Why doesn't my business show up on Google Maps?

You search for what you do, add your town, and three businesses appear in a box above everything else with a little map beside them. You are not one of them. Sometimes you are not on the first page at all.

That box is where most of the phone calls come from. Getting into it is the single highest-value thing most local businesses can do, and a good share of the reasons you are not there are things you can fix yourself today.

Here they are, in the order I would check them.

1. You have not claimed the listing

Google frequently creates a listing for a business before the owner does, assembled from other sources. It exists, it has your name roughly right, and nobody is looking after it. An unclaimed listing almost never wins.

Search for your business name. If a panel appears with “Own this business?” or “Claim this business”, that is your answer and that is your afternoon. It is free. Google verifies you are real, usually by postcard, phone or video, which takes a few days to a couple of weeks.

2. The listing is thin

A claimed but empty listing loses to a claimed and complete one, consistently. Google is choosing which three businesses to show, and it prefers the ones it knows the most about. Fill in everything:

• Every category that genuinely applies, with the most accurate one as your primary
• Hours, including holiday hours, kept actually current
• Services or products, individually listed rather than lumped together
• A description written for a person
• Real photographs — the front of the building, the inside, the team, the work
• Whether you serve customers at your address, travel to them, or both

The photographs matter more than people expect. They are also how somebody decides they have the right place when they pull up outside.

3. Your details do not match everywhere else

Google cross-checks your name, address and phone number against everywhere else they appear — directories, your website, review sites, an old listing from a previous address. When those disagree, it becomes less confident it knows who and where you are, and confidence is what it is ranking on.

The usual culprits: a suite number present in one place and missing in another, an old phone number on a directory nobody has looked at in years, “St” against “Street”, a business name with “LLC” on one and not the other. Pick one exact spelling of everything and make the world agree with it. This is tedious and it works.

4. You are outside the area you are searching from

This is the one that surprises people most. There is no single ranking. The map results change depending on where the person searching is standing. If you are searching from your kitchen three towns over, you are not seeing what a customer in your actual service area sees.

Businesses near the centre of a town tend to appear for searches around that centre. If you are on the edge, you may rank well for people nearby and not at all for people across town, and both things are true at once. Before you conclude you are invisible, check from somewhere a real customer would be.

5. You have few reviews, or they arrive in bursts

Reviews are a real factor — how many, how good, how recent, and whether you reply.

The way to get them is unglamorous: ask every customer, shortly after you have done the work, with a link that takes one tap. Not a campaign. A habit.

Two things to avoid, and I mean genuinely avoid rather than “be careful with”:

Do not buy reviews. They get detected, they get removed, and it can take your listing with them.

Do not ask only the customers you think are happy. Filtering people by how satisfied they seem before deciding whether to ask — sometimes sold as “review gating” — is prohibited by the Federal Trade Commission’s rule on consumer reviews, which took effect in October 2024, and it breaches Google’s own policies besides. Ask everybody or ask nobody. If you are paying somebody to handle reviews for you, ask them in writing which one they do, because you are the one answerable for it.

6. Somebody else’s listing is sitting on top of yours

Duplicate listings — from a move, a rebrand, a previous owner, or Google generating one it forgot to merge — split your signals in half and confuse everything. Search your business name and your address separately and see what comes back. Duplicates can be reported and merged.

What actually moves it, and how long it takes

The honest answer is weeks to months, not days. Verification alone can take a fortnight. Consistency across the web takes time to be re-crawled. Reviews accumulate at the speed of your actual customers.

Anybody quoting you a position or a date is either guessing or selling. Nobody can guarantee a rank on Google. Not me, not an agency, not the person who cold-called you. What can be done is to make you the most complete, most consistent and most obviously real answer to the question — and then the ranking is what it is.

What to do this week

1. Claim the listing if you have not.
2. Fill in every field, add real photographs.
3. Pick one exact spelling of your name, address and phone, and fix the three worst places it is wrong.
4. Start asking every customer for a review. Every one.
5. Search from somewhere a real customer would be, and see what actually comes back.

That list is free, it is most of the work, and I would rather you did it yourself than paid anyone for it — including me.

If you get through it and still are not showing up, that is the point where it is worth someone looking properly at what is different between you and the three businesses above you. Tell me what you have tried and I will tell you what I would look at next.