Somebody with a worse website and half your experience is above you in the map results, and it is infuriating. Before you spend anything on fixing it, find out which of four things is actually happening. Only three of them respond to money.
First, check you are looking at a real result
Search results are personalized and location aware. Searching from your own office, on a browser logged into your business account, shows you a result nobody else sees.
Do this instead: use a private browsing window, and check the result from a location other than your own building. A phone on cellular data a few miles away is fine. Even better, ask a customer what they see.
Half the time this ends the investigation. You are already ranking where it matters and you were looking at a distorted version.
Cause one: proximity
The single biggest factor in map results is how close the business is to the person searching. If your competitor is downtown and you are eight miles out, they will beat you for downtown searches. That is not a flaw in your marketing.
How to tell: search the same term from several points around your area. If you win near you and lose near them, it is proximity.
What to do: mostly, accept it, and go win the searches you can. Build the pages and the evidence for the areas you actually want. If a market is genuinely worth it and you keep losing on distance, the honest answer is a real location there, which is a business decision and not a marketing one.
What not to do: create a fake address. It gets listings suspended, competitors report it, and the recovery is worse than the problem.
Cause two: the listing itself
Compare the two listings side by side, honestly.
- Is their primary category more specific than yours?
- Do they have more reviews, or just more recent ones?
- Do they reply to reviews and you do not?
- Do they have photos from this year?
- Are their hours complete, with holiday hours set?
- Have they filled in services and a description, and left yours half empty?
This is the most common fixable cause, and category is usually the first thing to look at.
Cause three: the website behind it
Open the page their listing points at, then open yours, and compare like a customer would.
- Does the page name the service and the town, or is it a generic homepage?
- Does it load quickly on a phone?
- Does it say what happens next, with a number that is easy to tap?
- Does it back up what the listing claims, or say something vaguer?
A specific page beats a homepage for a specific search, reliably. If their listing points at a page about the exact service and yours points at the homepage, that is a fixable gap and it is cheap to fix.
Cause four: they have been at it longer
Some competitors are ahead because they have been doing the boring things consistently for four years. Steady reviews, current photos, pages that get updated, work that keeps happening in that town.
How to tell: their reviews stretch back years, arriving steadily, with owner replies. Their site has pages that have obviously been maintained.
What to do: the same things, starting now. There is no shortcut here and anyone selling you one is selling you a problem. The good news is that consistency is rarer than it should be, and most competitors stop after four months.
What not to do
Do not report them out of frustration. Report genuine violations, a fake address, keywords stuffed into the business name, obviously bought reviews. Do not report a business for outranking you. It wastes your time and it can come back at you.
Do not chase one keyword. The term you check obsessively is one of hundreds people use. Winning it changes less than you think.
Do not rebuild the website because of the map pack. Those are different systems. A rebuild might help. Check the listing first, because it is free.
An hour, done properly
- Private window, off your own network, from three different points in your area. Note who ranks where.
- If you win near you and lose near them, it is proximity. Stop here and go work on the areas you can win.
- If you lose everywhere, put both listings side by side and list every difference.
- Fix the category, the photos, the hours, and start replying to reviews. Wait six weeks.
- Compare the two landing pages and make yours specific to the service and the place.
- Then, and only then, consider whether anything else is worth paying for.
