Last reviewed: February 2026
Map Pack Rankings for Law Firms: How Google Chooses
Whitespark’s annual Local Search Ranking Factors survey tracks how local SEO practitioners rank the signals that determine map pack visibility. Over the past three survey cycles, one trend has been consistent: proximity’s relative weight is declining while review signals, GBP signals, and website authority are gaining. Across the 2021, 2023, and 2025 surveys, proximity dropped from roughly 33% to approximately 25% of total estimated local ranking weight, while GBP and review signals each gained several percentage points. A firm five miles from the searcher with strong signals now regularly outranks a firm two blocks away with a thin profile. The map pack (also called the local pack or local three-pack) is not a proximity contest. It is a signal contest.
Google’s local algorithm evaluates three signal categories — relevance, distance, and prominence — but won’t tell you how much weight each carries. That weight shifts depending on the query type, the market, and how much differentiation exists among competing listings.
Proximity Is Not the Ranking Factor You Think It Is
Distance matters. Of course it does. But its influence has been declining for years, and the trend accelerated after Google’s November 2021 Vicinity Update, which specifically adjusted how proximity was calculated for local results.
What has changed since that update — and what Whitespark’s surveys quantify — is the relative weight of proximity versus relevance and prominence. A strong profile can increasingly overcome a distance disadvantage, particularly for queries that include a city name rather than “near me.”
What this means for law firms: your physical office location matters, but it is not destiny. A firm five miles from the searcher with strong reviews, an optimized GBP, and a well-structured website can outrank a firm two blocks away that has a thin profile and no review strategy. This is especially true for queries that include a city name rather than “near me.” When someone types “personal injury lawyer Dallas,” Google interprets that as a city-level query and expands the competitive radius significantly compared to “personal injury lawyer near me,” where the searcher’s precise GPS coordinates weigh more heavily.
The practical limit for map pack visibility varies by market density. In a major metro, a firm may struggle to appear for queries centered more than 5-8 miles from their office. In a mid-size city or suburban area, that radius can extend to 15-20 miles. In rural areas, it can be even wider. There is no fixed rule because Google dynamically adjusts based on the number of relevant businesses in the area.
For service area businesses that serve clients across a region but operate from a single office, the distance factor works differently. Google shows service area businesses in results based on the service area defined in their GBP, not solely based on the office address. But the office address still anchors the listing, and firms further from the query center need proportionally stronger relevance and prominence signals to compensate.
The Diversity Factor Nobody Talks About
Here is something Google will not tell you directly: the map pack avoids redundancy. It does not want to show three personal injury firms from the same office park. Or three listings from the same firm with different GBP profiles. Or three listings that are so similar they offer the searcher no real choice.
This is called the diversity update, and while Google has never published a detailed explanation of it, the behavior is well documented by local SEO practitioners. When multiple firms in close physical proximity target the same queries with similar categories, Google tends to suppress some in favor of showing geographic diversity. The practical effect: if your firm is in a legal office complex with five other law firms all optimized for “personal injury lawyer,” the map pack is more likely to show one firm from your complex and two from other parts of the city.
Practice area specificity interacts with diversity in an important way. If three nearby firms all have “Personal Injury Attorney” as their primary category, Google may filter based on diversity. But if one of those firms has “Motorcycle Accident Lawyer” as a primary category and the query is specifically about motorcycle accidents, that firm may appear in the pack even when the two generalist firms are filtered. Specificity gives you an angle that bypasses the diversity constraint.
This has direct implications for firms choosing their GBP categories. The more precisely your primary category matches a query, the harder it is for Google to replace you with a competitor in the name of diversity, because you are the most relevant match for that specific search.
What Keeps Firms in the Pack Versus Falling Out
Local pack rankings are volatile. A firm can hold position one for weeks, then drop to position four and disappear from the visible three-pack overnight. Understanding what stabilizes or destabilizes your position is critical.
Review velocity is one of the strongest stability signals. A firm that receives a steady flow of new reviews, even just two or three per month, sends Google a consistent signal that the business is active and generating client interactions. A firm that received 50 reviews in its first year and none in the six months since looks stagnant. Multiple practitioner studies referenced in Whitespark’s local search ranking factor surveys have identified review recency and frequency as among the most important prominence signals.
GBP activity consistency reinforces stability. Firms that post regularly, upload new photos periodically, respond to reviews promptly, and answer Q&A questions maintain what practitioners describe as “profile freshness.” Nobody is gaming anything here. Google’s algorithm interprets a consistently active profile as a signal that the business is operational, engaged, and trustworthy.
Website authority is the stability factor that takes the longest to build and is hardest for competitors to replicate quickly. Google’s own documentation states that “your position in web results is also a factor” in local rankings. A firm with strong organic rankings for its target keywords has a prominence advantage that feeds directly into map pack stability. This is where local SEO and traditional organic SEO overlap, and firms that invest in both tend to hold their map pack positions more reliably than firms that optimize their GBP in isolation.
The combination effect is worth understanding here. A firm with strong reviews, an optimized GBP, and solid organic authority is hard to displace. A firm with only one of those three is perpetually vulnerable to a competitor who improves in the other two.
Do this now: search your primary practice area keyword on Google Maps. Note the three firms in the map pack. For each one, count their reviews, check their last review date, and look at their GBP posting activity. Compare those numbers to yours. The gaps you find — whether in review volume, review recency, or profile activity — are the specific signals you can influence this month.
How Generalist Firms Compete Against Specialists
A five-practice-area firm targeting “personal injury lawyer Austin” is competing against boutique firms whose entire website, review base, and content library is exclusively about personal injury. This is a structural disadvantage, but not an insurmountable one.
Google does favor specificity in category matching. If a boutique firm has “Personal Injury Attorney” as its primary category and nothing else, while a generalist firm has it as a secondary category behind “Law Firm,” the boutique firm has a relevance advantage for personal injury queries. The first adjustment is obvious: if personal injury is your highest-value practice area, make it your primary category regardless of how many other services you offer.
Beyond the GBP itself, the generalist firm needs to build practice-area-specific depth on its website. This means dedicated, comprehensive practice area pages for each focus, supported by blog content that clusters around each practice area’s keyword universe. When Google evaluates prominence, it looks at the website connected to the GBP listing. A generalist firm with a thin personal injury page and fifty pages about estate planning will struggle against a specialist whose entire site reinforces personal injury expertise.
Reviews also matter here. If a generalist firm’s reviews mention family law, estate planning, and real estate transactions, but only two mention personal injury, Google has limited evidence that the firm is a strong match for personal injury queries. Encouraging practice-area-relevant language in reviews, naturally and without scripting, strengthens the relevance signal. When a satisfied personal injury client mentions the type of case in their review, that language feeds Google’s understanding of what your firm does.
The generalist firm’s real advantage is breadth of conversion opportunity. While the specialist wins on relevance for one query type, the generalist can appear in the pack across multiple practice-area queries if each area is properly supported with content, categories, and reviews. The measurement for success here is total leads from all practice areas combined, not just ranking position for a single keyword.
Building competitive local pack presence for a specific practice area typically takes three to six months of consistent optimization, assuming no technical issues or penalties are present. That timeline extends for more competitive markets and compresses for less saturated ones.
The question to ask yourself is not “are we in the map pack” but “which of the three levers — reviews, GBP optimization, or website authority — is weakest for us right now?” Fix the weakest one first. GBP optimization is covered in the Google Business Profile post. Review strategy gets its own deep treatment in our post on how client reviews impact rankings. Ignore either, and the map pack stays out of reach regardless of what else you do.