How to get your small business found on Google

The three ways people find you

Strip away everything complicated and there are only three routes to a small business online. Somebody was given your name and looked you up. Somebody followed a link from somewhere else. Or somebody searched for the thing you do and found you among the results.

The first is the most common and the one businesses think about least. A friend recommends you, and before ringing, that person searches your business name to see if you look real. You are not competing with anybody at this point. You are simply being checked. Losing here is silent and expensive, because nobody rings to say they went elsewhere.

The second brings a steady trickle: your listing in a trade directory, a mention in a local group, a supplier who links to you, a social profile. Each one is a small door into your business.

The third is the one people mean when they talk about being found, and it is where growth lives. Somebody types “electrician near me” or “italian restaurant in Bath” with no particular business in mind, and whoever appears gets the chance. That is the route this guide is mostly about, because it is the one you can influence most.

How search actually works

You do not need the detail, but the shape of it explains why the advice further down is the advice.

Search engines run programs, usually called crawlers, that follow links from page to page across the internet and read what they find. Everything they read goes into an enormous index, which works like the index at the back of a book except that it covers every page they have ever seen. When somebody searches, the engine looks in that index for pages that appear to match, and orders them by which it thinks is the best answer for that person, in that place, at that moment.

There is a fuller explanation of the machinery in the guide to what a website actually is, and Google publishes its own account of how search works if you want it from the source. Three things follow from it, and between them they are most of what a small business needs to know.

1. You have to be readable. Crawlers read words. They do not read the text inside a photograph, and they give up on pages that take too long to load. A beautiful site whose words are all inside images is invisible.
2. You have to say what you do and where. If your pages never contain the word “electrician” or the name of your town, you will not appear when somebody searches for those words. This sounds obvious and is skipped constantly, because owners write about their values instead of their trade.
3. Other people have to vouch for you. Reviews, mentions, links from other sites, a complete listing. Search engines are trying to work out whether you are a real, active, trusted business, and they do it largely by looking at what exists about you elsewhere.

Your Google Business Profile

If you do one thing from this guide, do this one. A Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts you on the map and in the box of local results that sits above the ordinary links. For “near me” searches, that box is what people look at first, and plenty never scroll past it at all.

Most businesses have claimed a profile and then left it half finished, which is the worst of both worlds: you appear, but you appear worse than the competitor who filled theirs in. Working through it properly is an hour of your life and it is the highest return hour in this entire guide.

The fields that matter most

• Your primary category. This is the single most important field on the profile. “Electrician” and “Electrical installation service” are different categories and surface for different searches. Pick the one that describes what you mostly do, not the broadest one you qualify for, then add the others as secondary categories.
• Your services. List them individually rather than lumping them together. Someone searching for a specific job is looking for that job, and a profile listing “fuse board replacement” matches in a way that “electrical work” does not.
• Your area or address. If customers come to you, use the address. If you travel to them, set service areas properly rather than leaving it vague.
• Hours, including the unusual ones. Bank holidays and Christmas especially. Nothing annoys a customer like turning up to a closed door your listing said was open, and Google notices when people report that.
• Photographs, and keep adding them. The outside of the premises, the inside, the van, finished work, the team. Profiles with real photographs get looked at for longer, and an abandoned looking profile reads as an abandoned business.
• The description. Plain sentences saying what you do, who for, and where. This is not the place for slogans.

The parts most people never touch

Two features sit unused on almost every profile. Posts let you add short updates, which is a low effort way of signalling the business is active. Questions and answers is public, anyone can ask, and anyone can answer, which means a competitor or a confused stranger can leave a wrong answer sitting on your listing. It is worth checking, and worth seeding with the four or five questions you get asked constantly.

If you work from home or have no premises

This applies to most trades and plenty of other businesses, and it causes more confusion than any other part of the profile. If customers do not come to you, you set yourself up as a service area business: you give Google your address so it knows where you are, but you hide it from public view and instead list the towns and areas you travel to.

Two mistakes to avoid here. Do not use a fake address or a mailbox to appear in a town you are not in, because listings get removed for it and rebuilding one is painful. And do not leave the service areas empty, which is the more common error, because an empty area list means the profile has very little to match against when somebody two towns over searches.

What local search rewards

Google has said publicly that local results come down to three things, and it is a useful frame because it tells you which of your effort is wasted.

1. Distance. How close you are to the person searching. You cannot change this, so stop trying. It is also why chasing rankings for a city thirty miles away is usually a poor use of your time.
2. Relevance. How well what you offer matches what they asked for. This one is almost entirely in your control, and it is mostly about saying plainly what you do, in the words customers use, on both your profile and your site.
3. Prominence. How well known and well regarded you appear to be. Reviews, mentions in local press or directories, links from other sites, how long you have been established. This is the slow one, and it is the one that separates businesses after the first year.

The practical reading of that: relevance is this week’s job, prominence is this year’s, and distance is somebody else’s. Businesses that get frustrated with local search are usually pouring effort into the third.

Where else to be listed

Prominence, the third factor above, is built partly from how often your business turns up in sensible places across the internet. Each listing is a small vote that you exist, that you are what you say you are, and that your details are what you claim. A handful of good ones is worth far more than hundreds of poor ones.

Worth your time, roughly in order:

• Bing Places. Free, and it takes about ten minutes because it can import most of what you already put into Google. Smaller audience, near zero effort, and it feeds results in places people forget about.
• Apple Business Connect. Also free. This is what appears in Apple Maps, which is the default on every iPhone, so for a local trade it is a useful listing that most competitors have never claimed.
• Your trade body or scheme. Gas Safe, NICEIC, NAPIT, TrustMark, FMB and the rest all run find an installer directories. These are high quality mentions from sites people already trust, and you are usually paying for the membership anyway.
• The big trade directories. Checkatrade, Rated People, MyBuilder and similar. Worth being on, and worth keeping your reviews there current, but they are not a substitute for your own listing and site.
• Local and community. Your chamber of commerce, the town’s business directory, a sponsored junior football team, the local news site that covered something you did. These are the mentions competitors cannot easily copy.
• Suppliers and partners. If a manufacturer lists approved installers or stockists, get on it. Those pages carry weight and almost nobody asks.

What is not worth your time is any service offering to submit your business to two hundred directories at once. Those listings sit on sites nobody visits, they frequently get your details slightly wrong, and inconsistent details across the internet make you harder to identify rather than easier. Six good listings with identical details beat two hundred sloppy ones, every time.

What your website contributes

Your profile gets you into the map results. Your website is what decides whether the person who clicks through actually contacts you, and it is also what lets you appear for the long tail of specific searches that a profile alone will never cover.

One page per service, not one page listing everything

This is the change that makes the most difference and the one most small sites get wrong. A single “Services” page listing twenty things will rarely rank for any of them. A page about one job, with a few hundred words about that job, can rank for it.

So an electrician’s site is far better off with a real page about landlord condition reports than a bullet point mentioning them, because somebody typing “EICR” has a legal reason to be looking and clear intent to book. The same logic gives a plumber separate pages for boiler installation and emergency callouts, since those are two completely different customers arriving in two completely different moods.

Name the places you actually work

Local search runs on real place names. “We cover the local area” matches nothing, because no human types that. Listing the towns and areas you really serve, in ordinary sentences rather than a stuffed block at the bottom of the page, is why builders and other trades get found for the villages next to them.

The unglamorous mechanics

• Page titles. Each page needs its own, saying what that page is about and where. It is the blue line people click in the results, and it carries real weight.
• Headings that describe. Search engines read your headings to understand structure. A heading that says “Boiler repair in Exeter” helps in a way that “What we do” does not.
• Words as words. Text inside an image cannot be read. If your opening hours or your service list live in a graphic, they may as well not exist.
• Speed, especially on a phone. Most local searches happen on phones, often on poor signal. A slow page loses both the visitor and the ranking, and you can check yours free with PageSpeed Insights.
• Link the two together. Your profile should link to your website, and your site should carry the same name, address and phone number as the listing.

None of this is exotic, and all of it comes as standard on a site that has been built properly rather than assembled from a template. If you are still deciding what goes on the pages themselves, that is covered in the guide to what to put on a small business website.

Reviews, and how to ask

Reviews do two jobs at once. They are part of how you rank in local results, and they are very often the thing that decides which of the three businesses in the map box gets the call. A profile with eleven recent reviews beats one with three from two years ago, even when the three are better.

Most owners underestimate how willing customers are, and overestimate how much of an imposition asking is. People who are pleased are usually glad to help. The trick is entirely in the timing and the friction.

• Ask at the moment of relief. When the boiler fires up, when they see the finished room, when they are visibly pleased. A week later the feeling has faded and so has the review.
• Ask in person, then make it one tap. Google gives every profile a short review link. Put it in a text message you send while you are packing up, or on a card, or as a QR code on the invoice.
• Ask everybody, not just the delighted. A run of five star reviews with no texture reads as suspicious. A four star review with a real sentence in it makes the rest believable.
• Reply to all of them. Two lines is plenty. It shows the listing is tended, and it is read by every future customer.
• Reply calmly to the bad ones. Nobody expects a perfect record. What people judge is how you handled the complaint. A defensive reply does more damage than the original review ever could.

Never buy reviews or write your own. Beyond being against the rules and risking the listing, they read as fake to customers, who are far better at spotting them than businesses assume. This matters most in trades where trust is the product, which is why salons and restaurants live and die on genuine ones.

What does not work

A great deal of what gets sold as search expertise stopped working a decade ago, and some of it will actively hurt you.

• Repeating the same phrase everywhere. Writing “Bristol plumber” forty times across a page made a difference in about 2006. Now it reads badly to humans and is recognised instantly by the engine.
• Buying links. Packages promising hundreds of links from unrelated sites are the oldest offer in the business. At best the links are ignored. At worst they count against you.
• Hidden text. White words on a white background, or lists of towns crammed into the footer in tiny type. Detected easily and treated as deception.
• A page for every town with the name swapped. Tempting for trades, and specifically the sort of thing search engines have spent years learning to filter out. One honest page naming the areas you cover beats forty near identical ones.
• Anyone who reports rankings but never enquiries. A rising position for a phrase nobody searches is not progress. Ask what changed, what it brought in, and what they would do next if they were spending their own money.
• Chasing the wrong measure. Visitors are not customers. The number that matters is how many people got in touch.

The uncomfortable truth is that there is no trick left. The businesses that do well in local search are, almost without exception, real businesses that clearly describe what they do, in a place, with customers who liked them enough to say so.

How long it takes, honestly

This is where most guides go quiet, because the honest answer is less exciting than the alternative.

Two things move fastest and are worth front loading: finishing the profile properly, and gathering a first handful of genuine reviews. Both can be done in a fortnight and both make an immediate difference to whether you appear at all.

The slow part is prominence, and it cannot be rushed honestly. What it can be is compounded. A business that collects a couple of reviews each month and adds a service page now and then is in a very different position a year later from one that built a site and never touched it again.

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The checklist

In order. Do not skip to the bottom, because the early items are the ones that pay.

1. Claim your Google Business Profile if you have not, and check there is only one.
2. Set the primary category precisely, then add secondary categories.
3. Fill in every field: services, area, hours, description, and a dozen real photographs.
4. Check the questions and answers section, and seed it with what you get asked most.
5. Make sure your business name, address and phone number match everywhere they appear.
6. Give your website a page for each service you actually want work from.
7. Name the towns and areas you cover, in normal sentences on relevant pages.
8. Write a proper title for every page, saying what it is and where.
9. Check the site loads quickly on a phone on mobile data, not just on your desktop.
10. Ask your next five happy customers for a review, at the moment they are pleased.
11. Reply to every review you have, including the old ones and the poor ones.
12. Write down how every enquiry found you, for four weeks, then read the list.
13. Set up Google Search Console, which is free and shows which searches are already bringing people to the site.

The short version

Finish your Google Business Profile properly, because it is free and it is what appears on the map. Get the primary category right, list your services individually, set your area, add real photographs, and keep the hours accurate. Then collect genuine reviews and reply to all of them.

On your website, give each service you care about its own page, name the places you actually work in ordinary sentences, write a real title for every page, and make sure it loads fast on a phone. Say what you do in the words customers use rather than the words your trade uses.

Ignore anyone selling tricks. Measure enquiries rather than rankings. Expect the profile and the reviews to help within weeks and the rest to take months. And if you want to see how the shape of all this differs by trade, there is a page for each kind of business we build for.