Compare a Business Location to the City Limits

If a business is located outside of city limits, the Business Profile won’t rank well for queries containing the city name. (Examples here: https://www.sterlingsky.ca/physical-vs-mailing-address/)

Personally, I like to visualize this with a map that shows both the location of the business and the city limits.

Here’s how I create it:

• Spoof my address to the business address using one of my favourite tools, GS Location Changer
• Go to Google Maps
• Search for the city name

Maps will display the city limits. It also shows my “location”—which is the business address—as a blue dot on the map. Here's an example where my location is spoofed to an address just outside the city limits of Lenexa, Kansas.

This is a great illustration to explain things to a client!

Sometimes Maps doesn’t show the blue dot, and I have to refresh or change the zoom until it does. And sometimes I just give up and try again later. There's a problem with this method: sometimes it doesn't work.

Does anyone have a more reliable way to generate this kind of map image?