Why Is My Business Not Showing on Google Maps?

Somewhere between half and most of the trade businesses we look at are invisible on Google Maps, and almost none of them know it. They search their own name, see themselves, and reasonably conclude everything is fine. It is not fine, and the reason is nearly always one of six things.

This is what actually controls whether you appear in the map results, in the order it matters, with the fixes. None of it costs money.

First, check properly

Your own search results are personalised. Google knows your location, your account and every time you have clicked your own listing, so it shows you to yourself. This is why so many businesses think they rank.

To see the truth, search from a phone on mobile data, signed out, or ask somebody who lives on the other side of your patch to search your trade plus their town and tell you what comes up. That result is what your customers see.

1. The listing is not verified

An unverified listing either does not appear or appears weakly, and can be edited by the public. Verification is a postcard, a phone call or, increasingly, a short video showing your premises, your tools and your face.

If you claimed a listing years ago and never finished, this is where you are stuck. Go into the Google Business Profile app, see whether it says verified, and finish it. Nothing else on this list matters until this is done.

2. The category is wrong

Your primary category is the strongest single ranking signal on the whole listing, and it is the one people pick carelessly. A kitchen fitter set to General Contractor is competing in the wrong race entirely.

Pick the most specific primary category that genuinely describes your main work. Then add secondary categories for the rest, but do not add ten, because a listing claiming to do everything convinces Google it does nothing in particular.

3. The address or service area is set up wrong

If customers come to you, publish the address. If you go to them, do not. Register as a service area business, hide the address, and list the towns you actually work in.

Two mistakes cost people real ranking here. The first is publishing a home address, which anchors you to a residential street and tells Google your relevance drops off from your own front door. The second is listing thirty towns because you would drive anywhere. Google discounts an implausible service area. Pick the places you genuinely work and can talk about.

4. The profile is half filled in

A complete profile ranks better than an incomplete one, and completeness is not just fields. It is the whole thing being actively used.

• Every service listed as a separate service item, with a sentence each.
• Hours that are correct, including bank holidays.
• Photographs that are yours, added regularly rather than ten uploaded in 2023.
• The description written for a human, naming what you do and where.
• Questions answered, including the ones you ask and answer yourself, which is allowed and useful.

Most listings we look at have four photographs and no services. Fixing that alone moves people.

5. There are not enough reviews, or nobody replies to them

Review count and review recency both feed the map ranking. A business with forty reviews, the newest from last month, outranks a business with forty reviews that all arrived two years ago.

Replying matters too, and it is free. Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, in your own words. There is no deadline on this and anybody telling you to answer within a fixed number of hours is inventing a rule. What Google responds to is that replies exist and are real.

6. The website behind it is thin or missing

This is the part we can actually help with. Google reads the site your listing points at to decide what you do and where you do it. A listing pointing at a one page site that says welcome, or at a Facebook profile, gives it almost nothing to work with.

A site with a page per service and honest pages about the areas you cover gives Google the vocabulary to match you to searches. It is also what the person clicking through actually lands on, and the map result is wasted if that page does not convince them.

You can see this on Direct Landscaping and Tree Care, which went live this year with the profile set up alongside the build rather than left as an afterthought.

What to do this week

1. Search from somebody else's phone and write down where you actually rank.
2. Check the listing says verified. If not, start verification today.
3. Change the primary category to the most specific accurate one.
4. Fix the address or service area so it matches how you really work.
5. Add every service, correct hours, and ten photographs from your own phone.
6. Ask your last five customers for a review, and reply to every review you already have.

That is a couple of hours of work and it costs nothing. Do it before you spend a penny on advertising, because advertising on top of a broken listing is pouring money through a hole.

Where we come in

We set the Google Business Profile up properly as part of every build, because a site without it is half a job and a listing without a site is the other half. Builds are £395, £650 or £1,200 and you own the result. Care plans are £45, £85 or £150 a month with no minimum term.

If you would rather just see what the site would look like first, we build a real working preview in 48 hours and you owe nothing if you do not want it.

Common questions

Written by Salvo Della Gana, co-founder of SH Studios. He writes the code behind every SH Studios site and keeps the live ones running.