Why your business does not show up on Google Maps

The map is a different product from the search results

Your website competes in the blue links. Your Google Business Profile competes in the map. They feed each other, but they are ranked differently, and work on one does not automatically move the other. This is why a new website on its own is not a map-pack fix, and anyone telling you otherwise is selling the wrong thing.

Google is broadly weighing three things up there: how close you are to the person searching, how relevant your listing looks for what they typed, and how prominent your business appears across the web. You cannot do anything about the first one. The other two are almost entirely within your control, and most local businesses have barely touched them.

We measured this on ourselves before we said it to anyone else. On a 25-point grid across our own service area we were not in the top three at a single point, while the businesses winning those searches sat an average of 5.7km further away from the centre than we did. Distance was not the difference. Relevance and trust were — and both of those live on the profile, not on the website.

Claim it, and then actually finish it

Search your business name on Google. If a profile already exists — and one often does, generated from old directory data — click “Own this business?” and verify it, usually by video these days. If nothing comes up, create it. Verification can take a few days, and nothing else on this list works until it is done.

Then fill in every field. Not most of them. A half-finished profile is a listing Google has less reason to show, and it reads to a person exactly like a business that might not still be trading.

One primary category, chosen the way people search

This is the single most consequential setting on the profile, and it is the one most often wrong. Pick the category that describes the job somebody is searching for, not your legal description. “Plumber”, not “Contractor”. “Hair Salon”, not “Personal Care”. “Photographer” is fine, but if half your work is weddings, there is a category for that too.

Add secondary categories for the other work you do — they matter less than the primary one, but they cost nothing. If you change the primary category, give it a few weeks before judging the result.

One thing not to do: do not put keywords in your business name. It works for some listings right now and it violates Google's real-world-name policy, which means the downside is a suspension while you appeal — which is zero visibility with no way to fix it in the meantime. The legitimate version of that idea is the Services list, below.

The Services list is free, and mostly empty

Every service you offer, listed individually, with a sentence of description each. It is free, it takes an evening, and it lets you describe work that would never fit in your business name. Most profiles in most local markets leave it blank.

Write them the way a customer would say them, not the way you would invoice them. Somebody types “drain cleaning”, not “hydro-jet lateral service”. If you offer both an emergency call-out and scheduled work, they are two entries, because they are two different searches.

Photos and posts: the part that takes ten minutes a week

• Add 20–30 real photos. Your work, your van, your storefront, your chair, before-and-afters. Taken on a phone is fine — real beats polished here. A profile with one photo looks abandoned, and people do read it that way.
• Post weekly. A finished job, a seasonal reminder, an offer. Two sentences and a photo. It takes five minutes and almost nobody in your market is doing it.
• Answer the questions. The Q&A section is public and anyone can answer it, including people who do not work for you. Seed it with the questions you get on the phone every week and answer them yourself.

None of this is clever. It is just unglamorous, and it is the reason the profiles that win are usually the ones somebody touches regularly rather than the ones belonging to the biggest business.

Reviews are the part nobody wants to hear

If I could only get an owner to do one thing on this page, it would be this. Reviews are visible to the person choosing, they are one of the strongest signals of prominence, and no amount of website work substitutes for them. It is also the item furthest outside a web designer's control — we can build you the link and the message, we cannot make your customers write.

What works: ask in person, while you are still standing there and the job is fresh. Then send the review link by text the same day, because the ask and the link have to arrive close together. Reply to every review, good or difficult, in a sentence or two — the replies are read by the next person deciding, not by the reviewer.

What does not work: buying them, incentivising them, or asking twenty people in one week after a year of silence. All three are visible.

Your name, address and phone — character for character

The same business name, the same phone number in the same format, the same address and the same hours, everywhere your business is listed: the Google profile, your website, Facebook, Instagram, every trade directory you have ever been added to. Google cross-checks them. A mismatch between the profile and the site undermines both.

The usual version of this is an old phone number on a directory nobody remembers signing up to, plus a suite number that appears on some listings and not others. Neither is dramatic alone. Together they are a quiet drag on the thing you are trying to move.

Practical tip: write your name, address, phone and hours in a note on your phone, exactly as they should appear, and copy-paste from that note every single time. That is the whole system.

How long this takes

Movement in local search usually shows between three and six months. Some of it is faster — a corrected primary category or a newly verified profile can change what you appear for within weeks — and some of it is slower, particularly reviews, which arrive at the speed of your actual customers.

Measure it properly or do not measure it at all. Searching your own business name on your own phone tells you nothing: Google knows where you are and what you have searched before. Use a grid tool that checks a set of fixed points around your area, keep the points identical every time, and report the percentage of them where you appear in the top three. Average position is a comfortable number that hides which neighbourhoods you are missing.

What this will not do: none of the above promises you a ranking, and nobody honest will promise you one — Google does not sell placement in the map results and it does not tell anyone the formula. What it does do is remove the reasons your listing is being passed over, which is the only part of it you control.

If you would rather not do it yourself

Everything on this page is free to do and you do not need us for any of it. We manage profiles as part of our packages because most owners genuinely do not have the evening — but if you have the evening, take it, and start with the category and the reviews.

If you want a second pair of eyes on your listing first, book a callback and we will go through it with you on the phone.