How To Check Your Google Maps Ranking (And How Often To Do It)

Google Maps results depend on where the person searching is standing. Search from your kitchen and Google shows the businesses nearest your kitchen. Your own business is often one of them, because your profile is based where you live.

A customer three miles away sees a different list. A customer on the other side of town sees a different list again. So the result on your phone is the ranking for one street, the one you live on.

Google also learns from what you click. If you tap your own listing every week, it is more likely to show it to you. That makes the check even less reliable.

Maps rankings change across your area. You might be first in your own village, fifth in the next town and nowhere in the city you most want work from. To see the real picture, you need to check the same search from several places across the area you cover.

This is called a grid check. Picture a grid laid over your service area, with a dot every mile or so. At each dot, you record where you appear for one search. The result is a map that shows where you are strong and where you disappear.

1. Ask people in different towns. Send a friend, a family member or a happy customer in each town a search to type, such as "electrician Taunton". Ask them for a screenshot. It is slow, but it is real.

2. Use a free grid checker. Several local rank tools offer a free check at a handful of points around your address. Type in your business and one search, and they plot where you appear. The free versions are limited, but a few checks a month are enough for most trades.

3. Look at your Business Profile performance. In your Google Business Profile, the Performance section shows the searches people used to find you and how many calls and website clicks you got. It does not show your position, but it shows whether the right people are finding you, which matters more.

Search Console is useful too, but it shows where your website ranks in the normal results, not where your Maps listing ranks. They are two different lists.

Check the searches your customers actually type, not the ones that sound good. For most trades that means three to five searches:

• Your main service and your main town, such as "roofer Yeovil"

• Your main service plus "near me", such as "roofer near me"

• The job people need urgently, such as "emergency roof repair"

• One or two of the jobs you most want more of

Leave out your business name. You will almost always rank for your own name. It tells you nothing.

Once a month is enough. Maps rankings move a little every day, so checking daily or weekly mostly shows you noise and makes you change things that were working.

After you make a change, such as adding services to your profile, fixing your categories or getting a batch of new reviews, give it a few weeks before you judge it. Then compare this month's grid with last month's.

A healthy result for a local trade is a strong showing close to where you are based, fading as the grid moves further out. That fade is normal. Distance is one of the main things Google uses, and no amount of work fully overcomes it.

What you want to see over time is the strong area getting wider, and the towns you care about most moving from "not showing" to the top three.

The usual causes are a short list:

• The wrong primary category on your profile

• Services missing from your profile

• Fewer recent reviews than the businesses above you

• Your website not linked to your profile, or linked to a page that does not match the search

• Your name, address and phone number written differently across the web

We go through each of these in our Google Map Pack checklist. If you are not showing at all, start with why your business is not showing on Google Maps.

We run grid checks for the trades we work with, so we can show them exactly where they appear across their area, month by month. If you would like to see where you stand, ask us for a free analysis.