Why a competitor with worse reviews outranks you

It's the most common thing a good trade business says: their work is better, their reviews are better, and the business above them in Google is not as good. Both things can be true, because Google is not ranking quality of work. It's ranking signals.

The dullest explanation and often the correct one. Distance is weighted heavily, and there is no way around it. If your competitor's pin sits in the middle of the suburb and yours is fifteen kilometres away, they will usually win searches made there.

What to do: measure your realistic radius with a geo-grid, then compete properly inside it rather than losing money chasing suburbs you cannot hold.

Category selection beats almost every other on-profile factor. A competitor whose primary category exactly matches the search intent will outrank a business with a broader or wrong category, regardless of review count.

What to do: audit your primary and secondary categories against the searches you actually want. This is often a same-day fix with results in weeks.

Volume is not the whole picture. A competitor collecting three reviews a week is sending a stronger freshness signal than a business with a bigger total from two years ago.

What to do: start requesting after every job. Recency compounds quickly.

Photos, posts, updated services and answered questions all indicate an actively managed listing. A profile untouched for a year looks dormant.

What to do: weekly job photos and a monthly post is enough. It doesn't need to be clever.

If a competitor has fifteen individual service entries and you have a paragraph, they are eligible for far more specific searches than you.

What to do: write out every service you offer and publish each one separately.

Categories and service listings first — fastest and free. Review recency second, because it compounds. Profile activity third. Accept distance and target accordingly.