For local trades and services
Why you are not in the map pack, and what actually gets you there
The three businesses in the box above the search results take most of the calls. Here is how to check what you are up against, in about thirty seconds, and the three things that decide it.
Ed Howe · 4 September 2026 · 8 minute read
If you fit out bathrooms in Oxford, the person looking for you is standing in their kitchen holding a phone. They type "bathroom fitter near me". Before they see a single website they see a map with three businesses under it. Most people ring one of those three and never scroll.
That box is the map pack. For a local trade it is worth more than your website, and it is a completely different thing from your website, which is the bit almost nobody explains.
First, the thirty second check
Do this now, on your phone, not your laptop, because your laptop is probably on your office wifi and that changes the result.
- Search what a customer would type. Not your business name. "Cleaner Headington", "boiler repair Cowley", "sports massage Jericho".
- Look at the three businesses in the box. Are you one of them?
- Tap each one and write down two numbers: how many reviews they have, and their average score.
Those two numbers are your target. Not a vague ambition to "do SEO", an actual number you can beat.
Worth doing before you spend anything
When I checked the map pack for my own trade in Oxford and London, the businesses holding the top three had between one and five reviews each. That was a genuine surprise, and it changed what I did first. Your trade will be more competitive than mine. Check it rather than assuming, because the answer decides whether this is a month of work or an afternoon.
What Google says decides it
Google publishes this, which saves everyone guessing. Local results are ranked on three things: relevance, how well your profile matches what was typed; distance, how far you are from the person searching; and prominence, how well known your business is, which includes review numbers and links to your site.
Read that again, because two of the three are largely out of your hands. Distance is geography. You cannot move your unit to the middle of town because someone searched from there. Relevance you can influence, but only up to the truth of what you do.
Prominence is the one you control. That is why reviews matter so disproportionately for a local business, and why the bloke down the road with a worse website is getting your calls.
Google is also explicit that there is no way to pay for a better local ranking. If anyone offers to buy you a map pack position, they are selling you something else.
The unglamorous list that actually moves it
In the order I would do them.
1. Claim and finish the profile
Google says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up, and that incomplete profiles may not appear at all for relevant searches. Finished means finished: primary category, opening hours, service area, phone, website, and every service you offer listed individually with a price or a "from" price.
The services list is the part everyone skips. It is also the part that lets Google match you to "emergency boiler repair" rather than just "plumber".
2. Ask every customer for a review, the same way, every time
Not a campaign. A habit. The job finishes, the invoice goes out, and the same short message goes with it containing your review link. One sentence, no grovelling.
Two things to get right. Ask everyone, not just the ones you think will be kind, because filtering who you ask based on how happy they seem is against Google's rules and it is the sort of thing that gets a profile suspended. And never buy reviews. It is obvious, it is detectable, and it puts everything else at risk.
3. Reply to all of them
Including the bad one. Especially the bad one. Google says responding shows you value your customers, and a calm reply to an unfair review does more for the person reading it than the review itself does against you.
4. Put real photographs on it
Your van, your team, the work finished. Phone photos are fine. Stock images of somebody else's kitchen are worse than nothing, because the customer can tell.
5. Make sure your name, address and phone match everywhere
Your website, your profile, your invoices, the old directory listing from 2014 you forgot about. Inconsistency here is quietly expensive and takes an hour to fix.
What this is not
This is not your website ranking. You can be first in the map pack and nowhere in the blue links underneath, and for a lot of trades that is a perfectly good outcome. They are separate systems and they are won separately.
It is also not fast. Reviews accumulate at the speed of finished jobs. If you do twelve jobs a month and ask every one, you have twelve reviews in a month and you have beaten most of your local competition. That is the whole strategy, and it is boring, which is precisely why it is still available.
If you do one thing this week
Do the thirty second check, then write the review request message and put it in your phone as a saved reply. Everything else on this page can wait a fortnight. That one habit is the compounding bit.
Getting found is a fixed piece of work: the profile built properly, every service listed with a price, and a review habit set up so it keeps filling without you thinking about it. Every account is created in your name, so if you stop working with me you keep all of it.
Source for Google's ranking factors: Google Business Profile Help, how to improve your local ranking.