How does Google rank profiles in the map pack?
On distance from the searcher, relevance to what was typed and the prominence of the business, in roughly that order for most local searches. Distance is measured from wherever the person is standing, or from the place named in the search, to your address or the centre of your service area. Relevance comes from the category, the services and the words on the profile and the website it links to. Prominence is reviews, mentions, links and how long the business has been visible.
That is why a profile can be first when you search from your own office and nowhere when a customer searches from Bingley. The pack you see is a different pack from the one they see.
Is the problem distance?
If you are based in Keighley and want to show for Keighley searches, distance is rarely the issue. If you are in Halifax hoping to appear in the Keighley pack, it is almost always the issue, and no amount of profile work changes it. Google draws the pack from businesses near the searcher, and a service area set to cover the whole valley does not move your pin.
A quick test: search your service with Keighley added, from your phone, standing in the town centre, then again from Bradford. If you appear in one and vanish in the other, you have your answer, and the fix is organic pages for the other town, which are tied to no pin at all.
Is the category or the profile itself the problem?
Check the primary category first, because it is the single strongest relevance signal and it is often wrong. A heating engineer listed as a plumber will lose gas searches to every profile with the right category. Then look at what is missing: services unlisted, a description that says nothing specific, no photographs for a year, no posts, questions unanswered. Google favours profiles that look alive, and yours may simply look abandoned.
The fix takes an afternoon and then an hour a week. Category, services, description, hours, area, then photographs of real jobs on a regular day of the month.
Are reviews holding the profile back?
If the profiles above you have more reviews, more recent reviews and reviews that mention the job and the town, then yes. Google reads them for relevance as well as counting them, and a run of recent ones tells it the business is trading. Ask after every job, make it a link, and reply to each. Do not buy them or ask friends to write them; Google filters those and can suspend the profile.
Six honest reviews a quarter, each naming the job, will usually beat sixty vague ones from three years ago.
Is the website behind the profile letting it down?
Often, and it is the reason fewest people check. The profile links to a website, and Google uses that site to decide what the business is relevant for and how established it is. A single-page site with no service pages, no mention of Keighley in a sentence and a slow load on a phone gives the profile nothing to lean on. The profiles that dominate a pack are usually attached to sites with a page per service and a page per area.
Dolphin Heating is a one-van business in Huddersfield whose site says plainly what Fay does and for whom, and the business is first on Google for female gas engineer Huddersfield and named in the AI answer. The site and the profile support each other, which is the whole point.
Could a duplicate, a suspension or mismatched details be the cause?
Yes, and these three are the ones that stop a profile dead. A duplicate listing, often created years ago by a previous owner or a directory, splits your reviews and confuses Google about which is real. A suspension, usually for a virtual address or a name stuffed with keywords, takes the profile out of the results entirely until it is appealed. And a business name, address or phone number that differs between the profile, the website and the directories makes Google less sure the three are the same business.
Search your business name and phone number in Google and in Maps, tidy what you find, and make every listing say the same thing. It is dull work and it is frequently the whole fix.
