If your customers come from one catchment area, your visibility on Google is decided mainly by a verified business profile that is correct and maintained. Google names three factors for local results: "Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity." You cannot influence the distance to the person searching, but you can influence relevance and prominence: through complete details, correct hours, real photos, the right category and answered reviews. On top of that, your business carries the same details, factually, everywhere it appears online, because Google merges those sources. And one thing is stated in Google's own help: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." Anyone selling you a better spot on the map is selling something the owner of that map rules out.
I run my business as a solo freelancer with a workforce of AI employees built on Claude, and locally the same rule applies as everywhere else with me: tools measure, I decide. How the concept is built is on Hiring AI Employees, the way into the topic is in Bringing AI to a Small Business. The four stages the local part belongs to are in SEO Basics for Small Businesses; here it is mainly stage three, but in depth. First, briefly, stage one, because many people asking how to get found on Google mean the website itself.
Website first, then the profile: how your site gets onto Google
You do not have to submit your website through some sign-up form. Google's help says: "you usually don't even need to do anything except post your site on the web." Google finds pages mainly through links from pages it already knows. What you can do is five checks, in this order:
- Check whether Google knows your pages. Search Google for
site:yourdomain.com. If results appear, you are in the index. According to Google the list "is not always exhaustive", so it is good for looking, not for counting.
- Set up Search Console and verify ownership. Free, and the precondition for steps three and four; how to do it is in Setting Up Google Search Console.
- Submit your sitemap. Through the Sitemaps report in Search Console. Google calls this "merely a hint": there is no guarantee Google will use the sitemap. According to Google's starter guide a sitemap is not required either.
- Inspect individual pages and request indexing. With the URL Inspection tool in Search Console. There is a daily limit, and according to Google a request does not guarantee that the page will appear in the index.
- Check noindex and robots.txt. A noindex on the page keeps it out of the index. Per Google, robots.txt is not meant for that, and if it blocks a page, Google never even sees that page's noindex.
That leaves the money question. Google writes that it "doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently, or rank it higher". Ads are a separate product and, according to Google, have no effect on your place in the regular search results.
The full technical run is in How to Run an SEO Audit With AI. If your website is found, just not when someone searches nearby, the business profile is the lever. That is what the rest of this post is about.
Why your website is not showing up on Google: the most common causes
Google names the reasons a website gets missed itself. Sorted by how you recognise them:
If the page is indexed but does not appear for the queries that matter to you, check next whether it really answers the question behind the query. That is stage two of the basics post linked above.
Local SEO: where visibility is actually decided
Local visibility is largely maintenance work, not optimisation. A profile with correct opening hours, current photos and answered reviews will usually take you further than fine tuning on the website. What comes first for you is decided by the findings, not by the rule of thumb.
Google states the expectation on the data very plainly: "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results. If your business info isn't accurate, your Business Profile might not show up for relevant searches in your area." A demand on care, not on technology.
How to create and verify a Google Business Profile
The profile costs nothing. Google's help says: "You can add or claim your business at no charge." The steps according to Google:
- Go to business.google.com/add and add your business to Google.
- Follow the on-screen instructions and enter your business details. The address has to be correct and meet Google's guidelines; what that means is in the section on the connection to a place further down.
- Select a verification option and work through the steps.
If an unverified profile for your business already exists, do not create a second one: find it in Google Maps by name and town and claim it there.
You have less choice over verification than many expect: "Verification methods are automatically determined by Google and can't be changed." The help lists phone or text, email, live video call and mail. For the postcard, Google says most codes arrive within 14 days, a code expires after 30 days, and requesting a new one in the meantime invalidates the old one and can make the process longer. After the verification steps, Google reviews the details, according to the help for up to 5 business days, on rare occasions longer.
And because the price question often comes with offers in your inbox: the profile is free, and according to Google a better spot can neither be requested nor bought. The quote is at the start of this post.
What actually counts in your business profile
In its guidance on local ranking, Google names five things you control yourself.
Three fields go wrong most often.
The category. Google's rule of thumb separates surprisingly well: "Select categories that complete the statement: 'This business IS a' rather than 'this business HAS a.'" And: "Use as few categories as possible to describe your overall core business." Anyone picking twelve so as not to miss anything ends up describing nothing.
The name. What is required is the name your business actually goes by: "Your name should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers." So the name on the sign, on the letterhead and on the phone, in one spelling. Marketing taglines, store codes, service or location descriptions and phone numbers in the name field are explicitly not allowed and can lead to suspension.
The opening hours. "Provide your regular customer-facing hours of operation." That includes special hours for public holidays, a quarter of an hour of work once a year. Someone standing at a locked door while Google says "open" writes a review about it.
Holidays and short closures. There are two routes. If you are closed for just a few days, set special hours; your regular hours stay unchanged. According to Google's help that works for up to 6 days in a row. If the business is closed for 7 days or more, or for an unknown period, mark it as "Temporarily closed". The help is not entirely consistent at this boundary: another page gives special hours for "7 days or less". At exactly seven days, either is defensible. Google names one consequence of the label itself: "For broad queries, temporarily-closed businesses can rank after open businesses." For a short holiday, special hours are therefore the better fit.
The connection to a place that Google requires
A profile needs a genuine connection to the location you give: "Create your Business Profile for your actual, real-world location." And further: "P.O. boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations aren't acceptable." Anyone renting an address without working there is explicitly excluded: "If your business rents a physical mailing address but doesn't operate out of that location, also known as a virtual office, that location isn't eligible for a Business Profile."
Three consequences follow.
- If you show your address, it has to be signposted. "Businesses showing their address on Google should maintain permanent fixed signage of their business name at the address." A coworking desk only counts with its own signage, staffed, with customers received there.
- If you travel to the customer, the address has to go. Google's own example: a plumber working from a residential address clears the address and sets a service area instead.
- The service area has a limit. "The boundaries of your profile's overall service area shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based."
If you serve at your own address and travel out as well, both apply: under the guideline the location has to be staffed during its stated hours and able to receive customers.
The same details everywhere, and why differences hurt
Your profile is not the only source Google assembles your business from. Google names three itself: publicly available information such as crawled web content, licensed data from third parties, and users who contribute factual information such as addresses and phone numbers or suggest a correction.
Differences hurt not because some counter drops to zero, but because a contradictory detail can win without anyone asking you. If your legal notice carries the old landline, your contact page the new one and a directory the number of the previous owner, the question is not whether a wrong number reaches people, but which one.
Google's guideline on this is one sentence: "Represent your business as it's consistently represented and recognized in the real world across signage, stationery, and other branding." What is required is factual agreement, not character-identical spelling. Translated into an afternoon's work:
- Write the truth down once. Company name spelled as it is on the sign, the full address, the number someone actually answers, opening hours, website address. A consistent format is what makes differences obvious later. That is your reference sheet.
- Go through the places your business appears, and correct everything to the reference sheet. Your own site including contact, legal notice and footer, the business profile, trade directories, review platforms, social networks, old entries left by some agency. You work through the same list at the next move or number change.
- Put the details on your site as structured data as well. Google describes
LocalBusiness as a format for address, phone number, opening hours and geo coordinates. It belongs on the pages where those details are visible: "Your structured data must be a true representation of the page content."
Step 3 is the only technical one in this post, and even it is not finished once it is in place: validate it with the Rich Results Test and update it as soon as a detail changes. A highlighted appearance in search does not follow from it, Google states plainly that it "does not guarantee that features that consume structured data will show up in search results". Machine-readable, your details are there all the same.
Reviews, and what to do with a bad one
On reviews, Google's local ranking guidance says: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." That is Google's wording, not a promise about a number. Anyone telling you that something happens once you hit thirty reviews made that number up. For replying, Google gives a reason other than ranking: it shows that the feedback matters to you.
What you can control is that replying, once your business is verified. The reply is checked before it goes live, usually minutes, in individual cases up to 30 days according to Google. It appears publicly in the name of the business, not under your personal name, and the author can still change their review afterwards.
With a bad review it helps to separate two cases.
Google draws the line itself: "Do not report a review just because you disagree with it or dislike it." A report that names no policy violation gets rejected, and that time is missing from your reply.
Two routes are forbidden and get sold anyway. Google prohibits merchants from "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers", meaning asking only the happy customers. Incentives for posting, changing or removing a review are prohibited too. What is allowed is the plain route: ask all customers alike for an honest review, without any return favour and without prescribing anything.
Pages for individual towns, if there is genuinely something there
Should I build a page for every town in my area? The question hangs on one condition. A location page pays off if there is something there to write about: a branch, fixed consultation hours, its own team, references from the town. Then the page is an offer.
If there is nothing there, the location page becomes what Google describes as doorway abuse: "Having multiple domain names or pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page." The better route without branches: one strong service page that names the catchment area in running text; for trade businesses I have described that as regional findability without a graveyard of location pages.
What to do monthly, quarterly and yearly
So that maintenance does not turn into a permanent building site, a rhythm helps. This is my maintenance template, not a requirement from Google.
Queries belong in there because the profile only tells half the story: what people type before they land on your site is free to read in Google Search Console.
The employee who measures instead of guessing
The list above is not hard, it is just long, and nobody works through it voluntarily every quarter. So at my place it is a fixed role: Sebastian, my AI employee for SEO and GEO, gets a URL and an objective and measures with real tools instead of from memory: Lighthouse and the PageSpeed Insights API, linkinator for broken links, advertools for crawls, Playwright CLI for fetches and screenshots, plus Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools where access exists. Every raw output lands in a dated project folder, every finding names where it came from. He changes nothing on live websites and submits nothing in third-party accounts: he measures, I decide. For other people's servers my house rule applies: at most one request every three to five seconds, because a test run that is too fast can take a small site down.
The value is in the prioritising: a tool hands you thirty findings, many of them meaningless at your size, and the work is naming the three that fit you. Because a position is not an enquiry, what gets re-measured is what actually arrives: clicks, calls, direction requests. What the tools cost is in SEO Audit Tools Compared.
A second measurement setup is joining it, because more and more people put their question to an AI chat. Whether your pages show up there as a source does not follow from your Google position, it is a metric of its own: What Is Generative Engine Optimization?.
If you would rather build a role like this yourself: the route is in Creating an AI Employee: How to Start. You do not have to think it through alone, the ready-made templates are in the Community, and in the calls we go through roles like this together.
Frequently asked questions
How do I get my business found on Google?
With a verified business profile, complete and accurate details in it, and a website carrying the same. Google names relevance, distance and prominence for local results: distance is a given, relevance comes from complete data. Buying a position is not possible.
How do I get found on Google Maps?
Maps and the local results in Search draw on the same profile. You do not need a second one for the map, you need a maintained one: verified, right category, coherent hours, address or service area, your own photos.
Can I get a bad Google review deleted?
Only if it breaks Google's policies, for instance spam, abuse or published personal information. Simply disagreeing is not a reason to report, according to Google. For an unpleasant but genuine review, the factual public reply is what works, because every later reader reads it alongside.
How long until I get found better?
That cannot be predicted seriously, nobody should give you a date. Google states: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." What you can control is data quality: corrected opening hours work immediately for the person calling, independent of any position.
How do I submit my website to Google?
You do not need a sign-up form: Google usually finds websites by itself, mainly through links. Check with site:yourdomain.com whether your pages are in the index, set up Search Console, submit your sitemap there and request indexing for individual important pages. None of these steps guarantees inclusion, but afterwards you can see where it is stuck.
Does it cost anything to get found on Google?
No. Appearing in the regular search results, Search Console and the business profile are free, and Google states that it takes no money to crawl a site more often or rank it higher. Only ads are paid, and according to Google they have no effect on your place in the regular results.
Why is my website not showing up on Google?
Usually for one of a few reasons Google names itself: the site is new, has few links, sits behind a login, or is blocked for Google, for instance by a noindex after a relaunch or by robots.txt. According to Google it also misses sites now and then, especially small ones. How to recognise each case is in the table under "Why your website is not showing up on Google".
Do I have to show my address in the profile?
Only if customers come to you and your name is signposted on the building. If you work from home and travel to customers, Google requires the opposite: clear the address, set a service area. A rented postal address with no business there is not permitted under the guideline.
Where to go from here
Take twenty minutes for your reference sheet. Then open your business profile and your contact page side by side and check both against it. In most businesses at least one difference turns up: the first real finding, without installing a single tool.
After that, answer the reviews still sitting open, oldest first. If you do not want to do this yourself every quarter, the role gets more interesting than the tool: how my AI employees are built is on Hiring AI Employees, and the ready-made templates are in my Community.
