Why your Google Business Profile is not showing

A surprising share of these enquiries turn out not to be a problem at all. Google personalises local results heavily by location, and searching from your own office — or worse, searching your own business name repeatedly — tells you almost nothing about what a customer two miles away sees.

1. 1.Search your business name exactly. If the profile appears, it exists and is not suspended, and the problem is ranking rather than visibility.
2. 2.Check it from a different location, not just a different browser. An incognito window on the same connection is still in the same place.
3. 3.Use the Google Business Profile dashboard rather than a search. If the dashboard shows the profile as published, it is live.
4. 4.Check on mobile as well as desktop. The pack behaves differently and mobile is where most local searches happen.

Work down this list rather than starting with whichever seems most interesting. The order reflects both how common each cause is and how quickly it can be established.

Proximity is the single largest factor in local pack ranking and it is the one nobody wants to hear about, because there is no work you can buy that changes it. Google shows results near the searcher. If your premises are four miles from the town centre, you will not appear for searches made in the town centre, however well optimised the profile is.

This has two practical consequences. The first is that a business checking its own visibility from its own address gets a flattering and useless picture. The second is that "we rank in the map pack" is not a single fact — it is true at some coordinates and false at others, which is why grid-based rank tracking exists and why a single position figure for local search is close to meaningless.

What you can do about it is limited but real: strengthen the other two factors, relevance and prominence, so you win at the edges of your radius where you would otherwise lose. What you cannot do is rank across a city from one address, and anybody promising that is describing something that does not exist.

Suspension is the frightening cause and usually the most fixable, because it nearly always follows something specific and recent. Profiles are rarely suspended at random; they are suspended after a change.

• A recent edit to the business name, address or category — particularly a name edited to include keywords rather than the actual trading name.
• An address that does not look like a real place of business: a virtual office, a mailbox, a co-working desk, or a residential address for a category Google expects to have premises.
• Multiple profiles at the same address, which looks like an attempt to occupy more of the pack.
• A category change into something regulated, which triggers additional checks.
• Adding keywords to the business name. This is the most common single cause and it is worth stating plainly: it is against the guidelines, it is easy to detect, and it gets profiles suspended.

These do not suspend anything. They just stop you appearing, and because nothing looks broken they can persist for months before anybody investigates.

• Hours set to closed, or special hours left over from a bank holiday two months ago. A profile showing as permanently closed disappears from the pack.
• A service area business with the address hidden, when customers actually visit you. Hiding the address removes you from searches near it.
• The primary category set to something adjacent rather than exact. Secondary categories help; the primary one does most of the work.
• Service areas set far too wide, which dilutes relevance rather than extending reach.
• A duplicate profile ranking instead of the one you are looking at, which is why searching the business name matters before anything else.
• The profile marked as permanently closed by a Google user suggestion nobody reviewed.

If the profile is live, verified, correctly categorised and unduplicated, and you still do not appear where you want to, then the honest answer is that you are being out-ranked rather than hidden. That is a different problem and it has a different set of answers.

Relevance and prominence are the two factors you can actually influence. Relevance means the categories, services and description genuinely match what people search. Prominence means reviews, citations, links and how well known the business is generally. Both move slowly and both are worth doing, and neither will overcome a competitor who is simply closer to the searcher.

The strategically useful conclusion is usually to stop trying to win the pack at the centre of a city you are not in, and to win it comprehensively in the area you actually occupy. That is a smaller ambition and a considerably better return.