Why can nobody find my business on Google?

First, check you are actually invisible

Search your own business name in a private browsing window. If you appear, you are not invisible, you are missing the searches for what you *do* rather than who you *are*, which is a different and much more common problem.

Then search what a customer would type: your service and your town. Note honestly who appears, because those are your actual competitors in search, and they are frequently not the businesses you consider competitors in real life.

Search on a phone as well as a laptop. The results differ, and your customers are mostly on the phone.

Step one: your Google Business Profile

This is the free listing that produces the map results and the panel on the right of a search. For a local business it is usually worth more than the website, and it is the single most neglected thing we encounter.

Claim it if you have not. Then complete all of it, because completeness is itself a factor: exact categories, hours including bank holidays, service area, real photographs of the actual premises and work, and the services you offer written out. Post to it occasionally, it is not a social network, but an entirely dormant profile is treated as one that may be out of date.

The category field deserves particular care. Choosing "restaurant" when you are specifically a "Thai restaurant" quietly removes you from a large set of searches.

Step two: be the same business everywhere

Your business name, address and phone number should appear character-for-character identically everywhere they exist online: your site, your Google profile, Facebook, directories, industry listings, anywhere you were listed years ago and forgot.

"Street" in one place and "St" in another, or an old mobile number on a directory you have not thought about since 2019, makes it harder for a search engine to be confident that these are all the same business. Confidence is precisely what it is trying to establish before showing you to somebody nearby.

This is tedious and free, and it is the second most valuable hour you can spend.

Step three: reviews

Review count and recency affect both where you appear in local results and whether anyone chooses you once they can see you. Most of the businesses we speak to have years of satisfied customers and almost no reviews, for the single reason that nobody ever asks.

Ask, and make it take one tap: a short link, a QR code on the invoice, a message after the job. Ask soon after the work, while the customer still feels how it went. Reply to all of them including the unhappy ones; a measured reply to a bad review reads better to a stranger than no bad reviews at all.

Never buy reviews. They are detectable, they get removed, and the penalty is worse than the problem you were solving.

Then, and only then, the website

Once the free work is done, these are the site-side things that matter for being found locally.

• A page for each service you actually want to be found for, rather than one page listing all of them
• Your town and area written naturally in the copy, because that is what people type, and not stuffed in repeatedly, which is both obvious and counterproductive
• The same name, address and phone number as everywhere else, in text rather than inside an image
• Page titles that describe the service and the place, not "Home" and "Services"
• A site that loads quickly on a phone, since that is where local searches happen
• Structured data marking up your business details, so search engines can read them without guessing

How long any of this takes

Business Profile changes can show within days, sometimes hours. This is the fastest lever available and another reason to start there.

Consistency and citation work takes weeks to be noticed. Reviews accumulate at whatever rate you ask. Website changes typically show over one to three months, longer on a brand new domain with no history.

Anyone promising you first place next week is describing a search nobody performs.

When to pay somebody

Do the three free steps yourself first. They are genuinely free, they are the largest part of the return for most local businesses, and paying an agency to fill in your opening hours is a poor use of money.

It becomes worth paying when you have done that and are still not appearing for the terms that matter; when your market is competitive enough that everybody has already done the basics; or when the website itself is the bottleneck: too slow, too thin, or structured so that no page targets what people search for.

What you should not pay for: a twelve-month lock-in, a guarantee of position one, or a monthly report full of rankings for terms that bring nobody who buys anything.

Common questions

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