Service
Local SEO: the map pack, decided by the profile, not the website
The three businesses in Google's map are chosen mostly by Google Business Profile signals: primary category, distance from the searcher, whether the business is open at that moment, review count and recency, and whether the services and hours are filled in. Our local SEO service works those signals in that order, from £399 a month with one business per town and sector on the Local tier. A vehicle remapping client in Chester went from unlisted to third in the map pack for its main search in five weeks of this work.
Try it now
Search your service and your town on a phone, in a private window. Note the three businesses in the map, their star rating, their review count, and whether the pack says “open now” beside them. Then open your own profile and count what is missing: services ticked, hours including Saturday, photographs from the last month, a reply on the last review. The gap between the two lists is the work.
What decides the map pack
The factors, ranked, and what we do about each
The order follows Whitespark's 2026 local ranking factors survey and what we see on client accounts. Two things moved sharply up in the 2026 survey: whether the business is open at the time of the search, and whether Google's predefined services are filled in. Both are free to fix.
| Factor | What we do | How soon it shows |
|---|---|---|
| Primary category | Set to the category Google uses for your money search, not the one the owner clicked first. Additional categories for every service that is true. | Days |
| Open at the time of search | Hours set to when the phone is genuinely answered, including evenings and Saturdays where true; special hours for bank holidays. | Days |
| Predefined services | Every service Google lists under your categories ticked if you do it; custom services added for the ones it misses; prices where they are fixed. | Weeks |
| Reviews: count, rating, recency | A routine that asks at the end of every job and replies within a day. Steady beats a burst: thirty reviews in a week followed by silence looks like what it is. | Months |
| Business name | Your real trading name, exactly as on the website and the invoices. Keywords added to the name get profiles suspended; we report competitors who do it. | Immediate, and protective |
| Distance and service area | Address shown if customers visit, hidden if they do not; service areas matching where you actually go, not a fifty-mile circle. | Weeks |
| Photographs | A brief for what to photograph on the next job; uploads, captions, a cover and a logo. Phone photographs of real work beat stock. | Weeks |
| The website behind it | The profile links to the page about the service you most want, with the same name, address and phone as the profile, loading in under three seconds. | Weeks to months |
Reviews
The routine that produces reviews every week without breaking the law
- The ask happens in person or on the final call, at the moment the customer says thank you. One sentence, which we write for you.
- The link goes the same evening: the direct review link, on a card with the invoice or in the follow-up email, never a week later.
- Every review gets a reply within one working day, three sentences at most, and the reply never argues.
- Every customer is asked, not only the happy ones. Asking selectively is review gating, which the CMA treats as an unfair practice and Google treats as a policy breach.
- No incentives, no family, no staff, no purchased reviews. Google's filters catch more than people expect and a suspended profile costs months.
One town or many
What it takes to rank in a second town
Google's map is distance-weighted from the person searching. A profile in Wrexham does not appear in the map pack for Chester, twelve miles away, however good the website is. The organic results below the map are different: a page about your service in Chester can rank there if it carries evidence you work in Chester: jobs described, reviews that mention it, mentions on Chester sites.
So a second town means one of two things. A second profile at a real address staffed during the hours shown, which earns its own map pack. Or a genuine area page and the acceptance that the outlying town comes through organic results, not the map. What it never means is twenty pages with the town name swapped; Google filters those and the filter takes the good pages with them.
On the Growth tier we build the towns you have evidence for, one at a time, in the order the query data suggests. On Multi-area we run separate profiles and pages per base.
The first five weeks, from a real account
What moved a new business into the map pack
The vehicle remapping business in Chester had no website before July 2026. The Google Business Profile was set up properly in the same weeks as the site: the primary category for the money search, the predefined services ticked, real hours, photographs of real work. The site went live in July with a page per service and the profile linked to the page about the service the business most wanted.
By week five the profile sat third in the map pack for the main search, with reviews at eleven against the leader's 235. The website's mobile performance score was 98 out of 100, and by the end of month two clicks from Google were up 500 per cent on month one. The limit now is reviews, not the site or the profile, which is what the report said in August. The full account, with the flattering-percentage caveat, is on the results page.
Questions about local SEO
We serve customers at their premises, not ours. Does local SEO still apply?
Yes, as a service-area business. The profile hides the address and lists the areas you cover; Google ranks it by the searcher's location and your reviews rather than by a shopfront. Plumbers, cleaners, consultants who visit clients and mobile mechanics all rank this way.
Can we be in the map pack for several towns?
Only where you have evidence: a page for the town with real detail, reviews that mention it, mentions on local sites. Google's local results are distance-weighted, so a profile in one town rarely appears in the pack of a town fifteen miles away whatever the website says. Several towns usually means several profiles, each with a real address, or accepting that the organic results (not the map) carry the outlying towns.
How many reviews do we need?
Enough to be in the range of the three businesses already in the pack for your search, which in most UK towns is between twenty and eighty, and a steady flow matters as much as the total. The audit counts the leaders' reviews so you know the gap before you start.
Do you take one business per town?
One business per town and sector on the Local tier, confirmed personally in the reply. Two accountants in the same town would be competing for the same three map positions, and one of them would be paying us to lose.
Our profile was suspended. Can you fix it?
Usually. The common causes are keywords added to the business name, a home address shown on a service-area business, or a virtual office. We correct the cause, submit the reinstatement with evidence, and tell you honestly if the profile is unlikely to come back, in which case a new one is built correctly.
Does local SEO need a new website?
Rarely. The profile does most of the map pack work. The website needs a page for the service the profile links to, the same name, address and phone number as the profile, and to load quickly on a phone. If it has those, it stays.
Find out why you are not in the map pack
Send your business name and your town. The audit lists what the three profiles above you have that yours does not, and what it would take, in plain English.