Local businesses

Know how your business looks to someone searching nearby.

Not how it looks to you, from your own phone, signed into your own account, standing in your own shop. That search is the one search that tells you nothing.

Free to join · No obligation · Private beta in the UK and Spain

emergency plumber near meSearched from M20, 2.4 km away
  1. 1Demo competitor A4.4129 reviews
  2. 2Demo competitor B4.596 reviews
  3. 3Northgate HeatingYou4.647 reviews
  4. 4Demo competitor C4.162 reviews

You are third. The two above you have more reviews, not better ones — and one of them has a page for this exact service while you have a paragraph.

Demonstration data · fictional business

The moment that matters

Someone two miles away needs what you sell.

They type four words, look at three results, and choose one. Everything NegoTrack monitors exists to change what happens in those eight seconds.

Where you appear

Your ranking is not a number. It is a map.

Local results depend heavily on where the person searching is standing. Being third overall can mean first in your own street and nowhere at all four roads over — and the average hides exactly the part you could do something about.

The grid runs the same search from points across your area. Where you hold the top three, where you are mid-table, and where you do not appear at all become a shape rather than a statistic.

Map position for “boiler repair”, by search point

25 points across a 5km square
72 visibility
Top 34 to 10Not shown

Profile completeness

VerifiedYes
Categories1 of 3
Photos17
HoursSet

Checked and clear

  • No duplicate listings found
  • Address matches your website
  • Service area covers 5 postcodes

Demonstration data · fictional business

By business type

Same product, different first question.

A restaurant lives or dies by opening hours and reviews. A trades business lives on service-area coverage and whether the phone gets answered. Pick one to see which signals come first.

Demonstration business · Manchester

Northgate Heating

Local visibility72
Call conversion64
Reviews4.6 / 5
Website82
First recommendationGive boiler repair a page of its own

It is the term that brings you the most enquiries, and it is currently one paragraph inside a page covering six services.

Demonstration businesses · not customers

The usual causes

Local problems are boring, fixable and invisible.

Almost every business missing from the map is missing for one of these reasons, and almost none of them are about your website.

01

The listing is not verified

The single most common cause, and the quickest to fix. An unverified profile can be shown in a limited way, or not at all.

02

There are two of you

Somebody created a listing years ago, you created another. Google splits the signals between them and neither wins.

03

The primary category is wrong

It outweighs every secondary category combined. “Business” does not compete with “plumber”.

04

The address breaks the rules

A PO box, a virtual office or a relative's house ends in suspension. Service-area businesses have to hide the address instead.

05

Nobody set the opening hours

An empty schedule reads as abandoned, and listings that look maintained are favoured over listings that do not.

06

It is simply new

A freshly verified listing takes weeks to settle. If everything else is right and it has been a fortnight, the answer is to wait.

Local search questions

Why do I see myself first but customers do not?

Because you are searching from your own premises, usually signed in, often having visited your own site a hundred times. Google is personalising heavily. The honest test is searching the service rather than your name, from the area you want customers in, in a private window.

I travel to customers. Does any of this apply?

Yes, and the rules are different for you. Service-area businesses hide the address and define a coverage area instead; leaving a home address visible while not receiving customers there breaks the platform's rules and risks suspension.

Can NegoTrack get me into the top three?

No tool can promise that, and any that does is selling something. What monitoring does is find the fixable problems keeping you out of contention — verification, duplicates, categories, coverage — which is usually where the actual gap is.

Do reviews really affect where I appear?

Volume and recency both play a part alongside distance and relevance. It is why a competitor with a lower rating and three times as many reviews can sit above you, which is a problem you fix by asking, not by worrying.

See your area the way a customer does.

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