Pull out your phone and search “plumber near me.” Go ahead, I’ll wait.
See that box at the very top with a little map and three businesses listed underneath it? That’s the Map Pack. It sits above every single organic result on the page. And according to Google’s own data, roughly 42% of all clicks on a local search go to one of those three businesses.
Three. Out of hundreds.
If your business isn’t one of them, you’re fighting over the leftovers with everybody else. And most of those searchers never scroll past the Map Pack at all.
Here’s the thing, though. Getting into the Map Pack isn’t some dark art reserved for SEO agencies. It’s a set of specific, practical steps that most of your competitors are too lazy or too busy to follow through on. That laziness is your opportunity.
Let me walk you through exactly what to do.
First Things First: Claim Your Profile
You’d be surprised how many business owners in the Pittsburgh area don’t actually control their own Google Business Profile. Google sometimes creates listings automatically from public records, or a previous marketing company set it up and never handed over access.
Go to business.google.com and search for your business. If a listing exists, claim it. If it doesn’t, create one. Google will verify you’re the real owner, usually by mailing a postcard with a code to your business address. Sometimes they’ll do it by phone or email.
Get this done today if you haven’t already. Nothing else in this article matters until your profile is verified and under your control.
If a former employee or old agency already claimed it, Google has a process for requesting ownership transfer. It takes a couple weeks, but don’t let that stop you. Start the process now.
Your Primary Category Is Everything
Of all the fields in your Google Business Profile, your primary category has the biggest impact on which searches you show up for. Think of it as telling Google, in one phrase, what your business does.
Be specific. Google gives you hundreds of categories to choose from, and the more precise you are, the better your results.
“Plumber” beats “Home Services.” Every time. If someone searches “plumber near Squirrel Hill,” Google wants to show businesses categorized as plumbers, not businesses vaguely filed under home services. “Roofing Contractor” beats “General Contractor” if roofing is what you primarily do. “Personal Injury Attorney” beats “Lawyer.”
You also get secondary categories, and you should absolutely use them. If you’re an HVAC company in Cranberry Township that handles installations, repairs, and maintenance, set “HVAC Contractor” as your primary and add “Air Conditioning Repair Service” and “Heating Contractor” as secondaries. This widens the net of searches you can appear for without diluting your main signal.
Want to know what your competitors are using? Search for them on Google, look at their profile, and tools like PlePer’s free GBP audit tool will reveal their exact categories.
Fill Out Every. Single. Field.
Google rewards completeness. A fully filled out profile outperforms a half-finished one, all else being equal. And yet most profiles we audit in the Pittsburgh area have huge gaps.
Go through your profile and make sure nothing is blank. Your real business name. Your address (or service areas if you go to customers). A local phone number, not a toll-free one. Your website URL. Accurate business hours that you actually update for holidays.
The services section is one people skip constantly. Google lets you list every specific service with descriptions. Take twenty minutes and add them all. If you’re a roofer, that means shingle repair, full roof replacement, storm damage inspection, gutter installation, all of it. Each service gives Google another signal about what searches to show you for.
Your business description gives you 750 characters. Use every one of them. Describe what you do, who you serve, and the areas you cover. Write it like a human being would read it, because human beings will.
Attributes like “women-owned,” “veteran-owned,” or “free estimates” are easy wins. Check every single one that applies to you.
Every empty field is a missed signal. Your competitors who bother to fill in everything get a small edge on every one of those fields. Those small edges add up fast.
Reviews Are Currency
Let’s talk about the ranking factor that most people intuitively understand but still manage to get wrong.
The math is simple. More reviews, at a strong average rating, means more visibility. Google treats review quantity and quality as one of the three biggest ranking signals for the Map Pack.
So how do you actually get more reviews? You ask. Consistently. After every single job.
The best approach is a text message sent right after you finish the work, when the customer is happiest. Include a direct link to your Google review page (you can generate this from your GBP dashboard under “Ask for reviews”). Keep the message short: “Thanks for choosing us! If you have a minute, we’d really appreciate a quick review.” That’s it. No novel. No guilt trip.
A personalized text from the technician who actually did the work converts better than an automated email blast. People leave reviews for people, not for companies.
A few things to avoid. Don’t offer discounts or gifts for reviews. Google’s terms of service prohibit it, and your reviews can get flagged and removed. Don’t cherry-pick who you ask. Ask everyone. A mix of ratings actually looks more authentic than a wall of five-star reviews.
Now here’s the part most businesses completely drop the ball on: responding.
Reply to every single review. Positive ones, negative ones, the weird ones that are clearly meant for a different business. For positive reviews, a genuine thank you is enough. For negative ones, stay professional. Acknowledge the concern, offer to make it right, and move on. How you handle a bad review tells potential customers far more about your business than the review itself.
Google has confirmed that responding to reviews influences local rankings. And from a conversion standpoint, a business that replies to every review looks active, attentive, and trustworthy. A business with crickets in the response column looks like nobody’s home.
Photos: Your Secret Weapon
Here’s a stat that should get your attention.
And yet, most business profiles we see in the Mt. Lebanon, Robinson, and North Hills areas have either zero photos or a handful of blurry shots from 2019.
If you’re a contractor, this is your biggest opportunity. Before-and-after photos are incredibly persuasive. That kitchen remodel in South Hills? The new roof in Cranberry Township? The deck you just built in North Park? Photograph it. Upload it.
Beyond project photos, upload pictures of your team, your vehicles (especially if they’re branded), your storefront or office, and your equipment. People want to know who’s showing up at their door. A face and a branded truck go a long way toward building trust before you even answer the phone.
The key is doing this regularly. Uploading fifty photos once and then going silent for a year doesn’t send the same signal as adding two or three new photos every week. Make it part of your routine. Job done? Phone out. Photos up.
Google Posts: The Feature Your Competitors Ignore
Google Posts are short updates you can publish directly on your profile. They show up right in your listing and can include text, images, links, and call-to-action buttons.
Most businesses never touch this feature. Which is exactly why you should.
Think of Google Posts like a mini social media feed, except it lives right inside Google search results where people are actively looking for services like yours. You can post updates, special offers, event announcements, tips, recent project highlights, whatever makes sense for your business.
A plumbing company in the Strip District that regularly posts about water heater installations, drain cleaning tips, and bathroom remodel projects is giving Google additional context about what they do. Every post is another signal. “Hey Google, we’re active, we’re relevant, and we do these specific things.”
Posts don’t need to be long or polished. A photo of a recent job with a sentence about the work and a “Call Now” button is enough. One to two posts per week is plenty. They expire after six months, so you do need to keep them fresh, but that’s actually a feature. It means the businesses that stay consistent get rewarded, and the ones that post once and forget about it fade away.
Make Sure Your Website Backs You Up
Your Google Business Profile doesn’t exist in a vacuum. Google checks your website to verify and cross-reference the information in your profile. If your profile says one thing and your website says another, that’s a trust problem.
The most important thing is NAP consistency. Your business name, address, and phone number on your website need to match your Google Business Profile character for character. Put this in your website footer so it appears on every page.
If you serve multiple areas around Pittsburgh, create pages that mention those areas specifically. “Plumbing Services in Mt. Lebanon.” “HVAC Repair in Cranberry Township.” “Roofing Contractor Serving the South Hills.” These location-specific pages help Google connect your business to the areas you actually serve.
Your web developer should also add LocalBusiness schema markup to your site. This is structured code that explicitly tells Google your business name, location, services, and hours in a format search engines can parse directly. It’s one of those behind-the-scenes things that most business owners never think about, but it makes a real difference.
And your site needs to work on phones. The vast majority of local searches happen on mobile devices. If your site is slow, broken, or frustrating on a phone, you’re losing leads and sending Google a signal that your business isn’t keeping up.
Local Citations: Consistency Is the Game
Citations are mentions of your business name, address, and phone number on other websites. Directories like Yelp, BBB, Angi, Yellow Pages, Apple Maps, Bing Places, Facebook. Industry-specific directories too. For contractors in Pittsburgh, that might include local BBB chapters or trade-specific listing sites.
The point of citations isn’t just “be listed in more places.” It’s about consistency. When Google sees the same business name, address, and phone number across dozens of trusted directories, it reinforces confidence in your information. When Google sees three different phone numbers and two different addresses across your listings, that confidence drops.
Do a quick audit. Search your business name and look at the top directory results. Are they all accurate? Is the address current? Is the phone number right? Cleaning up inconsistent citations is one of the highest-impact, lowest-effort things you can do for your local SEO.
How Google Actually Ranks the Map Pack
Google weighs three main factors when deciding which businesses appear in the Map Pack.
Relevance is how well your profile matches what the person searched for. Your categories, business description, services, posts, and website content all feed into this.
Distance is how close you are to the searcher. You can’t move your office, but you can specify your service areas so Google knows your reach.
Prominence is how well-known and trusted your business is online. Review count, review quality, citation consistency, website authority, and overall web presence all factor in.
You can’t control distance. But you can absolutely maximize relevance and prominence. That’s what everything in this article is designed to do.
The 15-Minute Weekly Routine
Here’s where I tie it all together, because I know what you’re thinking. “This is a lot of stuff.” And you’re right. But you don’t need to do it all at once.
The initial setup takes some time. Claiming your profile, choosing categories, filling out every field, cleaning up citations. Budget an afternoon for that. But once the foundation is set, maintaining your competitive edge is a 15-minute weekly habit.
That’s achievable for any business owner, whether you’re running a two-person operation out of Carnegie or managing a team of thirty across the North Hills.
Your competitors aren’t doing this. Most of them claimed a profile years ago, haven’t touched it since, and wonder why they never show up in the Map Pack. The bar is low. All you have to do is clear it consistently.
You can do this. It’s not rocket science. It’s not even particularly hard. It’s just showing up every week, doing a few small things, and letting that effort compound. Start today, and in a few months, you’ll wonder why you waited.