Map pack positions are decided mainly by relevance, distance and prominence, and a competitor beating you is usually winning on one of five specifics: a better-matched primary category, closer proximity to the searcher, more and fresher reviews, a more complete profile, or consistent business details across the wider web. None of those live on your website, which is why a business with a worse site routinely outranks one with a better one.
The three factors, and what they mean in practice
| Factor | What it means | Can you change it |
|---|---|---|
| Relevance | How well your profile matches what was searched | Yes. Categories, services, description |
| Distance | How far you are from the searcher or the place they named | No, short of opening somewhere else |
| Prominence | How well known you appear to be, online and off | Slowly. Reviews, citations, coverage, links |
Start with distance, because it explains most of it
If you are checking rankings from your office, you are seeing results for your office. Somebody three miles away sees a different set. A competitor who appears to beat you everywhere may simply be closer to wherever you happened to be searching from.
How to check properly: use a tool that reports rankings from a grid of points across your service area, or at minimum check from several different locations. A single check from one place tells you almost nothing about local visibility.
Then check their primary category against yours
This is the single most common finding. Open their profile, look at the category shown, and compare it with yours. If three of the businesses ranking above you share a category you did not choose, that is usually the answer.
Categories are visible on any public profile, so this takes about two minutes per competitor and is the highest-value two minutes available.
Then reviews, on three dimensions
- Count. The obvious one, and the one people fixate on.
- Recency. A hundred reviews from four years ago carries less weight than twenty from this quarter.
- Responses. Read by humans making a decision, and a visible sign the profile is maintained.
Buying reviews is the one shortcut here and it is a genuinely bad idea, because the detection is better than people assume and the penalty is your listing.
Then profile completeness
Compare your profile with theirs field by field. Hours, holiday hours, services, attributes, products, photos, description, Q and A. A profile with everything filled in beats a profile with the basics, and most businesses stop at the basics.
Then consistency across the web
Your name, address and phone number appearing differently across directories creates doubt about which version is right. Old suite numbers, a previous phone number, a former trading name. Cleaning this up is dull and it is frequently what unblocks a stuck profile.
The order to work through it
- Re-check rankings from multiple points before concluding you have a problem at all.
- Compare primary categories with the businesses beating you.
- Compare review count and recency, not just the star rating.
- Compare profile completeness field by field.
- Audit your citations for inconsistent details.
If the competitor beating you is genuinely closer to most of your customers, some of that gap does not close. The work then is winning the searches you are close enough to win, which is a smaller and more achievable goal than the one people usually set.