Why is my competitor showing above me on Google?

Almost every answer to this comes from someone selling SEO, which is why it tends to arrive at "you need more SEO". The more useful answer is that "above me on Google" describes three separate competitions with three different sets of rules, and most people are worrying about the one they're least likely to win. This covers how the map results are ordered, the category mistake that costs a lot of local businesses, how much reviews move it, and how to check what the business above you is doing.

The short answer

Google orders local map results on three things it names openly: relevance, distance and prominence. Most businesses that feel stuck are short on one specific one of those, and the work that fixes each is completely different. Before spending anything, it's worth knowing which.

It's also worth checking that you're losing at all. The page you see isn't the page your customer sees, because your own location is baked into the result.

The three different results you're competing in

When someone says a competitor is above them, they're almost always talking about one specific block of the page. Being precise about which one saves a lot of wasted money.

A search like "fire alarm installer near me" returns three things stacked on top of each other. At the top, ads, which are bought rather than ranked. Under that, the map pack: three local businesses with a map beside them. Under that, the ordinary blue links.

These are three separate systems. Sitting first in one tells you nothing about the other two. A business can hold the top blue link and be nowhere in the map pack, and the reverse happens just as often.

Why the map pack is a different fight to the blue links

Google publishes what orders the local results, and it's unusually plain about it. Three factors: relevance, distance and prominence.

• Relevance. How well the listing matches what was typed. This is mostly the profile itself: the categories, the services listed on it, the description, and the website it points at.
• Distance. How far the business is from the person searching. Not from the town centre. From wherever they happen to be standing.
• Prominence. How well known the business is, which Google assembles from reviews, mentions elsewhere on the web, links, and how the website itself performs in ordinary search.

The blue links run on a different balance. Distance barely features, and content and links carry most of the weight. That single difference explains most of the confusion.

It means a business with a strong website can be top of the organic results and invisible in the map pack, because the map pack is weighing an address it can't argue with. It also means a business with a fairly ordinary website can hold the top map slot, because it's close, categorised correctly and well reviewed.

So the first question isn't "how do I do more SEO". It's which of those three you're short on, because the answer changes what you should spend money on. If you aren't sure whether the problem is being found or being chosen, our guide on why a website gets no enquiries separates those two before you spend anything.

Proximity, and the part you can't change

Distance in the map pack is measured from the searcher, not from the middle of town. The results reorder as somebody walks down the road.

This matters more than it sounds, because it means the first thing to check isn't your listing. It's where you were standing when you looked.

Want to see how you compare? Add a competitor's address to our free AI search audit and it checks both sites and shows your scores side by side.

Then there's the part nobody enjoys hearing. If the business above you sits three hundred yards from the centre of town and you're five miles out, distance is working against you on every search near that centre, and nothing you do to your profile moves your building. It's one of three factors rather than the only one, so a business further away does sometimes place above a nearer one on relevance and prominence. It just has to be enough better at both to pay for the distance.

That leaves two responses. Compete hard where you're near, which for most trades is a bigger area than they think. And use the levers that don't care about distance: pages that rank in ordinary search, and Google Ads, which let you appear in an area regardless of how far away you're based.

If you work from home and hide your address, you're a service area business. Hiding the address stops it being displayed. It doesn't move where Google thinks you are.

The category field almost everyone gets wrong

Of everything on the profile, the primary category does the most work, and it's the field most often left wrong. It's also free to change and takes about a minute.

The usual mistake is picking something broad and safe. A firm that fits fire alarms picks "Contractor". A landscaper picks "Gardener". Broad categories feel like they cover more ground, and they do the opposite: they make the listing a weaker match for the specific thing people type.

Illustrative rather than prescriptive: the right category is whichever one names the job you most want to be called about. Google's category list is fixed, so you're choosing from their words, not writing your own.

You can add secondary categories, and they're worth adding for the other things you do. The primary still carries most of the weight, so it should point at the work you want, not the widest net you can throw.

This is the most actionable thing in this guide, and so the most oversold. Getting the primary category right changes which searches you're eligible to appear for. It doesn't, on its own, decide where you land among the businesses that are also eligible. That's still relevance, distance and prominence between you and them.

While you're looking, check their business name against the name on their van and their invoices. Listings called things like "Norwich Emergency Plumber Ltd" when the company is really "Dave's Plumbing" are breaking Google's naming rules, which say the name should be the real world name and nothing more. It tends to work until somebody reports it, and Google provides a "Suggest an edit" link on every listing for exactly that. Worth knowing that the option exists, and worth not doing yourself.

Categories are one part of the profile. Our guide to optimising your Google Business Profile goes through the rest of it, field by field.

Reviews, and how much they move it

Reviews feed the prominence half of the equation. They're one signal among several, though review generation is sold as if it were the whole game.

Two things are worth knowing. Recency counts, so forty reviews where the most recent is from two years ago read differently to twelve where three arrived this month. And the effect that doesn't depend on ranking at all is the bigger one: when three businesses sit side by side and one has far more reviews than the others, the choice is often made before anybody clicks. That works from whatever position you already hold.

How to ask, how many you need, and the four common tactics that get reviews deleted are all in our guide on getting more Google reviews, so there's no point repeating it here. The short version: never incentivise them, and never ask only the customers you expect to be happy.

What your website has to do with map rank

The profile doesn't stand on its own. The website it points at feeds both relevance and prominence, which is why two businesses with equally complete listings can sit in different places.

The most useful thing a site does here is unglamorous: a real page for each service you want to be called about, saying what that service involves. If somebody searches for a thing you do and your site has no page about it, the listing is doing that work unsupported.

Then there are area pages, which is where most of the argument lives. We've built a fair number recently: eight for a Norwich landscaper and twenty six for a fire and security firm covering Hertfordshire and Essex, down to the town and service level.

One counterintuitive part, from the Norwich landscaping build. The Norwich area page on that site deliberately doesn't target "landscaping Norwich". The homepage already holds that phrase with the whole site's authority behind it, so a second page aimed at the same term would split them rather than add anything. Area pages are for the places the homepage isn't already covering.

Area pages are slow, and they mostly help you in the ordinary blue links rather than moving the map pack directly. Anyone selling them as a map pack fix is overselling them.

How to check what they are doing

This is the part you can do yourself, today, for nothing. Take the top three listings for the search that bothers you and go through the same six things for each.

• Their primary category. Under the business name on the listing. Compare it to yours.
• Review count, and the date of the newest one. The date tells you more than the total.
• How filled in the profile is. Services, opening hours, description, photos. Count the photos and check when the last one went up.
• Whether their site has a page for the exact thing you searched. Not a mention on the homepage. A page.
• How far they are from where you searched. Google shows the distance. Write it down for all three.
• Whether their listed name is their real name. Covered above, and quite common.

Twenty minutes across three competitors will usually tell you more than a paid audit, because it's your market rather than a general checklist. In most cases one of the six stands out.

Where we fit in

This is a large part of what we do. Getting the profile right, building the service and area pages that support it, and keeping reviews coming are the three things in both of our monthly plans, and the profile is the first thing we check when we take on local SEO in Norwich or further afield, because it's usually the fastest thing to improve.

What we won't do is tell you where you will end up. Nobody can predict a position in the map pack before the work has run, because two of the three factors involved are partly outside anybody's control, and one of them is the distance between your front door and the person searching. Anyone quoting you a position is quoting you a feeling.

The free video review covers this. We go through your listing, your site and two or three of the businesses currently above you, and write up which of the three factors is costing you and what's worth doing about it. If the answer is that you're five miles out and the fix is ads rather than SEO, that's what it will say.