The Online Group

Not in Google's Top Three? Your Reviews Might Be Why

By Alan Blackmore · · 8 min read

Thirty years ago, if you were a plumber in Parramatta, you wanted a big ad in the Yellow Pages. Bold, near the front of the section, ideally starting with “AAA”.

That book’s gone. But the fight for the front of the section hasn’t.

Today the section is the little map that pops up when someone types “plumber near me” into Google. Three businesses sit under it. Everybody else is hidden behind a “More businesses” button that plenty of people never press.

That box is called the local pack, or the three-pack. And here’s the bit most tradies don’t know:

Your Google reviews are one of the few levers you control that help decide whether you’re in it.

Not your logo. Not your ute wrap. Your reviews.

(If you want the practical side, here’s how our Google review automation works.)

Let’s dig into why.

Google has told you, in writing, how this works

You don’t have to take an agency’s word for it. Google publishes its own explanation.

In its Business Profile help page on local ranking (Google, 2026), Google says local results are “mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity”. Then, under prominence, it says this:

“This factor’s also based on info like how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have. More reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking.”

Read that twice. Google is telling you straight: review count and rating feed into where you rank.

Now break down those three factors from a tradie’s point of view:

Two of the three are mostly set and forget. Prominence is where the race is actually run.

What the local search experts rank highest

Google keeps the exact recipe secret. So every couple of years, the Canadian local SEO firm Whitespark surveys dozens of the best local search specialists in the world and has them score close to 200 possible ranking factors.

The Whitespark 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors report (Whitespark, 2025) surveyed 47 experts. Here’s where review factors landed in their top 15 for local pack/Maps ranking:

Four of the top 15. Most of what scores higher is the basics: your primary category, how close you are to the searcher, keywords in your business name, having an address in the city being searched and being open at the time of the search.

The report also notes that the biggest shifts for 2026 were “an increased importance of review signals and behavioural signals.”

Plainly put: the people whose job is getting businesses onto Maps think reviews matter more now than they did two years ago.

One honest caveat. This is expert opinion, not Google’s code. But it lines up with what Google says publicly, and it’s the best information anyone outside Google has.

Count, stars, freshness, rhythm: four different signals

Most tradies think of “reviews” as one thing. The experts’ rankings suggest Google weighs at least four separate review signals.

1. How many

Picture two electricians in Penrith. Same category, both five minutes from the searcher. One has 14 reviews. The other has 140.

To Google’s prominence signal, those aren’t equal. One looks like a sideline. The other looks like a fixture in the area.

2. How good

A high average rating is the highest-scoring review factor in Whitespark’s list. No surprise there. Google wants to show people businesses they’ll be happy with.

3. How recent

A review from 2021 says you were good in 2021. Recency of reviews ranks #11 on its own. If your newest review is two years old, you’re asking Google to bet on a business that may have shut up shop.

4. How steady

This is the one almost nobody thinks about. “Sustained influx of reviews over time (rather than bursts)” ranks #14.

So the classic tradie move of sending a big “please review us!” blast to your whole customer list once a year doesn’t do the same job. Ten reviews in one week, then nothing for eleven months, looks very different from a couple every week, all year.

Steady beats spiky.

Why this matters more for tradies than most

A café has foot traffic. A shop has a street front. People walk past.

A pool builder in Joondalup or a cleaner in Carindale doesn’t. Your customers find you one way more than any other: they search, they look at the map, they pick from what’s in front of them.

And a lot of service businesses are set up as service-area businesses with no public address. That means you’ve got one less “physical location” advantage working for you (Whitespark’s experts rank an address showing on the profile 7th for Maps). You lean harder on the factors you can actually influence. Reviews sit right at the top of that list.

There’s another bit of maths worth thinking about. Most of your jobs come from a handful of suburbs. If you’re in the three-pack for “pool builder” across, say, the northern suburbs of Perth, that’s not a ranking. It’s your sales pipeline.

Drop out of it and the phone doesn’t stop ringing overnight. It just rings a little less each week, and you don’t know why.

The stuff that won’t save you

Before anyone gets clever, a few things to steer clear of.

Buying reviews or writing your own. Google’s Maps user-contributed content policy bans fake engagement, and in Australia the ACCC says it’s against the law for a business to create fake or misleading reviews, or to arrange for others to. Not worth your business.

Only asking the happy ones. Cherry-picking who you ask (sometimes called “review gating”) is against Google’s rules, which don’t allow businesses to selectively ask for positive reviews. Ask everyone.

Paying or rewarding people for reviews. Google’s same policy also bans offering incentives such as payment, discounts or freebies in exchange for a review.

Stuffing keywords into your business name. Yes, keywords in the name rank highly. Renaming “Smith Plumbing” to “Smith Plumbing Emergency Hot Water Blocked Drains Sydney” breaks Google’s Business Profile guidelines, which say unnecessary information in a business name isn’t permitted and could get your profile suspended.

The honest route is the only one that lasts: do good work, and make sure a steady stream of real customers tells Google about it.

What “doing it properly” looks like for ranking

You don’t need a 20-step plan. For Maps ranking specifically, reviews come down to three habits:

  1. Ask every customer, every job. That builds count.
  2. Ask soon after the job’s done. That builds freshness, and people are more likely to follow through while the job’s still on their mind.
  3. Keep it going every week, not in bursts. That builds the steady rhythm the experts rate.

Notice number three. It’s the one that breaks down in real life. You’re flat out in summer, you forget. Winter’s quiet, you remember, you blast everyone. Spiky.

That’s not a character flaw. You’re running jobs, not a marketing department. It’s just the reason a system does this better than a sticky note on the dash.

The bottom line

The three-pack is your shopfront now. Three spots. Everyone in your suburb fighting for them.

Google has told you reviews help decide who gets in. The experts who study it rank review count, rating, recency and steadiness among the most important factors there are.

You can’t change how far you are from the customer. You can change how many people vouch for you, how recently, and how consistently.

Want the steady stream without the sticky notes?

The Online Group’s Google review automation sets up automated review requests that go out after every job, so the asking happens on time, every time, even in your busiest month. We can also automate the replies to your reviews, so your profile never looks unattended.

If you’d like a steady flow of fresh Google reviews working on your Maps ranking in the background, have a look at how our review automation works.

Sources

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