Why your Google Business Profile is not showing up

If you are not appearing in the map pack, the cause is almost always one of five things: the profile is unverified, the categories are wrong, the service area is set up incorrectly, you have too few reviews compared to competitors, or you are simply too far from the searcher. They are worth checking in that order, because the first three are free to fix.

First, understand what you are competing in

The map pack — the three businesses with a map above the normal results — is a separate ranking system from ordinary search. Your website matters to it, but less than most people assume. Google is mostly weighing three things: how relevant your profile is to the search, how far you are from the person searching, and how prominent your business appears to be.

That third factor is where reviews live, and it is why a competitor with a worse website can sit above you.

Google weighs three things for local results, and it is worth knowing which is which because only two of them are yours to change. Relevance is how well your profile matches what was typed — categories, services, the description. Distance is how far you are from the person searching. Prominence is how well known the business appears to be, and reviews are the largest visible part of it.

Relevance you fix in an afternoon. Prominence takes months of asking customers properly. Distance you cannot change at all without moving, which is why the rest of this list is ordered the way it is.

1. Is the profile actually verified?

An unverified profile will not rank, and plenty of businesses have one without realising — often a profile Google generated automatically, or one a previous marketer set up and never handed over. Sign in and check it says verified. If someone else controls it, request ownership through Google; it takes a few days but it is straightforward.

2. Your primary category is probably wrong

This is the single most common fixable problem. Your primary category carries far more weight than the secondary ones, and being slightly off costs you badly. An electrician set to “Contractor” instead of “Electrician” will struggle no matter what else is right.

Pick the most specific category that describes your main work, then add secondary categories for everything else you do. Look at what the three businesses currently ranking above you have chosen — it is public information and it tells you what Google associates with that search.

3. Service area set up as a radius

If you go to customers rather than them coming to you, you should be a service-area business with your address hidden and specific suburbs listed. Two mistakes are common: leaving the address visible when you work from home, and setting an enormous service area covering the whole metro.

A huge service area does not make you rank across it. It dilutes relevance. Listing the suburbs you genuinely service consistently outperforms claiming all of Perth.

4. Reviews — the honest bit

If your competitors have forty reviews and you have four, that gap explains a lot. Reviews are the clearest signal of prominence Google has, and there is no shortcut. You have to ask, consistently, at the moment the customer is happiest — which is when you finish the job, not a week later by email.

Ask for something specific rather than just a rating. “Would you mind mentioning the job was in Ellenbrook?” produces reviews containing the words people actually search for, which helps far more than a bare five stars.

The fields almost everyone leaves empty

A half-filled profile competes against fully filled ones. None of this is difficult; it is simply tedious, which is exactly why the businesses above you have often done it and you have not.

• Services. List them individually rather than relying on the category. Each one is a chance to match what somebody actually typed.
• Hours, including public holidays. Wrong hours cost you calls directly, and Google shows a warning on profiles it thinks are stale.
• Photos, added regularly. Real job photos, not stock. Add them as you go rather than in one batch — and take the before shot, which almost nobody does.
• The description. It is not a ranking lever in itself, but it is read by humans deciding whether to call you.
• The answers Google gives for you. Profile Q&A was retired in late 2025; Google now answers questions about your business itself, from the profile, your website and your reviews. Put the answers to the questions customers actually ring up and ask where it can read them.

The same discipline applies to your website: a page for each service and each area you genuinely want work from beats one page listing everything. We keep a short list of suburb pages for that reason rather than forty thin ones.

How to tell whether any of it worked

Change one thing at a time and give it a fortnight. Category changes in particular can move things within days, and if you change five things at once you will never know which one did it.

The performance tab on the profile itself is the honest measure: calls, direction requests and website clicks, not ranking position. Position varies by where the searcher is standing, so checking your own ranking from your own kitchen tells you very little. Calls per month is the number that pays you.

5. Proximity, which you cannot fix

Distance is a genuine ranking factor, so a business based in Joondalup will struggle to appear for someone searching in Fremantle. This is not a fault in your setup, and no amount of SEO overrides it entirely. What you can do is dominate the areas you are actually near, and build real pages for the suburbs you want work in so you compete in normal search where distance matters less.

Things that will not help

• Keyword-stuffing your business name. It is against the guidelines and it gets reported by competitors.
• Creating a second profile for the same address to cover more categories. This is a common suspension trigger.
• Posting daily. Posts are worth doing fortnightly; they are not a ranking lever.
• Buying reviews. It is detectable, and losing the profile costs more than the reviews gain.

If the profile gets suspended

Suspension is more common than people expect and usually follows an edit — a name change, an address change, or adding a second profile. The profile disappears from the map entirely while it is under review, which is why the shortcuts in the previous section are a genuinely bad trade.

If it happens, do not create a new profile. Appeal the existing one and be ready to show that the business exists at the address you claimed: signage, a rates notice, a registration document. Reinstatement takes as long as it takes, and there is no way to speed it up.

The order to work through it

1. Confirm the profile is verified and you control it.
2. Fix the primary category, then add secondaries.
3. Set the service area to real suburbs, not a radius over the whole metro.
4. Fill in every field: services, hours, description, photos.
5. Build a repeatable way to ask for reviews at job completion.
6. Then, and only then, look at the website.

If you would rather not work through it yourself, that sequence is essentially what our Google Business Profile management does, and it is the first month of the wider local SEO service if the website needs work too.

John Ocello

Founder, PC Madness Web Services, Midland WA