Why your competitor shows up in the map pack and you don't

The map pack is the block of three businesses with a map above them, sitting above everything else. For anything urgent — a blocked drain, a dead switchboard, a leak through a ceiling — that block is the whole game. Most people never scroll past it.

Here's the part that surprises people: your website barely decides who's in it. The map pack is drawn almost entirely from Google Business Profile, the free listing you probably set up once and haven't opened since. Which is good news, because it means you can move it without touching your site.

1. Proximity

Google shows the searcher businesses near them, not near you. Someone standing in Brunswick searching "plumber near me" gets Brunswick plumbers. If you're in Coburg, you'll show for Coburg searches and struggle two suburbs over, no matter how good your site is.

You can't move your workshop, but you can stop fighting the wrong battles: work out which suburbs you can realistically win from where you are, and build real pages for those instead of claiming all of Melbourne.

2. Categories

Your profile has one primary category and up to nine secondary ones. The primary one does most of the work, and it's the field most often set wrong — usually to something vague like "Contractor" by whoever built the site years ago.

If you're a plumber, the primary category is Plumber. Then add the secondaries that match jobs you actually want: Drainage Service, Hot Water System Supplier, Gasfitter. Don't add categories for work you don't do — you'll get calls you can't take, and declining them doesn't help you.

3. Reviews

Volume matters, but steadiness matters more. Forty reviews that arrived over three years beats forty that all appeared in one week two years ago — the second pattern looks bought, and Google treats it that way.

Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, in a normal voice. A calm reply to a one-star review does more for a reader deciding who to call than the review itself does against you.