Local search in Greenock, measured street by street.

Search for any trade on a phone, “plumber near me”, “roofer”, anything, and before the normal results Google shows a map with three businesses pinned under it. That box is what this page calls the top of the map (the industry calls it the map pack). It sits first, it shows ratings and a call button, and the three businesses in it get the calls. Most people never scroll past it.

Here is the part almost nobody is told:those three change from street to street. Google picks them mostly by how close each business sits to the person searching, which is roughly half of the whole decision, then by what the listing says it is, and by its reviews. So there is no such thing as “the” ranking for your town. There is a different answer on every street, and you cannot see it from your own phone, because when you search for yourself you are standing at your own business and Google already knows who you are. Your own search always flatters you.

That is why the numbers on this page come from running the same search from dozens of points across the area, the only honest way to see the map as customers see it. And it is why this matters commercially: every point where you are in the three is a street whose calls you are getting, and every point where you are missing is a street where the job goes to somebody else before you knew it existed.

A 7 by 7 grid, points two miles apart, four searches run from every point on 29 August 2026, the same method as our other town measurements so they compare like for like.

Two things set Inverclyde apart. The supply is thin: 17 roofers led somewhere here against more than 30 in the towns inland. And the reach is long: the winning businesses held top three positions past two miles from their door, further than anywhere else we measured, because along a shoreline there is simply less competition standing between you and the searcher. Fewer contestants, and a bigger prize for each win. The mechanics are in the published study.

And then there is the empty ground. A third of the roofer searches returned nobody, and the biggest such gap in any other town we measured was ten points of forty-nine. Where a search returns nothing, the first properly set up listing in reach does not compete for the spot, it inherits it, and nowhere else we measured has that much unclaimed ground to inherit.

Worth noting for the strip as a whole: Port Glasgow’s town-name searches barely registered in our fourteen town pull, not because nobody there needs a trade but because people search “near me” and let the map decide. On a shoreline where reach runs past two miles, that makes the whole strip one contest. Quoted against ourselves as usual: “web design greenock” was about 10 searches in July, so this page is here for the market intelligence, not to rank for our own trade.

Everything starts with the grid above, run for your business and your searches: where you appear along the strip, where you vanish, whether any of the empty ground is yours to claim, and which of the fixable things (the pin, the category, the details agreeing everywhere, a review routine) is holding you back. Then the same grid again sixty days later, so you judge the work on movement rather than promises.

Priced in the open, from £500 setup and £75 a month, details on the pricing page. If the baseline shows you already winning your stretch of the shore, I will say so, and you can keep your money.