Search from your truck and you get a different answer
Most owners check their ranking the same way: type the trade into Google at the office, find the business in the map, feel good or bad. Then a customer in the next town says they could not find you. Both are telling the truth.
The map pack is not one list. Google works out a fresh answer for every search, and one of the three things it weighs is how far the business is from the person searching. [1] Move the searcher two kilometres and the answer can change completely. So “where do I rank?” has no single answer. The real question is “where do I rank, from where?”
What a geo-grid is
A geo-grid answers that question by brute force. You lay a grid of evenly spaced points over the service area, run the same search as if a customer were standing at each point, and record where the business appears. Every point gets a number: first, fourth, fifteenth, or not in the top twenty.
Put the numbers back on the map and colour them, and you have a heat map: green where you are in the pack, red where you do not exist. For the first time you are looking at your whole service area at once rather than the view from your own desk.
Why your position falls away from home
Three things usually drive the drop, and they are worth telling apart because they have different fixes.
| Cause | What it looks like | What helps |
|---|---|---|
| Plain distance | Strong at home, fading evenly in every direction | Stronger relevance and reviews, so you hold on further out |
| A competitor's home turf | A sharp drop on one side, where another business sits | Work on that zone specifically: a page with real local substance, reviews from jobs there |
| A town line | Fine in your town, gone across the border, for searches that name a town | A useful page for that town, if you really work there |
The town line catches a lot of Fraser Valley businesses. A search for “roofer Langley” leans towards businesses whose address is in Langley. In the latest expert survey, having an address in the searched city ranked fourth among map-pack factors. [2] A roofer based in Surrey can be strong at the Langley border for “roofer near me” and weak there for “roofer Langley”. A grid that measures both kinds of search shows you which problem you have.
How big a grid, and how far apart
A grid is a sample, so its size is a trade between detail and cost. The spacing matters as much as the count: a grid that is too tight only measures your own neighbourhood, and one that is too wide jumps over whole towns.
| Grid | Points | Good for |
|---|---|---|
| 3 × 3 | 9 | A quick look: are you visible at all outside your own street? This is the free scan. |
| 5 × 5 | 25 | One town, or a clinic whose patients come from a few kilometres. |
| 7 × 7 | 49 | A trade covering two or three towns. |
| 9 × 9 | 81 | A wide service area, such as an HVAC or restoration company covering the valley. This is the audit. |
The right spacing depends on the trade. A dental clinic competes over a few kilometres, because patients will not drive past three dentists to reach a fourth. An HVAC company or a drainage contractor drives to the customer and may cover 25 kilometres or more, so its grid has to stretch that far.
What makes one grid comparable with the next
A single grid is a snapshot. The value comes from running it again and comparing, and that only works if nothing changed except the world. Four rules keep it honest:
- The same points. Move a point 500 metres and you are measuring a different street.
- The same searches. Swap “furnace repair” for “furnace service” and last month's numbers stop meaning anything.
- Searched by coordinates, not a logged-in phone. A personal Google account personalises the results. A measurement should not.
- Places pinned properly. Surrey, Langley, Delta, Mission, Hope and Abbotsford all share names with places in the US or the UK. A tool that searches by town name can quietly measure the wrong country.
What a grid does not tell you
It is Google's answer at a point, not a customer count
A grid point in farmland or the middle of the Fraser measures a search nobody makes. A green square does not mean calls, and a red one does not mean no calls. It shows where you are visible. Whether that turns into work depends on your reviews, your prices and how fast you answer the phone.
Some points have no map at all
For some searches Google shows no map pack at a point, for anyone. That is not a bad result for you, and a report that paints it red is misleading you. We mark those points separately.
Positions wobble from week to week
A point moving from 3rd to 4th and back is normal noise. A block of points turning from red to yellow over two months is a trend. Read the shape, not a single square: how to read a heat map walks through the patterns.
What to do with your own
Run the free scan first: nine points, five searches, about a minute. If the map is mostly red outside your own street, the fixes usually start with the Google profile, especially the primary category. If you want the same grid re-measured every week with the work logged beside it, that is map coverage tracking.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help, “Tips to improve your local ranking on Google”, read 30 September 2026. support.google.com/business/answer/7091
- Whitespark, Local Search Ranking Factors 2026, an expert survey published November 2025. whitespark.ca/local-search-ranking-factors
Where Merkat does this for you: A weekly geo-grid across your service area, the same points and searches every time, in your own dashboard.
Map coverage tracking →