MapRank

What we found auditing 50 Vancouver-area plumbers and HVAC shops

September 2026 · measured with the Google Places API · no business is named

We ran a Google Maps rank check on fifty plumbing and HVAC companies in Clark County, Washington. Same method each time: find the business on Google, then search its trade and city from points spread around its own address, and record where it came up.

No business is named here, and nobody was contacted because of what their numbers said. The point was to find out whether "we're not showing up on Google" is a real problem or a feeling.

The headline: a quarter of them are invisible

Where they ranked	Of 50
In the top 3	16 (32%)
4th to 20th	20 (40%)
Not in the top 20 at all	14 (28%)

Fourteen established companies — most with a real website, a verified profile and years of trading — did not appear in the first twenty results for their own trade in their own city.

It was not that they were worse businesses

This is the part we did not expect to be so clean. The median rating across all fifty was 4.9. The invisible ones were not badly reviewed. They were less reviewed:

	Median reviews
Shops in the top 3	649
Shops not in the top 20	97

Roughly a six-fold gap. Seven of the fourteen invisible shops had more than a hundred reviews and still did not place.

The honest caveat. Fifty businesses in one county is a pattern, not a law, and this is a correlation — we did not prove that reviews cause the ranking. Google has never published the weighting and anyone who tells you the exact formula is guessing. What we can say is that in this sample the two things moved together very consistently.

Rank is not one number

The most useful thing to come out of this is not a statistic. It is that "where do I rank?" has no single answer. Google gives a different result depending on where the person searching is standing, and almost no owner has ever seen that laid out.

Grid of Google Maps ranks for an HVAC company in east Vancouver, from 9 to 15 — An HVAC company with 1,847 reviews. Ninth at best, fifteenth at worst, across a two-mile square. By any normal measure this is a successful business — and it is on nobody's first screen.

Grid of Google Maps ranks for a central Vancouver plumber, from 11 to not ranked — A central Vancouver plumber. Eleventh near the middle of its area, outside the top twenty at two corners. If the owner checked from the shop, everything would look fine.

Grid of Google Maps ranks for an HVAC shop in Orchards, mostly unranked — An HVAC shop in Orchards with 166 reviews: outside the top twenty at seven of the nine points we checked. This is what "not showing up on Google Maps" actually looks like.

What the profiles had in common

Two of the fifty had no website linked on their Google profile at all. But most of the gaps were smaller and duller than that — a missing description, one category where three would fit, hours not filled in. None of those things vault a business to the top. All of them are free, and they were missing far more often on the shops that were not placing.

If you want to know your own number

Searching your own business name will not tell you — Google knows it is you and you are already nearby. You need the keyword a customer would actually type, measured from more than one place.

We built the thing we used for this into a free check. One per business, no card, nothing to install.

Check where you rank, free