Why your competitor outranks you on Google Maps. It isn't luck.

This is for local business owners who've searched their own trade, seen somebody else sitting in the top three, and thought: how? I've been at this longer than they have.

Most owners assume the answer is money. That the firm above them is paying somebody, or running ads, or has been going twice as long.

Usually it's none of those, and it certainly isn't that they're better at the work. I've looked at hundreds of these side by side now, and the pattern is almost always the same. The business on top hasn't done anything clever. It has just answered more of Google's questions than you have.

Here's how to see it for yourself in about a minute. Search your main service and your town. Open the top result, then open yours in another tab. Put them next to each other and count the differences. Services listed. Categories. Photos. Hours. How recently anything was updated.

You'll find the gap. It's usually embarrassing, and it's usually fixable.

Google isn't judging your business. It's reading your profile.

Here's the thing that trips everyone up.

You think Google is deciding who's best. It isn't. It can't. It's never had a roof fixed and it's never sat in your waiting room. It has no way of knowing that you turn up when you say you will and the other lot don't.

What it can do is read. So that's what it does. It reads every profile in your town, works out which one answers the most questions about the thing this customer just asked for, and puts that one in front of them.

Which means the businesses in the top three aren't there because Google rates them. They're there because Google understands them. (That shift, from Google listing businesses to recommending one, is what changed everything.)

That's the whole game, and it's why a firm three years younger than you can sit above you without doing anything you'd call marketing.

I took a Kent roofer from invisible to top three in 90 days. Here's what was wrong.

He wasn't doing anything wrong. That's what I want you to take from this.

His profile had been set up properly, once, back when he started. Two categories. Four services listed out of the fourteen he actually did. Hours that hadn't been touched since before the pandemic. A website link pointing at his homepage, which was mostly a photo of a roof and a phone number.

It looked finished. It just wasn't answering anything.

Ninety days after we went through the seven settings below, that roofer was in the top three across most of his patch. His visibility figure came out at 19,862%. That's a daft-looking number, so here's what it actually means. He started at roughly position two hundred across most of the map, and finished in the top three across most of it. Nothing more mysterious than that.

None of them got better at their jobs in that time. They got easier to read.

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BeforeWith Foundly© OpenStreetMap

The seven settings that decide whether you show up

Every one is simple on its own. Put together, they are a standing weekly job most owners never finish. And every one of them is sitting wrong on most of the profiles I look at, including plenty belonging to businesses that have paid somebody to sort them.

What follows is what each one does and where it goes wrong. Not a checklist. If it were a checklist, the firms above you would have finished it years ago.

1What you call yourself

Your business name on Google should be your actual business name. The one on the van, on the invoices, on the sign.

I'm putting this first because you'll have noticed something while you were comparing profiles just now. Some of the firms above you have names like "Maidstone Emergency Plumber & Boiler Repair". And you'll have thought: is that why?

Partly, yes. And I'd still tell you not to do it.

Stuffing keywords into your business name breaks Google's rules. Plenty of people will tell you Google never enforces it. That isn't true. There are well documented cases of profiles being suspended for exactly this, and a suspension doesn't mean you rank lower. It means your listing disappears, reviews and all, until you've argued it back. That appeal runs on Google's timetable, not yours, and reinstatement is not guaranteed even when you're in the right.

You'd be trading a small, temporary gain for the chance of vanishing completely in the middle of your busy season.

There is a legitimate version. If you're genuinely trading under a name that includes what you do and where you do it, that's your real name and you're entitled to use it. That's a decision to make properly, though, not a thing to type into a box on a Tuesday night.

2Your categories

This is the single biggest lever on the page, and it's the one most businesses get wrong.

Google gives you one primary category and up to nine more. You can't invent your own, you pick from their list, and that list runs to roughly four thousand options. It changes, too. Categories get added and retired without announcement.

Say you're a dentist. Your options include dentist, cosmetic dentist, dental clinic, dental implants periodontist, orthodontist, and several more. They are not the same. Say most of your money comes from implants and your category says "dentist". You're now competing with every practice in town for a search that was never going to pay you much. And you're invisible for the one that would.

And it isn't obvious. The right category isn't the one that best describes your trade, it's the one that matches the work you actually want more of, in the words Google's list happens to use. Those are three different things, and reconciling them is a judgement call rather than a lookup.

Get it wrong and nothing tells you. There's no warning, no drop you can see. You simply never appear for the search that would have paid you, and you've no way of knowing it was ever happening.

Then there are the other nine. Most profiles use one or two. Every accurate one you add is another search you can turn up for, and every inaccurate one muddies what Google thinks you are. Knowing which is which is the whole skill.

And if your work changes with the seasons, gutters in autumn and windows in summer, the right category isn't the same all year. Almost nobody accounts for that.

Don't fancy working out which category you should be in?

The free audit shows you the categories the businesses above you are using, next to yours. That comparison alone is usually the moment the penny drops.

3Your services list

Your profile has a services section, and on most of the profiles I look at it's almost empty. Not because anyone decided to leave it that way. It just sits somewhere nobody goes.

Every service listed there is another thing a customer can find you for. Fourteen listed instead of four is fourteen doors instead of four.

The catch is which fourteen, and in whose words. Google suggests some and lets you write your own, and those two behave differently. Write yours in trade language and you've listed something nobody types. List work you'll take but don't want and you'll get calls you resent, while blurring what Google thinks you are. Leave off the profitable thing you assumed was obvious and it stays invisible.

And it doesn't stop at the profile. Google cross-checks what you claim there against what your website says. A service listed on the profile and properly explained on your site is worth considerably more than the same service claimed on its own. Which means this was never really a profile job. It's a profile job and a website job that have to agree with each other, and most businesses have nobody making sure they do.

4Your reviews

Four things matter here, and only one of them is the one people think about.

Your rating matters, obviously. But less than you'd expect.

How many you have matters, though not as much as volume-obsessed people assume. I regularly see profiles with a dozen reviews sitting above profiles with three hundred.

How fast they arrive matters more than either. A business collecting four a month is sending a signal that a business sitting on two hundred old ones isn't.

How recent they are matters most of all. GatherUp's Beyond the Stars survey found 44% of people say recency is the thing they focus on, against 22% for the star rating. Twice as many care about when it was said as how many stars came with it.

Which is why a 4.9 that hasn't moved since 2023 reads worse than a steady trickle of fours and fives from the last few weeks. One says you were good. The other says you're still trading.

Nearly every business I speak to about this doesn't have a review problem. It has a remembering problem. The job finishes, the van pulls away, and nobody asks. The customer fully meant to and then put the kettle on.

Not getting reviews in as fast as the firm above you?

That's the single most common gap I find. The audit includes a review gap check: how many you've got, how recent they are, how fast they're arriving, and what that looks like next to the businesses ranking above you.

5Your opening hours

This one surprises people, so it's worth knowing.

Your ranking can change depending on whether you're open. If somebody searches at seven in the evening and you shut at five, the firm that's still open can appear above you. It doesn't matter that the customer might be perfectly happy to wait until Tuesday. That's just how it behaves.

Which means there's a gap in every trade, in every town, between the hours everybody keeps and the hours customers are still looking. Somebody is winning those searches by default.

Finding where that gap sits for your trade in your town is the difficult part. It isn't the same for plumbers as for salons, it moves with the seasons, and it changes the moment a competitor adjusts theirs. It's the kind of thing you'd only spot by watching every profile around you, month after month, which is not a thing anyone does while running a business.

The small version of the same problem: the bank holidays. Almost every profile I open has them wrong.

6The page you link to

The website link on your profile isn't decoration. Google reads whatever is on the other end of it and uses it to work out whether you are what you say you are.

Most businesses point it at their homepage and never think about it again. Which is fine, if the homepage is any good. Often it's a logo, a photo, and a phone number.

What Google is checking, roughly, is whether the page backs up the profile. Does it name the places you cover, in words, rather than leaving it to a map? Does it explain the work, or just list it? Does it load properly on a phone?

And, quietly, the one that catches the most people: does your name, address and phone number match your profile exactly? "Ltd" on the website and nothing on the profile. An old address that's still live on a contact page. A mobile in one place and a landline in the other.

None of those feel like errors. Every one of them makes Google slightly less certain about you, and less certain is how you end up fourth.

7Your attributes

Attributes are the little details you can tick on: wheelchair access, free parking, appointment required, whatever applies.

They look like they're just for customers. They aren't. Google uses them to match you to specific searches. Somebody looking for "wheelchair accessible dentist near me" will be shown practices that have said so, and not the ones that simply never ticked the box.

They're free and hardly anyone fills them in, which makes them one of the few places left where simple thoroughness still buys an advantage.

There's a catch, though, and it's the reason this isn't just a case of ticking everything. Some attributes push other information off your listing when you switch them on. More isn't automatically better. It depends on your trade and on what the ones above you have done.

Don't want to work through all seven yourself?

Fair enough. Most owners get three settings in, get called out to a job, and never go back. That isn't a character flaw, it's what a working week does.

I do the whole rebuild. Categories, every service, the description, the links, and photos from real jobs tagged with where the job was.

Then it's the boring part, every month, forever. Checking what Google has quietly changed. Checking what the businesses above you have added since last time. Swapping stale photos out. Keeping posts going. Watching for suggested edits from the public before they cause a problem.

It's about an hour a month of genuinely tedious work. That's the whole product, and I'd rather be straight with you about it than dress it up.

And none of it stays done

Here's the part that catches people who do have a go at this properly.

They spend a Sunday on it, get it right, and reasonably assume that's that. It isn't. A Google Business Profile is not a form you complete. It's something that drifts.

Google edits listings on its own. It changes categories, merges them, retires them, adds new ones your trade should be using. It updates hours based on what it thinks it knows. Nobody tells you when it happens, and there's no history you can look at afterwards.

Members of the public can suggest edits to your profile, and some of those go live without anyone asking you. Your hours, your address, whether you've permanently closed. That last one happens more than you'd like.

Your competitors move too. Someone above you adds four categories in March and the gap you closed in February opens again. Photos age. Posts stop. A description written for the work you were doing three years ago slowly stops describing the work you do now.

So the honest version of this article isn't "here are seven settings, go and fix them." It's seven settings, correct on the day you set them, then checked and corrected every month for as long as you want the phone to ring.

That's the bit nobody tells you before you start, and it's the bit that beats almost everyone. Not the difficulty. The fact that it never finishes.

The change that gets profiles suspended

Before you go and do any of this, one warning that could save you a fortnight of being invisible.

Don't change everything at once.

A profile that gets heavily reworked in a single sitting, by somebody feeling their way through it, can trip Google's verification checks. When that happens the listing doesn't slip down the rankings. It goes, along with every review on it, until you've appealed and won.

Changing your business name and your primary category on the same evening is exactly the sort of thing that does it.

This is the part people don't factor in when they decide to sort it themselves on a Sunday night. The work isn't difficult. The order you do it in, and the pace, is where it goes wrong. And a profile that's subtly wrong looks identical to one that's right. There's no error message. You'd carry on assuming it was sorted, right up until you noticed the phone still wasn't ringing.

Almost nobody finishes this. That's the whole opportunity.

Seven settings. Every one of them simple on its own. Every one of them invisible when it's wrong, which is exactly why they stay wrong for years.

The business above you didn't outspend you and it isn't better at the job. It answered more questions than you did, and it kept doing it after the first month, which is the part almost nobody manages.

That's really all "ranking" is now. Not a trick, not luck, and not a budget. Just a profile that's genuinely finished, kept current, by somebody whose week isn't already full.

Yours is already full. It was full before you read this.

That's what I do, every week, without you having to think about it: 14 days free, no contract, cancel whenever you like.

Start by comparing your profile with whoever's sitting above you. If you'd rather I did it and showed you:

Written by Ken Pointer. I started foundly.

We specialise in local visibility for UK service businesses. Google Business Profiles, reviews, and getting your name in front of the people searching near you.

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