This is the single most common thing I find when I look up a local business the way a customer would. The business is real, the work is good, the reviews are fine. But when you search the service plus the town, the business is nowhere in the map results. Somebody else, sometimes somebody two counties away, is sitting in the spot.
I live here in Lancaster, and I do a free write-up for local owners where I search their business the way a customer does and tell them what I see. Maps is where the problem usually is. Here is what is actually going on.
The map results are a separate system from the website
Most owners assume the map pack is a reward for having a good website. It is not. Those three businesses at the top of the map come from Google Business Profile listings, and Google decides them mostly on three things: how relevant the listing looks for what was typed, how close the business is to the person searching, and how prominent the business appears to be online.
You can have a beautiful website and be invisible in maps. You can also have a mediocre website and own the map pack. They are scored differently, which is good news, because the map side is usually the cheaper thing to fix.
Reason one: the listing is not claimed or not finished
A surprising number of listings were auto generated by Google, or claimed once years ago by whoever built the site, and never completed. Half filled listings do not rank. The fields that matter most and get skipped most often:
- The primary category. This is the biggest single lever in the whole listing. “Contractor” and “Roofing contractor” are not the same thing to Google. Pick the category that names exactly what you want to be called for, then add secondary categories for the rest.
- Services. Every service you sell should be listed as its own service item with a sentence of description. Most listings have zero.
- Service area. If you go to the customer, set your service areas. If customers come to you, do not set service areas, set an address. Getting this backwards quietly suppresses you.
- Hours, including holiday hours. Google demotes listings it suspects are stale, and it tells the searcher “hours might differ”, which costs you the call.
- Photos. Not stock photos. Job photos, truck photos, storefront photos, added regularly. This is a freshness signal and it is free.
Reason two: your name, address and phone do not match everywhere
Google cross references your business against everywhere else it appears online: the old directory listing, the chamber page, Yelp, Facebook, the invoice footer on your website. If the phone number changed in 2019 and three of those still show the old one, or the suite number is written four different ways, Google gets less confident that the listing is legitimate, and confidence is exactly what prominence is measuring.
This is boring work and it is the highest return hour most local businesses can spend.
Reason three: reviews stopped
Review count and recency both matter, and recency is the part people miss. Forty reviews with the newest from two years ago reads worse than twelve reviews with three from this month. It signals to Google, and much more importantly to the person deciding who to call, that the business may not be operating anymore.
Reason four: the website gives Google nothing to match
Here is where the site does come back into it. When somebody searches a service plus a town, Google wants to see that exact language somewhere it trusts. If your site has one page called Services that lists eight things in a bulleted list, and never writes out the towns you cover, there is nothing to match. A page per money service, and honest mentions of the places you actually work, does more than any amount of fiddling with the listing.
This is the finding I write up most often. The words a customer types are simply not on the site anywhere.
Reason five: proximity, which you cannot fix, and what to do instead
If you are ten miles outside town, you will struggle to appear for searches made downtown. That is proximity and no consultant can undo it. What you can do is stop competing only on the generic term and go win the specific ones. “Emergency” searches, brand and model searches, and the smaller neighbouring towns are far less contested, and the people typing them are usually closer to actually booking.
How to check it yourself in ten minutes
Open your phone, search your main service plus your town, and screenshot the map results. Then do it for the two towns next door. Then search your business name and read what Google shows next to it. Then open your listing and count how many of the fields above are actually filled in. You will usually find the problem in the first five minutes, and it is usually the category or an empty services section.
If you would rather someone just tell you
That is the free write-up I do. I look your business up the way a customer would, check the map results and the site, and send you what I find in plain language. If something is broken you can go fix it yourself, and if you would rather have help, I include options in the report. No obligation either way.
Comment, message the Facebook page, or use the form on this site and I will run yours this week.