Google ranks a local business on three things and says there is no way to pay for a better position.
Those two facts, from Google's own help page, frame every "my ranking dropped" panic I hear from UK tradesmen. Relevance, distance and prominence decide who appears, and none of the three can be bought from Google. That leaves two questions: is the drop real, and is the cause something you can fix for nothing?
Most of the guides that answer this are written by agencies selling recovery, so I have built this one from Google's pages and a worked example you can copy. It covers the three free checks, a triage table of causes, and the point where paying someone stops being a waste.
Is the drop real? Three checks that cost nothing
Check your own Performance figures over several weeks before you touch the profile, because one bad search from your phone proves very little.
- Read the Performance page, not your memory. Google says calls are the number of times a customer clicked the call button on your profile, and that calls are only tracked if you add a phone number. Compare four weeks, not two days.
- Remember the search date lag. Google says the searches figure is updated at the start of each month and can take up to five days to show. A drop in last month's searches can be old news by the time you see it.
- Search from somewhere else. Google defines distance as how far each business is from the person searching. If you check from the yard and a customer searches three miles away, you are both right and you see different results. The longer version of that is in why you rank at home but not three miles away.
Here is the sum I would do with invented numbers for a UK electrician. Calls from the profile over four weeks read 22, 19, 21 and 11. Three weeks sit within a few calls of each other, and the last week is half of them. That is a real signal worth acting on, not noise. If the weeks had read 22, 15, 21 and 18, I would leave the profile alone and check again in a fortnight. The figures are made up, and you should use your own.
The triage table: what changed, what to do, who does it
Match what you changed or noticed to the row below: four of the six causes are free for you to fix, and two are where paying a person can make sense.
| What you notice | Likely cause | Fix it yourself? | Pay someone? |
|---|---|---|---|
| Profile marked suspended or disabled | A guideline breach Google found | Yes: one free appeal, evidence ready | Only after a denial or if you cannot find the cause. See the suspended profile guide |
| It fell after you edited the name | A name that breaks the guidelines | Yes: put back your real-world name | No |
| It fell after an address or service area change | Location now reads differently to Google | Yes: check the address or service area is accurate | No |
| Calls fell, profile looks untouched | A rival moved up, or your searchers moved | Partly: check the results from several places | If you cannot find a cause after a month |
| A rival with your name or a fake address appeared | A fake or duplicate listing | Yes: report it, see how to get fake listings removed | If the reports go nowhere |
| Profile fine, your website is broken or slow | Weak site behind the profile | Depends on who built it | Yes, if you have no one to fix the site |
The table is my reading of Google's pages plus what I see when a tradesman sends me a profile that has dropped, not a list of Google's own causes. Google publishes no list of reasons for a movement in ranking, and I would distrust any page that claims to know yours without seeing the profile.
What Google lets you fix for free
Google's guidelines say unnecessary information in a business name is not permitted and can lead to suspension, so the cheapest first fix is to make the name exactly what it is on your van and invoices.
The guidelines page says the name should reflect the business's real-world name, and that marketing taglines, phone numbers, hours and service descriptions do not belong in it. A UK trader who renamed the profile to "Smith Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Leeds | 24 Hour" in the hope of ranking has done the thing the page warns about. The page also says to use a precise, accurate address and or service area, and that a service-area business working from home should hide its address.
One more rule catches people out. Google says a minor name edit is allowed if the proper nouns, services and category stay the same, but a bigger change makes the business a new profile. If you changed your trading name because the company changed, expect Google to treat it differently from a typo fix.
Everything here costs an hour. If the name and address are right, the profile is not suspended and the Performance lines are steady, the profile itself is probably not your problem.
When paying someone is reasonable
Pay when your time is worth more than the fee, when the checks find nothing, or when the problem sits outside your control, such as a fake listing or a broken website.
A tradesman in Britain who loses a week of calls loses real work, and an afternoon of reading Google's pages is an afternoon off the tools. If the fee for a proper audit is smaller than the work a month of dropped calls costs you, paying can be rational even for a fix you could do yourself. Run your own numbers: calls a week, the share that becomes jobs, the average job.
I could not verify a UK price for a ranking-drop audit. The agency guides I read gave no figures, and I do not quote ones I cannot source. Ask for it in writing before you agree.
Fee against lost work (invented figures)
| Calls lost a week | 1 in 3 become jobs | Work lost at £350 a job | Four weeks |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 1 | £350 | £1,400 |
| 5 | 1 to 2 | £350 to £700 | £1,400 to £2,800 |
| 10 | 3 | £1,050 | £4,200 |
Invented trade, invented rates. Replace the one in three and the £350 with your own last-quarter figures. Five calls is rounded, so I show a range.
A four-week routine if you fix it yourself
Change one thing at a time and write it down with the date, because a profile you edited five ways at once tells you nothing about which edit helped.
This is my suggested routine for a UK trade, not a Google procedure. Google publishes no timetable for how fast a change shows up, so I make no promise about when calls return.
- Week one: note the four-week calls figure, check for any suspension notice, and put the name back to the real-world name if it has extras in it.
- Week two: check the address or service area is accurate, and search your main service from two or three places a few miles apart, noting who appears.
- Week three: look for a copycat listing using your name or a made-up address near you, and report it if you find one.
- Week four: compare calls with week one and decide whether to pay someone.
If calls are back to normal by week four, you have saved the fee. If nothing moved and nothing was wrong, the profile may not be the cause at all, and the next place to look is the website the profile points at.
Five questions to ask before you pay
Anyone worth paying will tell you what they plan to check, what they will change and what you get if they find nothing.
- What will you look at first? A good answer names the profile name, address, category and any notices, which are the same things in the table above.
- Will you list every change you make? You should be able to undo any of them.
- What do you get if nothing is wrong? A flat fee for an audit that finds nothing is fair. A monthly fee for waiting is not.
- What access do you need? Manager access on the profile, never your Google password.
- What do you promise? Google says nobody can buy a ranking from it, so a promised position is a promise about something the seller does not control. The same warning is in what to never sign in an SEO contract. If the offer arrived as a call you did not ask for, check the caller first.
Where Sitework fits, and where it does not
Profile work is included in the SEO and Map Pack plan, but I do not sell a one-off ranking rescue and I cannot promise a position.
The Google Maps plan is £300 every four weeks on a website you already have, or £350 with a website I build and host, with a £150 deposit taken off the first payment. It covers the profile work, reviews, map grid scans and the search-led posts. If your drop turns out to be a name you can change in five minutes, I will say so rather than sell you a plan. For a UK trade with a stable profile and a weak site, the free mockup is the cheaper place to start.