Relevance: are you even in the right category?
Relevance is decided first by your primary category, and it is where most of these mysteries are solved. If a competitor's primary category matches the search exactly and yours is adjacent, they win before reviews are considered at all. A business listed as “Contractor” will lose to one listed as “Roofing contractor” for roofing searches, no matter how good its reviews are.
The services list matters for the same reason. Listing each service individually gives Google a specific match for specific searches; a single vague description gives it nothing to match. This is free to fix and it is the most common single cause of the situation this page describes.
Distance: closer usually wins, and you cannot change it
Proximity to the searcher is a genuine ranking factor and it is the one you have least control over. A competitor two streets closer to the town centre will outrank you for searches made in the town centre, and there is no amount of optimisation that overrides geography for a “near me” search.
What this means practically is that your ranking is not one number. You may be first near your premises and eighth two miles away. Judging your performance from a single search at your own desk gives a misleading picture in both directions — which is why we measure position across a grid of points rather than one.
Prominence: recency beats volume
Prominence is where reviews live, but it is not a simple count. A competitor with forty reviews collected steadily over the last year can outperform a business with two hundred that stopped arriving in 2023. Review velocity — whether reviews are still coming — carries real weight, and a stalled review profile looks like a business that has gone quiet.
Prominence also includes things outside your profile entirely: whether your name, address and phone number agree across directories, whether local sites and press mention you, and how established your website is. A competitor with fewer reviews but consistent details everywhere can genuinely be the more prominent business in Google's terms.
The things that look like ranking factors but are not
- Paying for Google Ads does not improve your organic map ranking — the two are separate systems.
- Reviews on Checkatrade, Trustpilot or Rightmove do not affect your Google ranking; only Google reviews count.
- Replying to reviews does not directly lift ranking, though it plainly helps the customer reading them.
- Posting weekly on your profile is good practice but is not a strong ranking signal on its own.
- How long you have been in business matters far less than how complete and consistent your listing is.