Local Pack Rankings Hate Business Districts

If you tuned into the webinar I just did with Semrush, The Local Blueprint for Top Rankings, you would have seen some data I shared using Semrush’s Map Rank Tracker tool to determine the “Rank Radius” (how far from its physical location a business can expect to rank in the Local Pack/Google Maps) for searches in a variety of local business categories in Los Angeles. The short answer: not very far, although when we looked at smaller cities, there did appear to be some benefit to having fewer competitors, enabling businesses to have larger Rank Radii.

Not too surprising, but when approving budgets for Local SEO programs, it might be helpful for a business to get an understanding of what’s reasonable to expect, right?

While doing the research for the webinar, I stumbled upon a related thing that also seems pretty obvious, yet I don’t recall ever seeing it discussed in detail:

Business districts for specific business categories are death to Local SEO.

Let’s look at a specific case: Zehl & Associates wants to rank for “Houston Personal Injury Attorney”. You can see it in their home page’s title tag.On Google Maps you can see they are clearly in the “Lawyer District” as there are at least 19 other PI law firms within a few miles of Zehl’s location:

According to Semrush’s Map Rank Tracker, Zehl currently only ranks in the Local Pack for this query within a few blocks of its location:

But check out the PI Attorney the tool says has the highest Share of Voice in Houston, Pusch & Nguyen. There are barely any other firms within several miles of its office:

In fact, if you look at the Rank Radii of the competitors with the highest Share of Voice throughout Houston, you’ll see that the further they are from the city center, the bigger the radius:

I imagine a lot of those law firms are located near Houston’s city center because that’s where a lot of potential clients work. But remote working has probably changed that dynamic a bit. And if you can’t rank well in Google, it may not really matter where your office is.

If I were a commercial real estate developer, I would be figuring out how to lure businesses out of their designated business districts. They have nothing to lose but their bad Local Pack rankings.