Someone in Llandudno searched "electrician near me" last Tuesday afternoon. Three listings appeared in the Google map pack. None of them were the best electrician on the Conwy coast.
One was a business from further away with 63 reviews and a fully built-out profile. One was a sole trader who'd done the basics right. The third was a company paying for GBP management.
The electrician who does the best work in that postcode has 11 reviews, a sparse profile, and gets two or three calls a month from Google. The others are getting ten times that.
This is happening across North Wales, in Wrexham, in Rhyl, in Bangor, in Gwynedd, every day.
The gap isn't about quality of work
The tradespeople losing jobs on Google aren't losing them because they're worse at their trade. They're losing them because their online presence doesn't reflect how good they are.
Google can't assess workmanship. It assesses signals. reviews, profile completeness, activity, citations. A mediocre business that has invested time in their GBP will consistently outrank an excellent one that hasn't. How Google decides who shows in the map pack explains exactly what signals it measures.
That's a hard fact, but a useful one. It means the gap is closable.
82% of smartphone users search 'near me' when looking for local services
North Wales trades lose an estimated 30 to 50 calls per month to competitors with optimised profiles
What the optimised competitor actually looks like
The business taking your calls has probably done a handful of specific things:
- Set their primary and secondary categories correctly, so they appear for every relevant search
- Built up 40 to 80 recent reviews through a consistent asking process
- Filled in every section of their profile. services, description, service area, Q&A
- Posted on Google regularly to signal active management
- Made sure their business name, address, and phone number match across all directories
None of that is complicated. All of it takes time and consistency. Most of your competitors haven't done it either. but one or two have, and those are the ones showing up.
Every tradesperson we audit in North Wales has the same reaction. they had no idea how many jobs they were losing to competitors who simply had a better Google profile.
The searches you're not winning
In North Wales, searches like these happen dozens of times a day:
- "plumber Rhyl". high intent, someone with a problem right now
- "heating engineer Wrexham". boiler fault, needs someone today or tomorrow
- "builder Gwynedd". extension or renovation project, ready to get quotes
- "roofer Bangor". storm damage, calling whoever's top of the list
The business at position one gets the first call. Most customers call the first result and stop. Position two and three get the overflow. Below the map pack gets almost nothing.
We audited 50 trade businesses across North Wales. Over 80% had incomplete profiles, wrong categories, or zero Google Posts in the last year.
What this costs over a year
A sole trader missing from the map pack for their main search terms is typically losing three to eight calls per week they don't know they're missing. Those calls went somewhere else.
At an average job value of £300 to £500, that's £45,000 to £200,000 in work you didn't quote on in a year. not work you lost at quotation stage, but work you were never asked to quote on because you weren't visible.
The situation in North Wales specifically
The trades market across Conwy, Denbighshire, Gwynedd and Wrexham is more competitive than most tradespeople realise. There are pockets where one business dominates simply because they've done the basics. There are areas where three or four businesses have invested in their presence and the bar is higher.
The way to know where you stand is to search for your trade in your town, as a customer would, and see what you're up against. If you're not in the map pack, someone is getting calls that should be coming to you. Our our audit of 50 North Wales trade profiles shows the exact problems holding most businesses back.