How do I outrank a competitor in the map pack?
Short answer
Find out which of Google's three local factors they beat you on: relevance, distance or prominence. You can't change distance, so the work is on relevance and prominence, tested one change at a time. Where the competitor is simply closer to the person searching, you may not pass them, and paying Google won't change that.
You outrank a competitor in the map pack by finding which of Google’s three local ranking factors they are ahead on, and then improving the ones you can change. The map pack is the block of three businesses Google shows beside a map. Google says those results are based on relevance, distance and prominence. Distance is fixed by where each business is and where the customer is standing. That leaves relevance and prominence to work on.
Measure where they beat you
A competitor is rarely ahead everywhere. Take a hypothetical roofing company based in Santee with a rival in La Mesa. Searched from Santee, the Santee company is first. Searched from La Mesa, the rival is. The contest is in the ground between them, in places like Grossmont and Fletcher Hills. A rank grid runs the same search from many points across the area and shows both businesses at each one. Without it you’re judging from one search at your own desk.
Compare what you can change
Most of what you need is visible on the competitor’s public profile and website. Compare like with like.
| Compare | What to look for |
|---|---|
| Primary category | Whether theirs matches the search more exactly than yours |
| Services listed | Whether the service being searched is named on their profile and missing from yours |
| Reviews | How many they have, how recent they are and what the reviews say about the job |
| The page their profile links to | Whether it’s clearly about the service and the area |
| Local mentions and links | Which local sites, suppliers or associations refer to them and not to you |
Google publishes the three factors and not their weights, so this comparison produces a list of candidates, not a proven cause. A fuller version of the comparison is what I do in a competitor analysis.
Change one thing, then measure again
Test the candidates one at a time. If I change the category, add services, rewrite the landing page and start a review push in the same week, and the ranking improves, nobody knows which change did it, and you keep paying for all four. I change one thing, wait about two weeks, and run the same grid again. If the cells between you and the competitor improve, the change stays. If they don’t, I move to the next candidate. Each candidate ties back to one of the factors behind map pack ranking.
If the competitor is breaking the rules
Sometimes the gap isn’t earned. The common patterns are a business name on the profile with extra keywords or city names that aren’t part of the real name, and a listing at an address where nobody from the business works. Both break Google’s rules for business profiles.
Don’t copy either one. Profiles that do this can be suspended, and a suspension costs far more than the ranking gained. You can report a fake business listing on Google Maps. Google decides what to do with a report, and there’s no certainty it will act.
Where you may not pass them
Streets that are much closer to a competitor than to you may stay theirs. Better relevance and prominence widen the area where you appear, and they don’t cancel distance. Google also states that there’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. For the far side of a rival’s territory, I’d tell you before taking on work that can’t succeed. Ads are sometimes the honest answer there. The ads above and inside the local results are a separate, labeled product: Google Ads and Local Services Ads (LSA) let you choose where you show, and you pay for that.