Why do I rank at home but not three miles away? The drop-off is a cliff, and I measured it
You are first or second on the map for your trade in your own town. You can check it from the kitchen table any morning of the week. Then you drive eight miles for a quote, sit in the van outside the job, type the same four words into the same phone, and you are not on the first screen at all. Somebody you have never heard of is in the top three.
Nearly every UK tradesman I speak to has had that moment and read it as a fault: a setting missed, a profile gone stale, an SEO company not earning its fee. It is usually none of those. It is the single strongest force in local search doing exactly what it is built to do, and it is far more brutal than most people selling local SEO let on. I went and counted it, because nobody in this trade publishes the number.
Because the searcher's own position is an input to the search, not a tie-break at the end. Your listing is pinned to one address, so every rival nearer the searcher gets measured against you too. In a sweep of 233 UK trade businesses across three market towns, 199 appeared in only one town's results. Pages on your own site, not profile settings, are what reach the next town.
How far "found" actually reaches, counted across three towns
Of 233 distinct trade businesses swept across three market towns in Shropshire, 199 of them, 85.4%, turned up in only one town's results. Three turned up in all three.
I keep cold-call lead sheets of real UK trade businesses, and in September 2026 I ran eighteen trade searches across Ludlow, Craven Arms and Church Stretton: plumber, electrician, builder, roofer, tiler, joiner, carpenter, plasterer, kitchen fitter, bathroom fitter, painter and decorator, gardener, landscaper, fencing contractor, driveway, tree surgeon, handyman and mobile mechanic. The three towns sit in a line on the A49. Ludlow to Craven Arms is about eight road miles, Craven Arms to Church Stretton about seven, and the two ends are about fifteen apart.
Deduplicated by business name, the sweep holds 233 distinct businesses. Counted per business and per trade search, it holds 294 pairs, and only 36 of those pairs showed up for the same search in more than one of the three towns. Call it one in eight. Seven in eight of these businesses are visible in one town and invisible in a town a twenty minute drive away.
| Trade searched | Distinct businesses found | Appeared in more than one town |
|---|---|---|
| Plumber | 18 | 6 |
| Fencing contractor | 18 | 6 |
| Tiler | 18 | 5 |
| Bathroom fitter | 15 | 4 |
| Landscaper | 16 | 3 |
| Roofer | 19 | 2 |
| Plasterer | 16 | 2 |
| Electrician | 18 | 1 |
| Driveway | 15 | 1 |
| Builder | 24 | 0 |
| Carpenter | 16 | 0 |
| Joiner | 13 | 0 |
| Kitchen fitter | 11 | 0 |
Thirteen of the eighteen trade searches, ordered by how many businesses reached beyond one town. The five not shown (gardener, painter and decorator, handyman, mobile mechanic, tree surgeon) sit between 0 and 2. This is a three point sample along one road, not a grid scan: it tells you how often a listing survives a move of eight to fifteen miles, and nothing about the shape of the fall in between.
Five trades where nobody travelled at all
Builder, carpenter, joiner, kitchen fitter and tree surgeon returned 67 distinct businesses between them and not one of them appeared in a second town. Plumbers and fencing contractors managed 6 of 18 each. That split is worth sitting with if you fit kitchens or build extensions: the trades where one job is worth the most are the trades where the map reached nobody beyond their own postcode.
Reviews do not buy you distance, and the medians say so
Single-town businesses in the sweep hold a median of 11 Google reviews. The ones appearing in two or three towns hold 9.5. The gap is the wrong way round.
This is the finding I did not expect, and it is the one worth taking into a meeting with anybody selling you reach. If review count bought distance, the businesses showing up across the cluster would be the ones with the big review counts. They are not. One listing is excluded from these figures and the exclusion is stated plainly: the landscaper search returned Shropshire Hills National Landscape, a protected-landscape body rather than a contractor, whose 5,345 reviews would have swamped everything else on their own.
The three businesses that reached all three towns hold 68, 2 and 3 reviews. Two of the three widest-reaching listings in the whole set have fewer than five reviews between the pair of them. What those three do have is a trade that overlaps the gap: two of them are tiling and bathroom businesses, and the tiler search was the third most travelled of the eighteen.
None of that is an argument for ignoring reviews. Reviews are most of what decides who wins where you are already in contention, which is near home, and that is where most of your money is. It is an argument against treating "get more reviews" as a plan for getting into the next town, which is how it is usually sold. The same goes for the rest of the profile: a rival sitting above you in your own town is a different problem with different causes, and it is the one worth fixing first.
Why the fall is a cliff: your position is an input, not a tie-break
Location is a parameter in the search itself. Google's own developer documentation for Places text search exposes it directly, with a circle you can set anywhere from 0 to 50,000 metres.
It is worth reading how Google lets other software ask it this question, because it is the clearest statement of the mechanism anywhere. The Places Text Search reference has two separate parameters for geography: a location bias, which pushes results towards an area while still allowing results from outside it, and a location restriction, which excludes anything outside the area entirely. The circle you supply is a centre point and a radius in metres, between 0 and 50,000.
That is the difference between a nudge and a wall, and it is sitting there as two different parameters because the distinction matters to the result. A consumer searching on a phone in Britain is not sending either of those by hand, but their position is going in, and it is going in before the ranking happens rather than after. Your listing has one position, fixed to the address on your profile, and it does not move when the searcher does.
Density does more of the work than mileage
Every trade in the sweep returned between 11 and 24 businesses across three small towns in one of the least crowded counties in England. Move the searcher eight miles and you are not being compared with the same field slightly reshuffled. You are being compared with a field in which a dozen businesses are all closer than you, and relevance and prominence are being applied inside that field rather than across the county. This is also why nobody can promise you a map position in a town they have never measured, which is the whole of what a Google Maps ranking guarantee can honestly cover.
What the service area setting does, and what it does not
The service area tells customers where you will travel. It does not move the point you are measured from, and widening it is not a reach strategy.
Google's guidance for service-area and hybrid businesses is specific. You can list up to twenty service areas, and the boundary of the overall area should not be more than roughly two hours of driving time from where the business is based. If you do not serve customers at your address, you are told to remove the address so the profile shows only the service area.
Read that as a buyer and it is a description of honest coverage, not a lever. It is still worth getting right, because a service area that claims half of England reads badly to a customer and a service area that omits the villages you actually work in costs you nothing but helps nobody. But if a supplier is explaining your drop-off three miles out and the fix is a field on your profile, you now know what that field is for.
The four levers that actually widen reach
Only one of these four moves you in a town you are not based in, and it is the slowest one.
The third one is the answer to the question in the title, and it is why I keep arguing that the website and the map listing are one job rather than two. A page about kitchen fitting in a named town, with four real jobs on it, can rank for that town for years. A profile edit cannot, because the profile has one address and that is the end of the argument.
The one thing you own that does travel
Your van does. It is the only piece of marketing most trades own that is physically present in the next town, which is exactly why signwriting is worth what it costs and exactly why it is not measurable. I have put the numbers on that trade-off elsewhere, in what a website costs against signwriting and paid ads, and the short version is that the van buys presence while the site buys the bit you can count.
So what do you actually do on Monday morning
Pick the towns by where the money is, not by where the gap is. A town you are invisible in and earn nothing from is not a problem to solve.
Write down the three or four towns your last twenty jobs came from and what each was worth. If your own town and the one next to it carry most of it, the honest answer is that your reach is fine and the work is to win more of the searches you are already in. If a town fifteen miles out carries real money and you are nowhere in it, that is a website job with a slow start, and it wants a page, not a setting.
Measure before you spend either way. A grid scan on one search term from a named base will tell you in an afternoon how far your listing currently reaches, and a repeat in eight weeks tells you whether anything you paid for moved it. That is the same method I run for clients on the SEO and Map Pack plan, measured the same way every time so the second reading means something.