Distance is fixed, and it sets a realistic radius
Distance is measured from wherever the searcher is. You can't change it, which means there is a radius beyond which you will not appear for generic searches no matter what you do. A restaurant four miles out is not going to beat a comparable one two blocks away for someone standing downtown.
This is worth knowing because it reframes the goal. You're not trying to rank everywhere. You're trying to be the obvious answer inside the area people would realistically travel from, and to win the searches where intent is specific enough that distance matters less.
Relevance is what you control most directly
Relevance is how well your profile and website match what was searched. Categories do most of this work, attributes and menu items do the rest, and your website reinforces it.
A restaurant that serves ramen but has nothing on the profile or site saying ramen is relying on Google to infer it from reviews. Sometimes it does. It's a bad thing to leave to chance.
Prominence is reviews, links and mentions
Prominence is how well-known Google thinks you are, assembled from reviews, links, press, directory listings and general web presence. It's the slowest to move and the hardest for a competitor to copy.
For restaurants, reviews carry most of it — and the pattern matters more than the total. A place with four hundred reviews and none in six months reads differently from one with ninety that arrive steadily. Velocity and recency are doing real work.
Why the place further away outranks you
When a restaurant beats you from further out, it's almost always prominence, and usually reviews specifically. Occasionally it's category — they're set to something more specific and you're set to something generic.
Check both before assuming it's something more complicated. Those two explain the large majority of map-pack results that look wrong.
What genuinely doesn't work
Keyword-stuffing the business name, creating extra profiles, buying reviews, and asking only happy customers to leave one. That last is called review gating, it violates Google's policy, and platforms that do it on your behalf put your profile at risk.
The legitimate version is asking everyone, consistently, at the moment the experience was good. That's slower and it works.