What decides which three businesses appear in the Map Pack?
Relevance, distance and prominence, in Google’s own words. Relevance is how well the profile matches what was searched: the primary category, the services listed, the words in reviews and on the website it links to. Distance is how far the business is from the searcher, or from the place named in the search. Prominence is how well known Google thinks the business is: review count and rating, mentions on other sites, and the strength of the website behind it. A business can be perfect on two of the three and still miss out on the third, and the checks below tell you which.
How do I check my own Business Profile?
Search your business name in Google while signed in to the account that owns the profile and open the management panel. Then go through it as if you were the customer: is the primary category the exact thing you do, is every service you offer listed, are there recent photographs of real work, is the address or service area right, are the opening hours accurate, and when was the last review answered. A profile with a vague category, no services and six photographs from 2021 is telling Google very little.
One number to write down: how many reviews you have, against how many the three businesses in the pack have. That gap is often the whole story.
Is it just that I am too far from the town centre?
Possibly, and this is the answer people least want to hear. For a search like plumber Huddersfield with no other place named, Google leans on the searcher’s location, so a business in Marsden will struggle to appear for someone searching in Almondbury however good its profile is. If you are a service area business with a hidden address, the pin is wherever the address is, and distance is measured from there.
The honest test is to search from a few different parts of the town on your phone and see how the three change. If your rivals appear near where they are based and you appear near where you are, distance is doing its job. The fix then is to be found for the places you work in through the website, and to be the obvious choice where you actually are.
How much do reviews matter for the Map Pack?
A great deal, and they are the part you have the most control over. Reviews feed prominence through their number and rating, and relevance through their words: a customer who writes that you fitted their EV charger in Lindley has just told Google two things it wanted to know. Ask every satisfied customer, make it a one-tap link, reply to every review including the poor ones, and keep it steady. Ten reviews a year for three years beats forty in one month and then silence.
Does my website affect the Map Pack?
Yes, more than most people expect. The profile links to the website, and Google reads the website to decide what the business is relevant for and how prominent it is. A site with a page for each service and each area it covers, that says Huddersfield in plain text and matches the name, address and phone number on the profile exactly, backs the profile up. A site with a single services page and a different phone number from the one on the profile does the opposite.
What would Halizona do about it?
Score the profile against the three factors and fix the ones that are within reach. Category and services corrected, photographs of real work added, a review process set up that keeps going, and the website brought into line so it says the same thing the profile says. Where distance is the reason, we say so, and we point the effort at the searches the website can win for the places you work in.
Dolphin Heating is a one-van business in Huddersfield, and the search work for it was built around the exact phrase customers use. A profile needs the same principle: say the specific thing, in the words the customer types.
