here: an owner who adds precise categories is also more likely to collect reviews, post updates, and maintain a website, any of which could be doing the actual ranking work. The same caveat covers Whitespark’s completeness index, a zero to five score that checks whether a listing carries a website link, a description, opening times, photos and a claimed status. Profiles scoring a five averaged position 43, against position 62 for profiles scoring zero, and hit the top 10 at roughly triple the rate of sparse, low-scoring listings.
None of that proves Google rewards a complete profile directly. A fully filled out listing could simply be a proxy for an operator who is diligent everywhere else that matters to rankings. Google has not confirmed either category matching or profile completeness as a ranking input in its own documentation, and Whitespark’s data cannot settle that question on its own.
The narrower, actionable move sits inside the noisier headline number: audit primary categories against Google’s full taxonomy this quarter, since swapping a generic label for an exact match is a same-day fix with a plausible ranking upside. Chasing a marginally higher completeness score without touching reviews, citations, or the website behind it is a lower-confidence bet.
Search Engine Land published Darren Shaw’s analysis of the Whitespark study on August 25, 2026.
