The three names on the map, and how they get picked

3 slots, and they are not the same 3 everywhere

Open Maps on your phone. Search your trade. You get 3 businesses with a map above them and a link underneath to see more. That block is the Google Map pack. On a phone it sits above the normal blue links, which is why it’s the first thing a customer sees.

Now drive 10 minutes and search the same 2 words again. Some of those names will have changed.

Nothing broke. The result was built fresh for wherever the phone was standing when you asked.

Tap the link under the map pack and you get a longer list of businesses, ordered much the same way. Sitting 7th on that list is not the same as being one of the 3, and on a phone screen it is barely the same page.

Run it as a real test, from 4 spots

A hunch about this is worth nothing. Twenty minutes of driving turns it into something you can read.

1. Pick 4 spots, roughly 2 to 3 km apart, spread around the edges of the area you work. Not 4 spots in the same suburb.
2. At each one, search your trade and nothing else. Don’t type a suburb in. Someone with a dead hot water system types 1 word and hits go.
3. Write down the 3 names in the map pack, in order, exactly as they appear.
4. You now have 12 rows. Count how many of them are you.
5. Then take a 5th reading standing at your own front gate, and mark it as the control.

Do it at 8.30 on a weekday rather than 9 at night, and write the date and time at the top. The 4 spots want to sit about 6 km across in total — far enough apart to be different places, close enough to all be inside the patch you’d actually service.

The instinct is to expect one answer or the other. Either you’re in it or you’re not. Don’t be surprised if it’s neither: strong in 1 corner, missing 8 minutes away, and a competitor you have never heard of holding the third slot in a suburb you drive through twice a week.

Do it once and the abstract argument about local search becomes a piece of paper with your own handwriting on it.

Reading the 12 rows

Three things are worth pulling out of that page before you throw it in the glovebox.

• Which spots you held. Those suburbs are already working. They don’t need a campaign, they need not to be broken.
• Which spots you missed by a mile. If your name isn’t in the top 3 and isn’t in the next handful either, that’s a suburb you’re absent from rather than close in.
• Which name keeps turning up. If one operator sits in the map pack at 3 of your 4 spots, that’s who you’re actually competing with, not the franchise advertising on the radio.

What decides the 3

Google’s help page on local ranking (checked 16 September 2026) names 3 things. In plain English:

• Relevance. Does the listing actually say you do this job? Your categories and the services listed under them. Get that wrong and the other 2 can’t save you — that sits on the Google Business Profile side of the fence, not on your website.
• Distance. How far you are from the person searching. Not from your office to the suburb. From their phone to you.
• Prominence. How well known the business looks — reviews, mentions elsewhere, the site behind the listing. It is the slow one, and the only one of the 3 you build rather than set.

Relevance and prominence were identical at all 4 of your spots. Nothing about your business changed while you were driving. Distance is the variable, which is why the list moved.

Why the report says you rank and the phone says otherwise

A rank tracker picks a location, asks the question from there, and writes down what came back. That part is fine. The problem is what happens next: the number gets printed beside your trade and your city, as though there were one result to have.

There isn’t. Your city holds hundreds of thousands of phones and each one gets its own answer. “3rd” is a photo taken from a single street corner. Ask whoever sends your report: where was the phone standing when you checked?

The fix is not a better tracker. It is asking for the same search run from a spread of points across the patch you actually service, so what you’re handed is coverage rather than a position. If a report can’t tell you where it was standing when it asked, it isn’t telling you much. That’s a reporting problem as much as a search one.

What “number 1” means once you accept this

If there is a result per location, then “get me to number 1” isn’t a complete instruction. Number 1 where, and for someone standing on which street?

The version that means something is narrower and much more winnable: be one of the 3 for the suburbs you’d genuinely drive to on a Tuesday morning. That’s a finite job with an edge to it. Spread the same effort across a whole metro area and you get a thin showing everywhere and a strong one nowhere.

It also settles an argument that often gets had on feel. The wider you go, the further you drive for the work you win. Before you decide how wide, it is worth putting an hour into costing the driving you already do — it makes the radius decision for you.

The 2 levers, and only 1 of them is yours

Distance you don’t control. You can’t be nearer to a phone in a suburb 40 minutes away, and no amount of website work makes you closer. What you can do is choose which phones you’re near, which is a decision about where the ute is based and which suburbs you commit to.

Prominence you do control, slowly. Reviews from real customers, a site with genuine detail about the places you work, a listing that isn’t half-filled. None of that is quick and none of it is a trick. It’s the only part of the 3 that responds to work.

Which is the honest summary of the whole thing. You win a spot in the map pack by being genuinely close and genuinely well known in a small number of places, or you don’t win it. The list of places is the decision that matters, and it’s worth making it on paper rather than by habit.