Why does my competitor outrank me in my own town?

Google's local ranking documentation names them: relevance, how well the profile matches what was searched; distance, how far each result is from the searcher's location; and prominence, how well known the business is, online and off.

Distance is why "my own town" is the wrong frame. There is no single ranking for a town. Each search is resolved against where the searcher is standing, so a competitor two miles closer to the city center outranks you for the searches that happen there and loses the ones that happen near you. If you are comparing your position against a competitor's, you are comparing two different queries unless you both searched from the same point.

That leaves relevance and prominence. Prominence is the one agencies sell and the one that moves slowly: the same documentation says it is based in part on information Google has about a business from across the web, and that review count and score factor into local search ranking.

You claim or create the profile, verify it, and complete it. There is no submission form for ranking and no paid placement.

Claim or add the business first — Google documents the process directly. If a profile already exists, common for businesses that have been trading for years, claiming is the step rather than creating a second one. Then verify it, because unverified profiles do not get the full feature set.

Then meet the representation rules. Google's guidelines for representing your business govern naming, categories and eligibility. Keyword-stuffed business names violate them, which matters because the competitor you are losing to sometimes has one — and that is a reportable violation rather than a tactic to copy.

If you travel to customers, configure it as a service-area business. Google's service-area guidance covers businesses that serve customers at their locations, and a service-area business does not display a street address, which surprises owners who expected one.

The honest limit: none of this produces a position. It produces eligibility. Relevance and prominence then decide, against a distance you do not control.

Yes, indirectly, through prominence — and the mechanism is documented rather than inferred. Google's local ranking page states that prominence is based in part on information Google has about a business from across the web. Your site is the largest piece of that information you actually control.

The site is where your services are stated in your own words. A profile category is one label; a service page is a document. If a profile claims a service the site never mentions, the only evidence is the claim.

Name, address and phone on the site should match the profile exactly. Not approximately.

And LocalBusiness structured data makes those facts machine-readable. Google documents the markup, and its structured data general guidelines are equally clear that marking up content which is not visible to users is a violation. Markup describes the page; it does not add facts to it.

What it does not imply: that a faster or prettier site raises a map position directly. The documented path runs through prominence, and prominence is slow.

There is no threshold, and no primary source states one. Google's local ranking documentation says review count and score are factored into local search ranking. It does not publish a number, a weighting, or a target, and any specific figure you have been quoted came from a vendor survey rather than from Google.

So the useful answer is relative, not absolute. The comparison that matters is the competitors ranking above you for your searches, not an industry average. Count theirs. That number is visible to you today and is the only target with evidence behind it.

Velocity and recency are visible to a reader even where their ranking weight is unpublished. Forty reviews with the newest from 2023 reads worse to a buyer than twelve from this quarter.

And how you get them is constrained. Google's prohibited and restricted content policy bars fake and incentivized reviews. Buying reviews is not a shortcut with a risk attached; it is a policy violation against the asset you are trying to build.

We will not give you a number here, because we cannot cite one. If a dated primary source publishes a threshold, this section changes.

The map pack is the block of local business results — typically three, with a map — that Google shows for searches it reads as having local intent. It is ranked by the relevance, distance and prominence model above, which is a different system from the organic blue links beneath it, with different inputs. A page can rank well organically and never appear in the pack, and the reverse happens just as often.

Getting in is the steps in section 02 plus time. Two clarifications worth having.

Three slots is a display convention, not a quota you can buy into. The same documentation that lists the ranking factors states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

And your own position in it is not a fixed fact. It varies with the searcher's distance, so checking “where do I rank” from your office tells you where you rank from your office.