How to get into the Google Map Pack in the North East

Ask somebody how they found a plumber and they will tell you they googled one. What they actually did was type "plumber near me", glance at the map block, and ring one of the three businesses in it. Most never scroll past it.

That block is the Map Pack, and for a local business it is the most valuable space on the internet. It sits above the ordinary results, it carries your rating, your hours and a call button, and it is free to be in. Here is how businesses get there.

How the Google Map Pack picks its three

Google is unusually open about this. Three factors decide local results: relevance, distance and prominence.

• Relevance. How well your business matches what was typed. Largely decided by your categories, your services and what your website says you do.
• Distance. How near you are to the searcher, or to the place they named. You cannot change this, so stop worrying about it.
• Prominence. How well known and well regarded the business appears to be. Reviews, links, mentions, and how complete and active your profile is.

Two of those three are fixed or nearly fixed. Prominence is the one you can genuinely move, which is why almost everything below is really about prominence.

Start with the profile, not the website

If you do nothing else, spend an afternoon on your Google Business Profile. It is free, it takes a couple of hours, and it is the single biggest lever most businesses have never pulled.

Categories

Your primary category carries more weight than any other setting. A roofer listed under "construction company" is competing in the wrong race. Pick the most specific category that describes what you actually sell most of, then add secondary categories for the rest.

Services

List every service separately, each with its own description. Most profiles have three vague entries. A profile with fifteen properly written services gives Google far more to match a search against.

Photos

Real ones, added regularly. Your vans, your team, finished jobs, the inside of the shop. Stock photography does nothing here, and an empty gallery suggests a business that has stopped trading.

Reviews are the engine

Reviews do two jobs at once. They are a ranking factor, and they are the thing a customer reads before deciding to ring you. A business with forty recent reviews beats one with twelve from three years ago, even when the twelve are glowing.

Ten reviews over ten months is worth more than thirty in one week. The steady trickle looks like a working business. The sudden burst looks like something you bought.

The businesses with a hundred reviews are not luckier than you. They ask, every time, at the moment the customer is happiest, and they make it take ten seconds. A short link sent by text the day after the job is finished will outperform anything else you try.

Reply to all of them, including the bad ones. A calm, factual reply to a poor review reassures the next reader more than the five star ones do.

Your website still has to back it up

This is where plenty of local SEO advice stops, and it is why plenty of local SEO fails. Google cross checks what your profile claims against what your website can prove.

• A page per service. If you sell six things and have one page covering all six, there is nothing specific to rank.
• A page per area. Written properly, not find and replaced. One page listing twenty towns ranks for none of them.
• Consistent details. The same business name, address and phone number everywhere, down to the punctuation.
• Local business schema. The structured data that tells a machine exactly what and where you are.

If you want this done properly rather than piecemeal, that is what our local SEO service covers, and every website we build has the foundations in from day one.

How long it takes

Profile work can move you within weeks, particularly if the profile was neglected and your competitors are not trying very hard. Competitive terms in a city take three to six months of consistent work, and holding the position takes more after that.

Anyone promising the Map Pack in thirty days is either in a market with no competition or is not telling you the truth.

Where to start tomorrow

• Open your profile and fix the primary category.
• Add every service with a real description.
• Upload ten recent photos of actual work.
• Text your last ten happy customers a review link.
• Reply to every review sitting there unanswered.

That is a morning's work and it will put you ahead of most of your competitors, because almost nobody does it.

Michael James

Michael heads up NE1 Web Design & SEO in North Shields and has been building websites for more than twenty years.