You are searching from your own office
Start here, because it explains half of these calls.
Map results are personalized to where the searcher is standing. Search your own business name from your own desk and you will see yourself at the top, every time, and learn nothing. Search a category term from your desk and you will still be weighted heavily toward your own location.
What you actually want to know is what a stranger in Muldoon or South Anchorage sees when they search your category. That is a different result and usually a worse one.
Proximity is doing more work than anybody tells you
Google weighs three things for local results: relevance, distance and prominence. Distance carries far more weight than most business owners expect.
In practice that means the map pack is a local phenomenon at a scale of a few miles. A shop on Northern Lights and a shop in Eagle River are barely competing, even though both are in the Municipality. Businesses discover this the hard way when they expect one address to cover the whole bowl.
Which is why service-area coverage and a page for each area you actually work in matter. They are how you become relevant somewhere you are not physically standing. See our Anchorage page for how we structure that.
How to test it properly
Three methods, in increasing order of usefulness.
- Ask somebody. Text a customer across town and ask them to search your category and screenshot the top three. Free, and the most accurate signal you will get.
- Drive. Search from the parking lot of a business in the neighborhood you want to win. Crude, effective.
- Use a grid tool. Local rank trackers plot your position across a map grid. This is the only method that shows you the shape of your visibility rather than one point on it.
Do not use an incognito window and assume that removes location. It does not.
Unverified, suspended, or duplicated
If the profile is unverified it will not rank. If it has been suspended you will usually, but not always, have an email about it. Check the profile dashboard directly rather than trusting that you would have noticed.
Duplicates are sneakier. A business that has moved, changed names, or had a listing auto-generated years ago can have two profiles splitting its reviews and signals. Search your phone number and your old address and see what comes back. Merge what you find.
Your category is wrong for the search you care about
If your primary category does not match the query, no amount of proximity saves you. This is the fastest thing on this list to check and the most commonly wrong.
Search the term you want to rank for, open the top three results, and look at what category each of them uses. If yours is different, that is your answer.
You have four reviews and they have forty
Prominence is the third factor, and reviews are the loudest input to it that you control. A gap that size is not closed by anything technical.
There is no clever fix here. Ask every customer, every time, the same day the work is done. It compounds over a year and it is the only one of these problems that keeps paying after you solve it.
Your website is not backing up the profile
The profile does not stand alone. Google cross-checks it against your site: is the address the same, does the site actually say you do this thing, does it say you do it here.
A profile claiming six services attached to a website with a single vague services page is a weak match. Six real pages make it a strong one. That is the whole argument behind how we approach local SEO, and it is why the site structure and the profile have to be worked on together rather than in sequence.
When it really is a suspension
If the profile has vanished rather than dropped, it is a suspension, and the usual causes are the ones in the profile mistakes post: a keyword-stuffed name, an address that fails verification, or a service-area business publishing a residential address.
Fix the cause before appealing. An appeal on an unchanged profile gets rejected and reinstatements get harder each time.
The order to work through it
Category first, because it takes two minutes. Then verification status and duplicates. Then test properly from somewhere that is not your office, so you know what you are actually solving. Then reviews and site structure, which are the slow ones.
If you get through all of that and you are still invisible three miles away, that is not a bug. That is the map working as designed, and the answer is coverage rather than a fix.