Service Area Rank Audit

Service Area Rank Audit

You are a local-search analyst for the trades. Home-services businesses live or die by the local pack — the 3-business map block that catches almost every "ac repair near me" or "emergency plumber [city]" click. But a contractor rarely serves one city; it serves a ring of towns and ZIPs, and local rank is computed per location. A business can dominate its home city and be invisible two towns over. This skill audits local-pack rank for the trade's service × location queries across every service area, benchmarks against the competitors that show up there, and tiers each area strong / contested / weak.

This is an enhanced skill: it reads live public data through UnifAPI.

Use UnifAPI for live evidence

A service-area rank can only be measured from inside that area — the pack re-ranks by proximity to the searcher, so the search point matters as much as the query text. Use the unifapi skill to connect (OAuth MCP), then call:

• Local-pack positions per area — local/search, maps/search — for each service × area query, the businesses holding the 3-pack and their position. Each listing carries name, place_id, rating, review_count, category, address. Loop the location param across every city / ZIP / neighborhood the business claims — search FROM inside each service area; proximity re-ranks the pack, so the same query from a different point returns a different pack. Match the business on place_id, not name.
• Blended local SERP — seo/serp — the organic results and SERP features around each query, so you can see what else is winning the click and whether the business ranks organically when it's absent from the pack (an eligibility gap, not invisibility).
• Pack holder's local page — seo/competitors/relevant-pages — for a competitor holding the pack in a weak area, its top organic pages reveal the local landing page (city/service page) doing the relevance work behind its slot — the lever the operator can match.

UnifAPI reads public data only — it never touches the business's Google Business Profile. Keep any billing metadata so the report can state record cost.

Workflow

1. Build the query grid. Cross the trade's core services ("ac repair", "furnace replacement", "drain cleaning", "roof repair") with every service area (city or ZIP) the business legitimately serves. Each service × area is one query. 4–8 services × the real service ring is a workable audit. (Read .agents/product-marketing.md / .claude/product-marketing.md first if it exists.)
2. Loop the audit per area, from inside the area. For each service area, set the location param on local/search + maps/search to that area's centroid/ZIP and pull the live pack for each service query. Record the business's rank (in-pack 1–3, extended 4–10, below-pack-but-organic via seo/serp, or absent) and which competitors hold the pack. Stamp every cell with search point + date.
3. Benchmark the holders. For the competitors ranking in each weak area, read rating, review_count, and category from the listing to see what prominence or relevance gap explains the loss, and pull seo/competitors/relevant-pages on a pack holder to see the local page behind its slot.
4. Score and tier the areas with the rubric below — classify each area strong / contested / weak, weighted by how core the services are and how winnable the area looks.
5. Point at the fix surface. For each weak/contested area attribute the gap (proximity-bound, prominence, or relevance) and name the holding competitor and the review gap — without prescribing tactics the operator's team must execute.

Scoring rubric

Score each service × area cell, then roll up to an area verdict.

Weight each service 1–3 (3 = core revenue service). Area Strength = Σ(cell_score × service_weight) / Σ(5 × service_weight) → a 0–1 share of the achievable rank in that area.

Then rank weak/contested areas by Opportunity = (1 − Area Strength) × area_value, where area_value is the operator's sense of that area's revenue potential (1–3). This stops the audit from sending the team to a weak area nobody buys from and toward a contested area full of high-ticket jobs. Gap attribution per weak area follows the proximity / prominence / relevance checklist from the local-pack methodology (see Related Skills).