Google Maps ranking dropped? Check these five things first

Most drops are one of five things, they are worth checking in order, and the first one is not really a drop at all. Work through this list before you spend anything, because the fix for four of the five is either free or already yours to do.

The checks take an evening, and four of the five fixes cost nothing.

First, make sure it actually dropped

A Maps ranking is not one number. When I measured 40 UK towns from 49 points each, a business under a mile from the searcher was in the top three 29.5 per cent of the time, and between one and two miles that was already down to 16.6 per cent. Searching from the house instead of the unit, from the van across town, or with wifi off instead of on can move you several places on its own.

So before anything else, pin down what changed. Search the same words from the same place you did last time. Better, spend about 40p on a geogrid scan, which searches your patch from a grid of fixed points and gives you a picture that can be compared like for like next month. If the map looks normal from where your customers are, you have not dropped, you have measured differently.

If it has genuinely moved, carry on down the list.

Check two: your own profile

Log into the Business Profile and look for the boring explanations first.

• Is it suspended or marked as needing verification? Google does this silently. You find out when the phone stops.
• Has the address or pin been changed? An edit you made, or one Google accepted from the public, can move where the profile competes from. Proximity is roughly 55 per cent of what decides the map pack, so a moved pin is a moved ranking.
• Has the primary category changed? “Roofing contractor” and “Construction company” compete in different searches.
• Are the hours, phone number and website still right? Google suppresses profiles it suspects are stale or wrong, and it cross checks against what it finds elsewhere.

Any of these being wrong is good news. They are free to fix and the fix is usually quick, though reinstatement after a suspension takes patience and paperwork rather than money.

Check three: did somebody else move up

Sometimes nothing happened to you. In every town I measured, a median of 36.5 different businesses led the map somewhere inside a 12 mile square, and the leaders churn constantly. A competitor who opened a unit nearer the town centre, or who has been collecting reviews steadily while you were busy, takes positions without you doing anything wrong.

Reviews are the visible half of that. In the same study, businesses with under 10 reviews held a top three spot to a median of 0.71 miles from their base. At 150 or more reviews it was 1.84 miles. If a rival has doubled their review count since spring, that alone reshapes the map around them.

Search your trade from a few spots around town and look at who came up instead of you. If it is someone nearer with more reviews, that is not a penalty and not a mystery. It is the ordinary mechanics of the map, and your response is the review routine, not a rebuild.

Check four: your website

The profile and the website hold hands. When I crawled 445 trade websites that Google already ranks in local packs, 16.9 per cent had no phone number in their readable text and 7 per cent served no readable content at all. A site rebuild, a new theme, a moved page or an expired domain can cut the profile off from the thing that was backing it up.

• Does the website link on the profile still load, on a phone, on mobile data?
• Is the phone number on the site the same one as on the profile, written as text rather than trapped in an image?
• Did anyone redesign, migrate or “improve” the site around the date things went quiet?

If the site changed and the ranking followed, start there. This is a website problem wearing a Maps costume.

Check five: Google moved the goalposts

A few times a year Google adjusts how local results work, and everybody shuffles at once. You cannot do anything about it, but you can recognise it: the drop is everywhere rather than in one spot, your profile is clean, competitors look reshuffled too, and the local SEO forums are all complaining in the same week.

The response to an update is the same as the response to a competitor: make sure the fundamentals are right and keep the reviews coming. What I would not do is pay somebody who claims they can undo an algorithm change. Nobody can, and the claim tells you something about the person making it.

Measurement first, then the profile, then competitors, then the website, then Google. In that order.

If you do bring somebody in

Ask for one thing before any work starts: a scan of your area from a fixed grid of points, saved, with the centre, the spacing and the keywords written down. Then the same scan later. That is the only honest way to show whether anything they did worked, it costs pennies, and anyone doing this properly will offer it before you ask.

The place to start is knowing where you actually stand today, street by street, which is a free check I run for trade businesses in Paisley, Glasgow and Renfrewshire.