You know the feeling: you type “roofing contractor near me” or “commercial builder Glasgow” and the same three firms keep showing up above the normal search results. That little block is the Map Pack, and for local construction businesses it can be the difference between steady, higher-quality enquiries and another month of price shoppers.
If you want to know how to rank in the map pack, you need to stop thinking about “SEO” as a vague marketing channel and start treating it like a local visibility system. Google is trying to solve a simple problem: which nearby company is most likely to be the right choice for this search, in this location, right now.
There are three big drivers behind Map Pack rankings: relevance (are you a match), distance (are you close enough), and prominence (are you trusted and established). Distance is the one you cannot fully control. The other two are where serious businesses win.
Google Business Profile (GBP) is the core asset. It’s the listing that shows your name, reviews, photos, service area, opening hours and the all-important primary category. But GBP alone rarely carries the day in competitive towns and cities.
Google cross-checks your listing against your website, your reviews, mentions of your business across the web, and user behaviour. If people click your listing, call you, request directions, and then don’t bounce straight back to search, Google reads that as “this result did the job”.
For construction, that last part matters more than most agencies admit. You are not selling a £19 impulse buy. People are vetting you. If your listing looks thin, your photos are poor, or your reviews don’t mention the type of work they want, you can be visible and still lose the enquiry.
Most GBPs are “set up”, not optimised. The difference is commercial.
Choose the right primary category. This is not a branding exercise. If you’re a general builder but most of your profit comes from extensions, loft conversions, or commercial fit-outs, your category choice and supporting categories should reflect what you actually want more of. Get this wrong and you will fight uphill, because you are telling Google you’re one thing while trying to rank for another.
Then make your services and service areas explicit. Don’t rely on Google to infer it. List the actual services you deliver and, if relevant, the towns you cover. Be realistic. If you claim you cover half of Scotland but you’re genuinely based in one area, your listing starts to look like every other “we go anywhere” outfit.
Your business description should read like a serious firm, not a leaflet. Say what you do, who you do it for, and where you work. Mention accreditations and specialisms if they’re real and current, but keep it plain.
Photos are not decoration. Google likes freshness, and customers like proof. A steady stream of real project photos (before, during, after) beats a one-off upload of five glossy shots. If you do commercial work, show it. If you want better contracts, your listing should not look like you only do small domestic jobs.
Reviews are one of the most direct “prominence” signals you can influence. But chasing generic five-star reviews is where most companies waste effort.
You want reviews that mention the type of job, the location, and the outcomes people care about: kept to programme, tidy site, clear communication, handled variations properly, good snagging process. Those phrases help Google connect your business to specific searches, and they help a prospect feel safe choosing you.
Ask at the right moment. For construction, that usually means when the customer is relieved – handover complete, snagging sorted, and they’ve had a week to enjoy the result. Build it into your operational process so it doesn’t rely on you remembering at 7pm.
And respond to reviews like a grown-up business. Short, polite, and specific. Not “Thank you for your feedback” copied and pasted 40 times. Google can see that, and so can future clients.
One of the biggest myths in local SEO is that “the Map Pack is just your Google listing”. In competitive areas, your website often decides whether you sit in the top three or hover in positions four to ten where nobody clicks.
Your site needs to make it easy for Google to understand three things: what you do, where you do it, and why you’re a credible choice.
If you operate across multiple towns, you need location landing pages that are genuinely useful. Not ten pages that repeat the same paragraph with the place name swapped.
A strong location page speaks to that area with proof: local projects, photos, case studies, testimonials from nearby clients, and the services you actually deliver there. If you do a lot of work in East Kilbride, show East Kilbride work. If you want to win commercial clients in Edinburgh, that page should look like you’ve done it before.
“Building services” is not a search term people trust. Specific services win: house extensions, loft conversions, roofing repairs, structural alterations, commercial refurbishments, shop fit-outs. Each should have a page that explains the process, typical timelines, what can affect cost, and how you handle the job.
This is where you filter out time-wasters. If you clearly explain how you price, what you will and won’t quote without a survey, and what a serious project involves, you naturally attract better enquiries.
If your site is slow, broken on mobile, or hard to crawl, you are making Google’s job harder. Construction sites often have heavy images and clunky galleries that look great on desktop and perform badly everywhere else.
You don’t need perfection, but you do need competence: fast pages, clean structure, indexable content, and clear contact details that match your GBP. Consistency matters – same name, same address formatting, same phone number.
Citations are mentions of your business details across directories and platforms. They are not glamorous, but they help confirm you are real.
The important part is consistency. If you have old phone numbers, slightly different business names, or an address written three different ways, you create doubt. Google doesn’t phone you to ask which one is correct. It just reduces confidence.
If you’ve been trading for years, you probably have some mess to clean up. Do it once, properly, and you remove a ranking headwind that never shows up in a glossy SEO report.
Map Pack results are influenced by how people interact with your listing. That includes calls, website visits, direction requests, and how often people choose you over competitors.
You can improve this without gimmicks. Make sure your GBP has the right call number, add messaging only if you will actually reply, and use photos that set expectations. If you specialise in higher-end work, your listing should look like it. That way the right people click, and the wrong people self-select out.
This is also why cheap, generic SEO can backfire. Ranking for broad terms that attract bargain hunters might inflate your “leads” while lowering your conversion rate and wasting your time.
Local SEO is not a lever you pull and instantly own the town.
If you are in a dense city, distance matters more. You might rank brilliantly near your office and struggle a few miles away. The fix is not to pretend you have ten locations. The fix is to strengthen your prominence through reviews, content, and authority, and to backfill gaps with paid search when the work pipeline needs certainty.
If you operate in a wide rural area, service-area settings and location pages matter, but you will still see ranking variability. Some queries are hyper-local. Others are more forgiving. The goal is not “rank everywhere for everything”. The goal is predictable enquiries for profitable jobs.
The fastest clean win is usually GBP: categories, services, photos, and a review process that generates the right kind of feedback. In parallel, fix the website pages that actually convert – your key service pages and the locations that matter commercially.
By day 90, you should be able to see movement in Map Pack visibility for target services, a lift in calls and form fills from local searches, and a clearer picture of which locations and job types are responding. If you can’t measure that, you’re paying for activity, not outcomes.
If you want a senior pair of eyes on your Map Pack performance and the website system behind it, Wicked Spider does this work with direct-to-expert delivery – no account managers, no scripted updates, and limited onboarding capacity. You can start with a paid audit and a practical plan at https://wickedspider.com/.
The closing thought is simple: the Map Pack is not a popularity contest. It’s Google trying to reduce risk for the searcher. Make your listing and your website do the same, and the rankings tend to follow.
