When a Worse Business Outranks You

This is the most frustrating conversation in the job, because the person is usually right. Their work genuinely is better. The business above them genuinely is worse.

And Google does not know, because Google has never seen either of you work.

What Google is actually ranking

Not your workmanship. Not whether you turn up when you say. Not whether the job lasted.

It ranks the evidence available to it: pages, profiles, reviews, and what the rest of the web says about you. A business can be mediocre on site and excellent on every one of those.

That is not Google being stupid. It is the limit of what anything can assess from outside, and it is the same limit a customer faces before they hire you. The difference is that the customer eventually finds out.

Go and look at why

Do not guess. Open the search you want, find the business above you, and check four things.

1. How many pages do they have aimed at real searches?

The single most common gap. They have a page for emergency call-outs, a page for bathrooms, a page for hot water. You have a page called Services listing all of it.

A page about one thing beats a page mentioning eleven things, every time. This is boring and it is usually the whole answer.

2. How complete is their Google Business Profile?

Open it. Count the services listed, the photos, whether the hours are filled in, whether anyone has replied to the reviews. Then open yours.

Most trade profiles are set up once and abandoned. If theirs is not, that is a real advantage and it took them an afternoon.

3. How many reviews, and when was the last one?

Ninety reviews with the most recent last week is hard to beat and takes time. Ninety reviews ending in 2024 is less of a moat than it looks.

4. Who mentions them?

Search their business name and see what comes back that is not their own site. Suppliers, trade bodies, local news, a manufacturer's installer list.

Longer-established businesses accumulate these without ever calling it link building, and it is the hardest part to close quickly.

Score it rather than stewing on it

Put the four side by side on paper. Their number, your number, four rows.

It turns a grievance into a job list, and it usually produces a surprise. The business you assumed was winning on reputation is often winning on having eleven more pages than you, which is a problem with a known solution and a known timescale.

It also stops you fixing the wrong thing. Plenty of businesses pour months into chasing reviews when they were four pages short, and the reviews would not have helped because they were not relevant for the search in the first place.

What is actually closeable

Quickly, within weeks: the profile. Services, photos, hours, service areas, replying to reviews. Free, and most businesses are losing here.

Within months: pages. One real page per job you want, written properly. This is the bulk of the gap in most cases.

Slowly: reviews and mentions. You cannot manufacture four years of steady reviews. You can start accumulating them today, which is the only version of this that works.

What is not worth doing

Reporting them, unless they are genuinely breaking a rule. Keywords stuffed into the business name or a fake address are reportable. Being better at this than you is not.

Copying their site. Understand what earns the position, then be more specific than them. Copying means arriving second with the same thing.

Obsessing over one search. The business above you on the main term may be below you on six others that collectively bring in more work. Check before deciding you are losing.

Checking it every day. Results move around, they are personalised, and they differ by where you are standing. Checking obsessively tells you nothing except how volatile the results are, and it is a reliable way to talk yourself into changing something that was working.

The part worth hearing

Being better at the job is not a ranking factor and never has been. It is why you keep customers, and it has nothing to do with how they find you in the first place.

The gap is almost never quality. It is legibility: how much of what makes you good is written down somewhere a machine can read. Closing it is unglamorous and mostly a matter of doing the obvious things that nobody got round to, which is what the search work actually is.

If you want to know specifically which of the four gaps is yours, that is what an audit answers, and you do not need one to start on the profile.