The map pack checklist for trades: what actually moves you into the top three

If you run a trade business, the map pack — those three results with the map above them — is worth more than every organic listing beneath it combined. Someone with a burst pipe does not scroll. They tap the first number that looks credible.

So the question isn't whether to care about it. It's what actually moves you into those three slots, because the advice on this topic is unusually bad. Here's the order I'd fix things in, and roughly what each is worth.

Proximity is the biggest factor, and you can't change it#

Start here because it reframes everything else: the single strongest signal in local pack ranking is the distance between the searcher and your business address. Not your reviews. Not your website. Distance.

This is deflating, but it's useful to know because it tells you what "ranking" even means for you. You are not going to rank across a whole city from one address. You're going to rank in a radius around it, and the honest question is how wide that radius can get.

Two implications:

• If you have a physical address in your service area, use it. A registered address in the suburb you want to work in beats a virtual office an hour away, every time.
• If you're a service-area business without a storefront, set your service area properly in Google Business Profile and accept that you'll rank strongest near your registered address, weakening outward. That's the system working as designed, not something you've done wrong.

What you can change is everything that decides which of the businesses near enough to the searcher gets shown. That's the rest of this list.

Your Google Business Profile is the ranking asset, not your website#

This is the part most trades get backwards. They spend on a website and leave the profile half-filled. It's the wrong way round: for map pack purposes, the profile is the ranking asset and the website is a supporting signal.

Fill it out completely. Not "mostly" — completely:

• Primary category, chosen precisely. "Plumber" and "Drainage service" are different categories with different competition. Pick the one that matches your highest-value work, then add secondaries for the rest. This is one of the strongest levers you have.
• Services, individually listed. Every service as its own entry with a real description. Most profiles have three. Yours should have fifteen.
• Hours, including holidays. Google demotes profiles it thinks might be inaccurate.
• Photos, added continuously. Not a batch of twenty on day one. A few every month, geotagged where possible, showing real jobs.
• Products, if they fit. Underused, and they render prominently.
• Q&A, seeded by you. You can ask and answer your own questions. Do it — those answers appear in the profile and pre-handle objections.

A completely filled profile with active posting genuinely outperforms a half-filled one from a bigger business. This is the cheapest win available to you and most of your competitors have not taken it.

Reviews: recency and velocity beat total count#

Everyone knows reviews matter. What's less understood is which properties of your reviews matter.

A business with 40 reviews, six of them from the last two months, generally outperforms one with 200 reviews where the newest is from last year. Recency and steady velocity signal an operating business. A big static pile signals a business that used to be busy.

What that means practically:

• Ask every customer, every time, at the moment the job is done and they're happiest. Not by email three days later.
• A short link straight to the review form. Every extra tap loses people.
• Respond to all of them, including the good ones, within a day or two. Response rate is visible and appears to matter.
• When you get a bad one, respond calmly and factually. Prospects read the response more carefully than the complaint — a measured reply to an unreasonable review does more good than the review does harm.

Don't buy reviews. Beyond the obvious risk of a profile suspension, purchased reviews arrive in patterns that are trivially detectable and they read as fake to actual humans, which is worse.

NAP consistency: boring, and it does matter#

Your Name, Address and Phone number need to be byte-identical everywhere they appear — your site, your profile, directories, your invoices. Not "basically the same". Identical.

+92 300 1234567 and 0300-1234567 are two different businesses as far as an automated citation matcher is concerned. Pick one format, write it down, and use it everywhere.

This is the least interesting item on this list and it's on it because inconsistent NAP quietly suppresses profiles that would otherwise rank. It's a tax you pay for sloppiness.

The website's actual job#

Your site does three things for local ranking, and they're narrower than most people assume:

1. It confirms your relevance and location. A page that clearly serves your area, with your NAP in the markup and LocalBusiness structured data, corroborates what your profile claims.
2. It catches the searches the map pack doesn't answer. "How much does it cost to replace a water heater" is not a map pack query. It's a page on your site, and it's how you reach people a week before they're ready to call.
3. It converts the traffic the profile sends. This is where a slow site on a phone actively costs you jobs — someone tapped through in an emergency and left before it painted.

Which brings up the one technical thing worth insisting on: your site must be fast on a mid-range phone on mobile data, not on your laptop on fibre. That's the actual condition your customers are in.

Service-area pages, done honestly#

The standard advice is to make a page per suburb. This works — but only if the pages are real.

Twelve pages that differ by a find-and-replace on the suburb name are doorway pages, and Google has been handling those for a decade. They don't rank, and at scale they can drag down the pages that would have.

A service-area page earns its place when it says something only true of that area: which estates you work in, the housing stock and its typical problems, response times from your base, actual jobs you've done there. If you can't write 300 genuinely specific words about a suburb, don't make the page. Three real ones beat twelve templated ones.

What I'd do in the first month#

If you're starting from nothing, in this order:

1. Claim and completely fill the profile. Every field. One afternoon.
2. Set up a review request process that happens on every job without you remembering.
3. Fix NAP everywhere it currently appears.
4. Make the site fast on mobile and put a tap-to-call button where a panicking person will find it.
5. Add LocalBusiness structured data with matching NAP.
6. Then, and only then, think about service-area pages and content.

Most of that is a week of work and costs nothing but attention. The businesses beating you in the map pack usually aren't doing anything clever — they're doing this list, and you aren't yet.

This is the work we do on local SEO projects, and it's most of what a trades site build involves beyond the site itself. If you'd rather hand it over, tell us what you need.