Local search
Why do I only rank near my office, not three suburbs over?
Published by Zubair Afzal, responsible editor
First published Updated 5 min readWe check this page every three months. Next check: .
You’re measuring from the one spot where you always win
Map results change with where the searcher is standing. Search from your own premises and you look strong. Search from a customer’s street four miles away, and other businesses are closer to them than you are.
That’s proximity, and it isn’t a fault. It’s one of the inputs Google names for local results, alongside relevance and prominence, and the only one of the three you can’t edit.
What you can do is find where your visibility stops, decide whether that line is in the wrong place commercially, and work on the two inputs that aren’t fixed.
Measurement
Find the edge in about an hour
The goal is a line on a map, not a position in a report.
Pick one search and five places
Take the search that produces most of your work, phrased the way a customer types it. Then pick five points: your premises, and four real places spread towards the areas you want business from, such as a high street, a retail park, a named suburb or the next town.
You get: One query and five locations written down
Check the result as it appears from each point
Use a tool that lets you set a location, or ask somebody who lives there to send a screenshot. Screenshots are slower and nobody can argue with them. Record whether you appear in the map results and in the ordinary results, because they behave differently.
You get: Ten answers: map and web, at five points
Draw the line and price it
Somewhere between your address and the furthest point you stop appearing. Mark it. Then use your customer records to work out how much revenue lies beyond that line. Often the line is in an acceptable place and the problem is conversion, not reach.
You get: A radius, and a number attached to the area beyond it
What moves it
Three levers that widen the reach
Relevance and prominence are the two inputs you can work on. In practice they come down to these three jobs.
- The primary category, matched exactly to the work you want. A broader category looks safer and competes against far more businesses. The primary category does more than the secondary ones.
- A specific page for each main service and each area you work in, with real detail: what the job involves there, what it costs, what differs about the housing stock, the permits or the ground.
- Reviews that mention the work and the place, gathered steadily, not in bursts. Reviews from customers in a neighbouring town are one of the few signals that you operate there.
Boundaries
What is allowed, and what gets the listing removed
The second column isn’t a grey area. These are the things that end listings.
Legitimate ways to reach further
- Open a real second location, with staff, signage and its own hours
- Write a substantial page about the work you do in a specific area, with real detail
- Earn mentions and listings from organisations based in that area
- Ask customers in that area for reviews, on the same terms as everybody else
What will cost you the listing
- A mailbox, a virtual office or a friend’s address used as a location
- Keywords added to the business name to look more relevant
- Dozens of near-identical town pages with the place name swapped
- Reviews from people who were never customers, however they were obtained
The other surface
When the map pack is lost, the ordinary results are still open
Local searches return two things: map results with a handful of businesses, and ordinary web results beneath them. They don’t weigh distance the same way, and people scroll.
A page about a specific job in a specific place can rank in the web results several towns away, long after the map pack has stopped showing you. That’s the practical route into an area you can’t reach on proximity, with no address needed.
It only works if the page is real: detail about the streets, the building types, the local permits, and the jobs you have done there. A page that repeats the town name eleven times ranks for nothing and makes the rest of the site look worse.
Questions
Common questions about local reach
How far should I expect to rank?
There’s no published distance, and anyone quoting one is guessing. The radius depends on how many competitors sit between you and the searcher, how dense the category is there, and how strong the alternatives look.
In a dense city centre the radius for a common trade can be a few streets. In a rural area the same business can be the obvious answer for thirty miles. Measure yours.
Will opening a second address fix it?
Only if it’s a real location with staff, signage and its own opening hours. Google’s guidelines are specific: a mailbox, a virtual office or a friend’s spare room gets removed.
The removal is the smaller problem. A suspension can take the original listing with it, and rebuilding a mature profile is much harder than never breaking it.
Does hiding my address help a service area business?
If you serve customers at their location and don’t receive them at yours, set up as a service area business with the address hidden. That’s the correct configuration, not a tactic.
It doesn’t widen the radius by itself. Proximity still applies, and the service area you declare says where you work, not where Google should show you.
Why does a competitor from further away outrank me here?
Because proximity is one input among several. A business slightly further from the searcher can win on relevance and prominence: a better-matched primary category, more and better reviews, a stronger page for the exact service, and more mentions elsewhere on the web.
That’s the encouraging part: those are the things you can work on.
Are the ordinary results worth chasing if the map pack is lost?
Often, yes. Web results and map results weigh distance differently, and a specific page about your work in a particular area can rank there after the map pack has stopped showing you.
The page has to be real. One whose only local content is the town name repeated tends to rank for nothing.
References
Sources for why do i only rank near my office
The official documents and research this page is based on. Platform rules change, so check the source before you act on a detail.
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Measure the edge before you spend anything
An hour of checking from five real places tells you more than a month of ranking reports. If the line turns out to be in the wrong place, we’ll tell you which of the three levers is worth pulling first.
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