Being found
where you
actually trade.
Most local search is decided before anyone reaches your website. The map pack sits above the organic results, and if your Google Business Profile is weak or suspended, the rest of your SEO is competing for scraps.
- Manchester, Greater Manchester, UK
- Map pack movement
- Calls, direction requests, form fills
The map pack is a different competition.
Ranking first in the organic results and being invisible in the map pack are entirely compatible outcomes, and most businesses discover this the hard way. The two are judged on different signals.
Proximity, prominence and relevance drive the map pack. Your profile category, the consistency of your name, address and phone number across the web, your review volume and recency, and the completeness of the profile itself all carry weight that your blog posts do not.
For a service area business the problem sharpens. You have no shopfront to anchor proximity, so everything else has to be stronger.
A suspended profile removes you from local search entirely, usually without warning and often for a reason that is never explained.
Reinstatement is a process, not an appeal. It needs evidence assembled in a specific order.
We handle both: building profiles that rank, and recovering ones that have been taken down.
Fix the profile, then the foundations.
We start with the Google Business Profile itself, because it is the fastest moving part. Category selection, service area definition, services and products, attributes, photographs, opening hours, the description, and the question and answer section that most businesses never touch.
Then the citation layer. Your business details are scattered across directories, aggregators and old listings, and inconsistency between them dilutes the signal. We audit what exists, correct what is wrong and remove what is duplicated.
On the website itself, local relevance has to be structural. That means location and service architecture that reflects where you genuinely operate, internal links that reinforce it, and LocalBusiness schema that matches what the page actually says.
We do not build doorway pages for every town within fifty miles. Google’s scaled content and doorway policies make that a liability, and we will say no to it.
A location page earns its place when there is genuine, specific content behind it. Otherwise the service page does the work.
Deliverables.
Google Business Profile build or rescue
Full optimisation of categories, services, attributes, imagery and description, or a structured reinstatement case if the profile has been suspended.
NAP and citation audit
Every instance of your business details found, inconsistencies corrected, duplicates removed, and the core directories claimed.
Service area architecture
A page structure that matches where you actually trade, with no templated location pages and no duplicate intent.
Local schema
LocalBusiness or ProfessionalService markup carrying your real service area, contact routes and opening information, validated against Google’s requirements.
Review programme
An ethical process for asking, a response standard for what arrives, and monitoring so nothing sits unanswered.
Local reporting
Map pack position, profile calls, direction requests and website clicks, tracked against the baseline we recorded at the start.
How local work runs.
Baseline
We record current map pack positions for the terms that matter, current profile actions, and the state of your citations before anything is touched. Without this, later improvement is unprovable.
Profile
Categories, services, service area, attributes and imagery rebuilt. If the profile is suspended, reinstatement comes first and everything else waits.
Consistency
Citations corrected, duplicates removed, and the website’s own contact information aligned with the profile exactly.
Content and schema
Local relevance built into the pages that already deserve to rank, with markup that matches visible content.
Review and report
Monthly reporting against the original baseline, in absolute numbers.
Straight answers.
How long before I see movement in the map pack?
Profile optimisation can move things within weeks because the signals are directly under our control. Citation and review work compounds over months. Anyone promising a fixed timeframe is guessing, and we would rather tell you what we are doing and show you the weekly position data.
My profile was suspended. Can you get it back?
Often, yes, but it depends on why. Suspensions usually trace to a verifiable cause such as an address that does not match the business type, a category conflict, or a change made to a profile that triggered re-review. We diagnose the cause first, because appealing without fixing the underlying issue tends to make reinstatement harder.
Do I need a physical address to rank locally?
No. Service area businesses rank in the map pack without displaying an address, and hiding the address is the correct setting if you do not serve customers at your location. Displaying an address you do not trade from is a suspension risk.
Will you build me pages for every town nearby?
Only where there is genuine demand and genuine content to put on them. Mass produced location pages are one of the most reliably penalised patterns in search, and we will not build a network that puts your site at risk for short term gain.
Can you guarantee a map pack position?
No, and neither can anyone else. Proximity to the searcher is a factor nobody controls. We can tell you where you currently rank across a grid of locations, improve the factors that are controllable, and show you the movement.