Why is my business not showing up on Google?
You know the business exists. Your customers know it exists. Google, apparently, does not. You search your own trade and suburb, scroll past competitor after competitor, and find yourself nowhere. Before you conclude search is rigged, run through the usual suspects, because this problem is almost always one of a handful of fixable things.
Suspect one: there is nothing for Google to find
Search engines rank pages. If your business has no page, a Facebook profile you last touched in 2023, or a website with three sentences on it, there is simply not enough material to rank. The fix is a complete, public page that states your trade, your services and your suburbs in plain words. A free Soho’s listing does this in an afternoon, on a directory Google already crawls daily, which is considerably faster than waiting for a new website to earn attention.
Suspect two: the page never says what you do or where
This one is everywhere. The page exists but says “quality solutions delivered with integrity” instead of “electrician in Wollongong”. Google matches search words to page words. If nobody typed your slogan, nobody found your page. Name the trade. Name the suburbs. Name the services, one by one, in the words a customer would use.
Suspect three: your details disagree with each other
An old phone number on one directory, a former address on another, two spellings of the business name. Inconsistency reads as unreliability to a search engine trying to confirm you are real. Sweep your online mentions once and make name, number and area identical everywhere.
Suspect four: no signs of life
A page untouched for years, zero reviews, no photos: Google has little evidence anyone would want this result. Recent reviews and fresh photos are ranking signals precisely because they are proof of a living business. Two reviews a month and a few photos per job, sustained, will do more than any trick a cold caller sells you.
What not to do
Do not pay anyone who rang you promising page one. Do not stuff keywords into sentences until they read like a ransom note. The boring fundamentals above are the actual mechanism, and they are all free.
Give Google something to rank
A complete Soho’s listing states what you do and where, on a page built to be found.
