The map results are not decided by your website
Proximity, category relevance and profile signals including reviews carry most of the weight. A well-maintained profile with a hundred genuine reviews beats a better website with twelve.
Defined area
Local marketing measured in calls, not clicks
The question local owners ask most on a first call is why a competitor with a worse website sits above them in the map. Local search is won on things that are mostly not on your website: proximity, category, profile and reviews. All Dogs Rock in West Palm Beach leaned on paid traffic until the profile was rebuilt and each service got its own page, and organic became the top channel.
Free, written by a person, yours to keep either way.
- 7,965 organic visits per month SEO
- 6.74x return on ad spend Google Ads
Certified across the platforms we buy on. 150+ businesses, 7 years.
Buying marketing as this kind of business.
Most enquiries arrive as phone calls
Which means without call tracking the channel cannot be measured. The phone rings, the job gets booked, and nobody can say whether the marketing caused it.
Rankings vary street by street
There is no single local ranking. Reporting an average position across a service area hides the fact that you are invisible in half of it.
Priorities, in this order.
The order matters more than the list. Doing the right things in the wrong sequence is how budgets get spent with nothing to show.
- Get the Google Business Profile complete and correct before any website work.
- Put call tracking in place so local search stops being a belief and becomes a measurement.
- Build a review process that runs steadily rather than in bursts.
- Build service pages for what you actually sell, and area pages only where there is something local to say.
Common mistakes
What goes wrong, repeatedly.
Reading brand rankings as success
Ranking first for your own company name is free and tells you nothing. The customers you do not have are searching for the service, not the company.
Creating listings in cities you do not operate in
That is a fake listing. It gets profiles suspended, and suspensions are difficult to appeal. The honest route is a service-area setting and, where warranted, a genuine local page.
Incentivising reviews
Buying, incentivising or writing reviews breaks FTC rules and is a fast way to lose a profile. A steady rate of genuine reviews is both safer and more credible.
What the report leads with.
If the first number in a marketing report is impressions, the report does not want to lead with leads.
- Calls and form enquiries from local search
- Map visibility by service and by area, not as an average
- Review volume, rating and response rate
- Jobs booked from tracked enquiries
Numbers from comparable accounts.
SEO
7,965
organic visits per month
Grown from a low baseline.
Google Ads
6.74x
return on ad spend
£31.4K conversion value from £4.66K spend, at £15.87 per conversion.
Real accounts, anonymised by client agreement. Currency as recorded in the account. Movement varies by market, budget and starting position.
Questions
Questions from businesses like yours.
01 Why does a competitor with a worse website outrank us on the map?
Because the map is largely deciding on proximity to the searcher, category relevance and profile signals including reviews. Website quality matters much less there than it does in the ordinary organic results below the map. It is usually the fastest thing to fix.
02 How many Google reviews does a local business need?
More than the business above you, gathered steadily rather than in a burst. A sudden cluster of reviews looks exactly like what it usually is.
03 Does a local business need a page for every town it serves?
No, and building one is often actively harmful. A page only earns its place if it has something to say that the parent page does not. City-name substitution pages are a doorway pattern Google names in its spam policies.
04 How fast does local SEO work?
Profile fixes can move the map inside the first month. Service pages and citations take two to three months to settle. Reviews keep compounding for as long as you keep asking.
What we would most likely run
Google Ads Agency Paid Per Qualified Lead | Mavix
Starting or rebuilding Google Ads? A straight answer on whether the searches exist, what a click costs you, and an account aimed at enquiries you would take.
Local SEO Services: Map Pack, Calls and Booked Jobs | Mavix
Local SEO for businesses that serve an area: a Google Business Profile done properly, service pages worth ranking, reviews on a schedule, every call tracked.
SEO Services Built Around Enquiries, Not Traffic | Mavix
SEO for businesses that want calls, not a traffic chart. We find the searches with money behind them, fix the pages that should win them, and report enquiries.
Next step
Send the site. We will tell you what is wrong.
Free, written by a person, and yours to keep whether you hire us or not.