Why isn't my business showing on Google Maps?

If your phone has gone quiet and you can’t find yourself on Google Maps, the fix depends entirely on which of two problems you have. So before changing anything, find out which one it is. It takes two minutes.

The two-minute test

Open Google Maps on your phone and do two searches.

1. Search your exact business name. Type it the way it appears on your vans or invoices.
2. Search what a customer would type. Your trade and your town: “tree surgeon Swindon”, “rubbish removal Chippenham”, “driveway cleaning near me”.

Then look at what happened.

• You don’t come up, even for your own name. Google isn’t showing your profile at all. Go to reasons 1 to 5.
• You come up for your name, but not for your trade. Your profile is live and working. Google is simply ranking other firms above you. Go to reasons 6 to 9.

One thing to know before you search: Google Maps results depend on where the person searching is standing. If you search from your house on the edge of town, you’ll see a different list to a customer in the middle of it. To see what customers see, search with your phone’s location off, or add the town to the search.

If you don’t show up, even for your name

1. Your profile isn’t verified

Google’s own words: “Only verified businesses can show their business info on Maps and Search.” Sign in to your Business Profile on the account you set it up with. If it asks you to verify, do that first. Nothing else on this page matters until you have.

If you can’t remember which Google account you used, or someone else set it up years ago, you can request access to the profile from Google.

2. Your profile has been suspended

If your profile breaks Google’s rules, Google says it “becomes disabled or suspended and won’t show to other users on Google until you resolve the issue”. You’ll see a warning when you sign in, and Google tells the account that manages the profile.

The rules trades break most often:

• Words added to the business name. “Smith Plumbing Swindon Boiler Repairs 24/7” is not allowed. Google says unnecessary information in the name “could result in the suspension of your Business Profile”. Use your real trading name, nothing else.
• Showing a home address when customers don’t come to you. If you go to your customers, Google says you “should hide your business address”. Showing your home as a premises when nobody visits it goes against that.
• More than one profile for the same business. Google’s rule is one profile per location.

To fix a suspension: correct whatever broke the rule, then ask Google to reinstate the profile through the Business Profile help pages. Don’t create a new profile to get round it. A second profile is another breach and makes things worse.

3. It’s brand new, or you’ve just changed it

Google’s help pages say edits “can take up to three days to appear” and that “rankings for new businesses can take up to a month to appear in search results”. If you verified last week, give it time. If you changed your name, address or category recently, the profile can drop out while Google checks the change.

4. There are two listings for your business

Duplicates are more common than you’d think: an old listing someone else made, one from a previous address, one set up by a supplier or a directory. They split your reviews, confuse Google about which one is real, and can send customers to a number that no longer works.

In August 2026, working with one tree surgery firm, we found a second listing under almost the same name sitting on Google with no reviews and a phone number that went nowhere.

Search Google Maps for every version of your name, your old phone numbers and your old addresses. If you find a duplicate, use “Suggest an edit” on it and report it as a duplicate or closed, or ask Google to merge or remove it through the help pages.

5. Your address is hidden and your areas are wrong

If you’ve hidden your address (which is right for most trades), Google shows you to people in the areas you’ve set as your service area. If those areas are wrong or missing, you can vanish from the places you actually work.

Google’s guidance is that your service area “shouldn’t extend farther than about two hours of driving time from where your business is based”. Set the towns you genuinely cover. Listing fifty towns doesn’t help: you’ll still mostly show near where you’re based.

If you show for your name but not for your trade

Good news: your profile is live. Now it’s a ranking problem, and Google is open about how ranking works. Its help pages say local results are based on three things:

• Relevance: “how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for”
• Distance: “how far each business is from the customer who’s searching”
• Prominence: “how well-known a business is”, which includes reviews, ratings and how many websites link to your business

Google also says plainly: “There’s no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google.” Anyone selling you a guaranteed spot on Maps is selling something Google itself says doesn’t exist.

6. The person searching is closer to someone else

Distance is the one people underestimate most. Here’s a real example.

What we have seen

Luke and Dan’s, a tree surgery firm we work with, had 5.0 stars from 91 Google reviews. When we checked “tree surgeon Swindon” in August 2026, they still ranked below four Swindon firms, one of them with a third of their reviews and the same category. The reason wasn’t their profile: every firm above them had a Swindon address, and Luke and Dan’s are based in Royal Wootton Bassett, about six miles out. In their own town they were 1st of 17 for “tree surgeon” when we checked on 19 September 2026. Read their case study.

What to do about it:

• Win your own town on Maps first. That’s where distance works for you.
• Never fake an address in a town you want to rank in. It breaks Google’s rules, profiles get suspended for it, and getting back is slow.
• Use your website for the towns further out. The normal search results under the map aren’t tied to distance the way the map is. A page on your site about the work you do in the next town over can be found there, even when the map can’t.

7. Your category doesn’t match the search

Your primary category is the strongest relevance signal you control. If you’re a tree surgeon listed as “Landscaper”, Google will be slow to show you for “tree surgeon”.

Google’s advice is to use “as few categories as possible” and pick ones that complete the sentence “This business IS a…”, not “This business HAS a…”. Put your main trade as the primary category, then add a few genuine secondary ones. If you deliberately don’t want a type of work, don’t add its category: you’ll get the enquiries.

8. The firms above you have more, and newer, reviews

Google says “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business’s local ranking”. In practice, the gap that matters is the one between you and the firms showing above you, not some magic number.

What we have seen

When we started with Swindon Transport & Recovery on 29 September 2026, the recovery firms already showing on Maps had between 59 and 425 Google reviews each. Swindon Transport & Recovery had none. Read their case study.

Ask every happy customer, every time, the day you finish the job. We’ve written a full guide to getting more Google reviews without begging, with the exact text to send.

9. Your website doesn’t back your profile up

Your website tells Google what you do and where, which helps relevance, and prominence counts how many other websites link to your business. A profile pointing at no website, a broken one, or a one-page site that never says your trade and your towns is giving Google very little to go on.

Your site should say, in plain words on the first screen, what you do and where you do it, and have a page for each main service. For A.P. Berrystone (a family firm: Adrian Berrystone is Tyler’s dad), 17 of his last 24 enquiries before 11 September 2026 came through his website forms. Read his case study.

What to do this week

1. Do the two-minute test above, from a customer’s location.
2. Sign in to your Business Profile. Check for a verification prompt or a suspension warning.
3. Search for duplicate listings under old names, numbers and addresses. Report or merge them.
4. Check your business name is your real trading name, with nothing added.
5. If customers don’t come to you, hide your address and set the towns you genuinely cover.
6. Check your primary category is your main trade.
7. Start asking every customer for a review, the same day you finish.
8. Make sure your profile links to a website that says your trade and your towns.

Most of these take ten minutes each. Done properly, they fix the large majority of “I’m not on Google Maps” problems.

How we fix this for trades

This is the “found” part of what we do. When we take on a trade, we start by measuring where they really stand: Google’s own list for their trade in their town, checked from the same point each time, and the numbers from their Business Profile. Then we fix the profile, set up the review asks, and build or rebuild the website so it backs the profile up. Then we check the same searches again the same way, so you can see what’s moved and when.

We don’t promise positions: Google says there’s no way to request or pay for a better one. What we can show you is exactly where you sit today and what we would fix first, and the free check does that in about a minute. Every case study on our site starts with the same measurements: see the work.