Why Your Business Isn't Appearing on Google

You've typed your own business name into Google and got nothing. Or you've searched for what you do, scrolled past six competitors and still can't find yourself. It's an annoying feeling, and it usually comes down to one of about eight things. Most of them take an afternoon to sort out.

Before you change anything, it's worth working out which problem you've actually got. They look the same from the outside and they have completely different fixes.

First: what do you mean by "not showing up"?

There are four very different situations here.

• You can't find your business at all, even searching your exact business name. That's usually a profile that doesn't exist yet or was never verified (cause 1 below).
• Your profile exists but you're not on the map. Usually verification, a missing category, or you're searching from outside your own area (causes 1, 2 and 7).
• You turn up for your business name, but not for your service. This is a very common one. Google knows you exist, it just doesn't know what you do well enough to put you in front of someone searching "blocked drains" (causes 2 and 3).
• You turn up, but everyone else is above you. That's usually competition rather than a fault (causes 4, 5 and 6).

Work out which one you're looking at, then read the matching section. The rest probably doesn't apply to you.

1. You haven't got a Google Business Profile yet

This is a common reason, and the easiest fix. A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts you on the map and in the panel beside the search results. Without one, a local business is hard to find on Google, however good the work is.

Two things trip people up:

• It's never been claimed. Sometimes a listing already exists (created automatically or by a customer), and nobody's ever taken control of it.
• It was started but never verified. Google needs to confirm you're really you, by postcard, phone or video. Until that's done, the profile essentially doesn't count. This is where plenty of people stop.

Once it's verified, fill in the lot: category, contact details, hours, services, service areas, photos. Our guide on how to get your business on Google walks through it step by step.

2. Google hasn't got enough to go on

Google works out what you do by reading what it can find about you. If the only thing it can find is a business name and a phone number, there's not much to read.

It's trying to work out four things:

• What you do
• Where you work
• Which services you offer
• Who you do it for

If those four are spelled out clearly on your profile and your website, you're a much better match for the right searches. If they're vague, you're a weak match for everything.

The usual gap is the services list. "Electrical" isn't a service. Switchboard upgrades, safety switches, ceiling fans and EV charger installs are four services, and each one is something a customer actually types.

3. Your website doesn't say what you do

Have a look at your homepage and read the first thing on it. If it says something like "Quality. Reliability. Excellence.", that reads well and tells nobody anything: not a customer, and not Google.

"Local electrician in Adelaide" is less poetic and far more useful. It answers the two questions most people landing on the page are asking.

To be clear, cramming words in won't help. Stuffing "Adelaide electrician" into every sentence just makes the page unpleasant to read. What helps is the page being honest and specific about the trade, the area and the services, in the words normal people use.

4. Your business is new

If you started three months ago and you're up against outfits that have been going twenty years, you're not doing anything wrong. Google looks at how established a business seems, and that genuinely takes time to build: reviews accumulate, the website gets older, people start mentioning you.

Nobody can tell you how long. A new profile can start appearing fairly quickly for your own business name and take considerably longer for competitive service searches. Anyone giving you a specific timeframe is making it up.

What you can do in the meantime is make sure everything in causes 1, 2 and 3 is sorted, so that when the prominence does build, it's building on something solid.

5. You haven't got many reviews yet

Reviews make you look good to customers, and they do more than that. A steady trickle of genuine ones is part of how established your business looks, and that feeds into which businesses Google puts forward for a local search.

If you've got two reviews and the three businesses above you have forty each, that's part of the gap. It's also a very fixable part, because you've probably done good work for people who'd happily say so. They've just never been asked.

• Ask on the day, while the job's fresh and they're happy.
• Text them the direct review link. Nobody goes hunting for it.
• Reply to every one, good or bad.
• Never buy them and never offer a discount for them. It can get found out.

Ten honest reviews are worth more than fifty suspicious ones, and there's no number you need to hit. Keep them steady and real.

6. Your competitors are simply further along

Have a proper look at whoever's above you. Often they've got some combination of:

• More genuine reviews, and more recent ones
• A profile that's completely filled in, with real photos
• A website that's been there for years
• Separate pages for each service rather than one page listing everything
• Clearer information about the areas they cover

None of that is out of reach. It's just a list of things they've done and you haven't yet. Pick them off one at a time. Our five simple ways to show up better on Google is basically that list in order, and there's a longer piece on what to do when a competitor ranks above you if that's the bit that's bugging you.

7. You're searching from the wrong place

This one catches a lot of people out, and it isn't a fault at all.

Local results change depending on where the person searching is standing. Search from your own workshop and you'll probably see yourself. Search from a customer's suburb twenty minutes away and you might not. Search from another city and you probably won't.

So before you conclude you've disappeared: search from the middle of the area you actually work in, and check what a real customer would see rather than what you see from your kitchen table. Distance is one of the main things Google says it weighs up, along with how well you match the search and how established you look.

That's covered properly in how Google Maps works for tradies, which is worth a read if most of your work is local.

8. Your details don't match across the internet

Google finds your business in a lot of places: your profile, your website, Facebook, old directory listings, that trade association page from 2018. When those disagree, it has to pick one, and it doesn't always pick right.

Common culprits:

• A trading name in one place and the registered business name in another
• An old mobile number on a listing you'd forgotten existed
• An address from before you moved
• A website URL that now goes nowhere

Google your own business name and work through whatever comes back. It's dull, it takes about half an hour, and it costs nothing.

Quick things to check

Run down this list. Anything you can't tick is worth a look.

Don't panic if you can't find yourself

Before you conclude anything is broken, know that there isn't one fixed list of Google results that everybody sees. What comes back changes depending on:

• Where the person is searching from: a big one for local trades
• The exact words they typed: "plumber" and "emergency plumber near me" are different searches with different results
• How busy your category is in that particular area
• How well your information matches what they asked for
• How established your business looks compared with the others nearby

So searching your own business once, from your own kitchen table, on your own phone, only tells you what one search looked like in one spot. Plenty of businesses panic over a result their actual customers never see.

Check from the middle of the area you work in, try the words a customer would use rather than your business name, and judge it over weeks rather than refreshing it on a Tuesday afternoon.

One last thing: Search and Maps aren't the same

They're connected but not identical. Your Google Business Profile feeds both, so fixing the profile helps both. The map leans much more on distance, though, which is why you can sit comfortably in the normal results and still be missing from the map two suburbs over.

If you're mainly worried about the map, the Maps article explains what it's weighing up.

If you'd rather not deal with it

Causes 1, 5, 7 and 8 are genuinely DIY: an afternoon of your time, and you shouldn't pay anyone a monthly fee for them.

Causes 2, 3 and 6 mostly come back to the website, which is where plenty of people run out of road. It's another job on a list that's already too long, and the quotes come back at three or four grand.

That's what ONYA is for. We build the site, and you pay monthly instead of copping the bill upfront. Your web address set-up (you buy the domain, about $20–$50, in your name), hosting and ongoing care are included. It's $0 upfront, from $49/month, and usually live within 7 days of getting your photos and details.

Have a look at how it works or our example sites (two real client sites, the rest concepts), and if it makes sense, tell us what you do and we'll sort the rest.