Google Maps & Business Profile
Three things drive it. You can influence two of them. Here's what we do about the two, and why we won't lie to you about the third.
The three factors
How close your business is to the person searching. This is the heavy one, and it resets with every search from every doorstep.
You cannot buy your way past it and neither can we. A plumber four blocks from the leak will often outrank a better plumber eight miles away.
How well your profile matches what was typed. Categories, services, the description, the questions answered, the words on your site.
Most profiles we look at are missing half their services and have the wrong primary category. That one is free to fix and it matters.
How well known and well regarded you look. Review count, review recency, ratings, photos, mentions of your name and number around the web.
This is the slow one and the one that compounds. It's also the reason we automate review requests instead of hoping.
The scan
When you search your own business from your own shop, you're standing right on top of the pin. Of course you look fine.
A geo-grid scan runs the same search from dozens of points spread across your service area and records where you land at each one. Green means top three. Amber means fourth to tenth. Red means the customer never saw you.
That map is the free report. It's also how we decide what to work on first, and how you check whether anything changed 90 days later.
Example scan · not a real customer
Each circle is a real search run from that spot on the map. Yours will use your business name, your city and your service.
Every month
The limits
Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling something.
Straight answers
Because Google shows the searcher what's near the searcher. Proximity is one of the biggest factors in Maps results and it changes with every search, from every doorstep. It's the single most misunderstood thing about local search, and it's why checking your own ranking from your own desk tells you almost nothing.
No. Nobody can. Somewhere in your service area there will be a competitor closer to the searcher than you are, and Google will often show them first. What we work on is widening the area where you do show up, and holding the ground you already have.
They're not a ranking lever on their own. What they do is keep the profile active, put your current offer in front of someone who's already looking at you, and give Google fresher signals to read. The bigger movers are reviews, categories, services and photos — and we do all of those too.
Because review count and recency are among the few things you can genuinely influence, and because the person choosing between three names on a phone screen reads them. That's why the request goes out automatically after every job instead of whenever someone remembers.
For the free report, no — we run it from the outside using public data. If you become a customer we ask for manager access to your Business Profile, which you can revoke yourself at any time from your own Google account.
We run the same search from dozens of separate points spread across your service area and record your position at each one, then plot it on a map. Green where you're in the top three, amber where you're fourth to tenth, red where you're effectively invisible. It's the only honest way to see local ranking.
We scan your service area and send the grid within 24 hours. Free, no obligation, and yours to keep.