Why is my business not showing on Google Maps?

Two different things get called "showing up on Google", and almost every argument about local SEO comes from mixing them up.

• The map results — the little map with three businesses pinned under it. These come from Google Business Profile, which is a separate Google product. Your website is not what appears there.
• The ordinary blue links below it. These come from your website.

They influence each other, and they fail for different reasons. Work out which one you are missing from before changing anything, because the fixes have almost nothing in common.

If you are missing from the map results

This is a Business Profile problem, and your website cannot solve it directly. Work down this list.

1. Is the profile claimed and verified?

An unverified profile is barely visible. Verification is done by Google — by postcard, phone, email or video depending on the business type — and there is no way around it. If you have never been through it, this is almost certainly your answer.

2. Is it suspended?

Suspensions happen, often for things that feel arbitrary: an address change, a category change, a virtual office, a name that includes keywords rather than your actual trading name. Google does not always email you. Sign in and look.

3. Is the primary category right?

The primary category does more than anything else you control on the profile. "Plumber" and "Bathroom remodeler" surface for different searches. Pick the one that names what you mainly do, and use secondary categories for the rest.

4. Are you searching from inside your own service area?

Map results are heavily distance-based. Searching from home, five towns away, and concluding you do not rank is a common false alarm. So is searching repeatedly for your own business — Google personalises what it shows you.

5. Do you have reviews, and have you replied to them?

Review count and recency genuinely influence which businesses appear. Nothing about your website substitutes for this.

What your website actually contributes

Your site does not appear in the map pack. It does three things that support the profile, and they are the parts SEOPert can check.

The details have to agree

Your name, address and phone number are how software works out that a mention of you somewhere else is the same business. If your profile says one number and your footer says another, you have weakened the connection between them — and confused a visitor who cannot tell which is current.

This is the single most common fault we find on local sites, and it is almost always accidental: an old number survives in the footer, or on a contact page nobody edits.

Why your details have to agree →

The site has to say, in machine-readable form, what it is

LocalBusiness structured data states your name, address, phone and hours directly rather than leaving them to be inferred from the page. It is not a ranking factor you can point at, and it costs a few lines — which is a better trade than most things sold as local SEO.

What to add, and what not to claim →

It has to work on a phone

Local searches are overwhelmingly mobile, by somebody fairly close to deciding. A number they cannot tap, a page that loads slowly on mobile data, an address they have to copy by hand — each one loses a share of people who were ready to call.

Making the number tappable → · Mobile speed →

The page-per-town question

Nearly every local SEO guide tells you to build a page for each town you serve. Google's own documentation names large sets of near-identical pages as scaled content abuse.

Both are true. The difference is not how many pages you have — it is whether each one says something a person in that town needed to know. A page with a real address, real staff, real photographs and real prices for that location is a location page. Thirty pages generated from one template with the name swapped are doorway pages, and the risk is not that they fail to rank but that they drag the rest of the site down with them.

Where the line is →

What we cannot check, and will not pretend to

SEOPert reads websites. A Business Profile lives on Google's servers, and no crawler can see it. So we cannot tell you whether your profile is verified, suspended, miscategorised or out of date — and any tool claiming to audit your Google Business Profile from your domain alone is either using a paid Google API or guessing.

What we can tell you is whether your website is holding up its end: whether the details agree, whether the markup is there, whether a visitor on a phone can call you in one tap. That is a smaller claim than "we will get you in the map pack", and it is one we can actually stand behind.

A sensible order to work in

1. Claim and verify the Business Profile. Nothing else matters until this is done.
2. Set the primary category correctly, and fill in hours, service area and photographs.
3. Make your website's name, address and phone match the profile exactly.
4. Add LocalBusiness structured data with those same details.
5. Ask satisfied customers for reviews, and reply to them.
6. Only then worry about content, pages and links.

Steps 3 and 4 are the ones an audit can check for you. Run the free one below — if your site looks like a local business, it now checks all of this and tells you which parts are missing.