What the businesses in Google's Maps top 3 have in common: 138 local searches analysed

The businesses that hold the top 3 on Google Maps share three things: they are close to the person searching, they have more reviews and more photos than the listings below them, and they have a website that names the service and the town. That is what we found when we analysed 138 local searches on 5 October 2026. A tidy website on its own did not separate winners from losers. Most of the ranking sites had one.

This article sets out what we measured, what we found, and where the limits are. It is Belgian data. We say what we expect to carry over to Lisbon and what we have not measured yet.

How we ran the study

We picked 23 local trades (roofers, electricians, plumbers, painters, vets, opticians, physiotherapists, garages, hairdressers, estate agents, restaurants and others) and searched each one as “trade + city” in six Flemish cities: Ghent, Bruges, Kortrijk, Roeselare, Aalst and Ostend.

138 organic results pages and 138 Google Maps results pages, 20 results deep, pulled through the DataForSEO SERP API with the location set to each city.
1,168 ranking pages crawled, plus each domain’s sitemap, so we could compare what the winning pages actually contain.
Control groups: organic #1 against organic #11–20, and Maps top 3 against Maps #15–20. A comparison only means something if the same element is rarer further down the list.

Limits, stated up front: one day, one searcher position (the city centre), desktop only. Classifying listings as directory, chain or local business was done by rule, not by hand. Six cities per trade is a small sample. Everything here is correlation, not proof of cause.

Finding 1: the 3-pack is the prize, not organic #1

135 of the 138 searches showed a Maps 3-pack, and in 134 of those 135 it was the first block on the page. For someone looking for a plumber in their town, the three map listings are what they see first. If your local SEO plan only talks about organic rankings, it is aiming at the second prize.

Finding 2: distance decides who gets in

409 of the 414 top-3 listings were within 5 km of the searcher. The median distance was 1.2 km for the top 3, 1.5 km for positions 4–10 and 1.7 km for positions 11–20.

This fits Google’s own explanation. Its help page lists three factors for local ranking: relevance (how well a profile matches the search), distance (how far the business is from the searcher) and prominence (how well known it is). It also says plainly: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.”

In practice, you cannot move your address. A business 8 km from the centre will struggle to appear for a searcher standing in the centre, whatever it does. Within the radius where it can compete, relevance and prominence are what it can work on.

Finding 3: reviews and photos separate the top 3 from the rest

In 21 of 23 trades, the median review count of the top 3 was higher than for positions 8–20.
In 19 of 23 trades, the top 3 also had more photos. Roofers: 21 against 4. Windows and doors: 30 against 9. Plumbers: 10.5 against 2.

The exceptions are useful too. Among restaurants the top 3 had fewer reviews (median 155 against 292), so relevance and distance beat volume there. Electricians showed no clear gap either.

The review bar varies widely by trade. For painters, joiners, landscapers, electricians, accountants and building contractors, about 10 to 15 real reviews already reached top-3 level. For hairdressers, estate agents, bike shops, vets and restaurants, the top 3 sat at 75 to 150 or more. Before you set a review target, check the median of your own local top 3. A trade-wide rule of thumb is no substitute.

Finding 4: directories own organic page 1

Directories and platforms held 54% of all organic top-10 positions and 51% of the #1 spots (71 of 138). One general business directory appeared in 22 of 23 trades and Facebook in 20. An independent business typically got one or two organic slots on page 1.

The practical takeaway is that a complete, consistent profile on the directories that rank in your trade is not vanity work. It gives you a second route onto page 1.

Finding 5: on-page SEO is table stakes

The independent businesses at organic #1 and those at #11–20 looked almost the same on the page: the city in the title in 79% against 72%, the service in the title in 61% against 61%, around 550 words and four subheadings. The #1 site had more ranking keywords than the best site at #11–20 in only 35 of 123 cases, so it was rarely just the bigger site winning.

What the winners did more often was rank with a page built for service + town. 65% of organic #1 independents ranked with an inner page rather than the homepage, and 40% had the city in the URL (in the form /roofing-bruges).

The must-have elements

Element	Organic #1 (independent)	Maps top-3 website	What it tells you
HTTPS + mobile viewport	98% / 100%	96% / 98%	Missing it is a warning sign, not a ranking edge
City in the page title	79%	53% (35% at Maps #15–20)	The clearest website signal tied to Maps position
Service in the page title	61%	42% (29% at #15–20)
Meta description	86%	81%
Tap-to-call phone link	63% (53% at #11–20)	57%
Full address with postcode	66%	77%	Should match the Google profile exactly
Quote or booking call to action	63%	71%
XML sitemap	84%	82%

The gaps are where it gets interesting. LocalBusiness structured data appeared on only 22% of #1 pages, an FAQ on 19%, reviews shown on the site on 28%, and any price at all on 37%. Yet the “People also ask” box appeared in 86 of 138 searches, and in the trades its questions were mostly “how much does X cost per hour / per m²?”. The median site had zero town pages in its sitemap. These are cheap to fix, and most competitors have not fixed them.

Finding 6: a cluster of suspicious listings in the top 3

77 of the 414 top-3 slots went to listings with fewer than five reviews. Some of that is normal: in some trades the bar is low. But a pattern kept recurring: listings named “trade + city”, sometimes with symbols in the name, at central landmark addresses such as a main square or a quay number 1, with zero to two reviews, sometimes the same brand repeated across several cities.

These look like lead-generation or virtual listings. We have not verified them one by one, so we are not naming them. Google’s guidelines require the name to match the business’s real-world name and the address to be a real, staffed location. Virtual offices are not eligible unless staffed during business hours. Copying the pattern risks suspension. The legitimate response is to report a listing only with evidence for that specific listing.

Other things we saw

AI Overviews were almost absent: 4 of 138 local searches. For local trades, AI visibility today mostly means Maps, directories and assistants like ChatGPT. More on that in how ChatGPT and Google’s AI choose local businesses.
Few advertisers: paid ads appeared in only 14 of 138 searches.
A “related websites” block appeared in 117 of 138 searches, with about 10 sites each, and 81% of them were local businesses rather than directories. How sites get into it is not known.

What this means for Lisbon

We have not yet measured Lisbon. Google’s local model of relevance, distance and prominence is the same everywhere, so we expect these to carry over: the 3-pack being the main prize, distance as the gate, and reviews and photos separating the top 3. What will differ: which directories rank, the review bar per trade, and possibly the distances in very dense neighbourhoods. We will publish Lisbon numbers once we have measured them, using the same method.

What to do with this

Look up the median reviews and photos of the current top 3 for your service in your town, and close the gap with real customers.
Put the service and the town in your page title, and give each main service its own page. See the local website checklist.
Answer the price question on your site, even as a range.
Fill in your Google profile completely, with no tricks. See what actually moves Google Business Profile rankings.

Next step

Want to know where your business stands against your local top 3: distance, reviews, photos and website? Ask for a free diagnosis. We will show you the numbers for your service and your town, and what we would fix first. No promises of rankings, just the data.