If customers near you can’t find your business on Google, the fix is almost always the same one: create a Google Business Profile, verify it, and fill it in properly. It’s free, it takes an afternoon, and for a local business it does more than anything else you can do in a week — including building a website.
That’s the short answer. The rest of this explains why it works, the two mistakes that get profiles suspended, and where a website actually fits in.
We should say the obvious thing up front: we build websites for a living, so we have an interest in you thinking websites matter. They do, but not first. If you’re a plumber in Guildford with no Google profile, a new website is the second job, not the first one.
Why you might not be showing up at all
There are only a handful of reasons a real, trading UK business is invisible in local results.
- There’s no Business Profile, or there is one and nobody has ever verified it.
- The profile exists but is half-empty — no category, no hours, no photos, no description.
- The details don’t match what’s on the website and the invoices.
- The business isn’t actually eligible under Google’s rules, usually because of the address.
The good news is that all four are things you fix yourself, for nothing, in an afternoon.
Step one: check you’re eligible
Google is specific about who gets a profile. You need either “a physical location that customers can visit, or [to travel] to customers where they are.” A shop, a salon, a clinic — that’s a location. A mobile dog groomer, an electrician, a mobile physio — that’s travelling to customers, and it counts.
What doesn’t count is an address that isn’t really you. Google states plainly that “PO boxes or mailboxes located at remote locations aren’t acceptable.” If your registered office is a formation agent’s address in London and you actually work out of Slough, the formation address is not your business location.
Two rules catch out trades and mobile services in particular:
Hide your home address. If you go to customers rather than the other way round, Google’s guidance is to remove the address from the profile — a residential plumber is the example Google itself uses. You still set a service area; you just don’t publish where you sleep.
Keep the service area honest. Google says a service area “shouldn’t extend farther than about two hours of driving time” from where you’re based. Claiming the whole of England doesn’t get you into more searches. It just makes the profile less credible.
Step two: claim it and verify it
An unverified profile is close to useless — this is the step people abandon halfway through.
Google offers five verification routes: phone or SMS, email, a live video call, a recorded video, and a postcard through the door. You don’t get to choose. Google says verification methods “are automatically determined by Google and can’t be changed”, which is frustrating but not personal.
Timings, from Google’s own help pages:
- Standard review after you’ve completed the steps: up to five working days.
- Postcard codes: arrive within 14 days, and expire after 30 days.
- Some cases verify instantly — for example if the business is already verified in Google Search Console.
Put a reminder in your diary for the postcard. A surprising number of profiles stall because a code turned up in a pile of post in week three and expired in week five.
Step three: understand what actually decides your ranking
This is where most of the bad advice lives, so here it is from Google directly. Local results are decided by three things:
Relevance — how well your profile matches what someone typed. Fixed by filling the profile in completely and accurately: the right primary category, your real services, opening hours, a proper description.
Distance — how far you are from the person searching. You can’t change this one, and anyone selling you a way to rank five towns over is selling you nothing.
Prominence — how well known the business is. Google bases this partly on links to your website and on review activity. This is the slow one, and it’s the one your website contributes to.
And the line worth taping to the wall, because it comes straight from Google: there is “no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.” Google Ads buys you an ad slot. It does not buy you a better position in the free map results. If someone offers to “get you to the top of Google Maps” for a monthly fee, ask them exactly which of relevance, distance and prominence they’re changing.
The two mistakes that get profiles suspended
Keyword-stuffing the name field. Your business name field must be your real name — the one “used consistently on your shopfront, website, stationery and as known to customers.” Not “Dave’s Plumbing — Emergency Boiler Repairs Reading 24/7”. Google explicitly disallows marketing taglines, location text and service keywords in the name, and warns that “including unnecessary information in your business name isn’t permitted, and could result in the suspension of your Business Profile.”
It’s tempting because it looks like it works for a few weeks. Losing the profile costs you far more than the few weeks gained. Put the services in the services field and the town in the address field, which is what they’re for.
Reviews you shouldn’t have. Covered properly below, because in the UK this one is no longer just a policy matter.
Reviews: how to ask, and what’s now illegal
Reviews feed prominence, so they matter. Asking for them is completely fine. Google’s policy allows merchants to “solicit or encourage the posting of content that does represent a genuine experience, without offering incentives.”
What isn’t allowed:
- Incentives. Google prohibits merchants offering “payment, discounts, free of cost goods and/or services — in exchange for posting any review.” The prize-draw-for-a-review trick is squarely in this.
- Reviews from yourself, your staff or your contractors. Google treats current or former employment and contractual relationships as a conflict of interest, and removes the reviews as rating manipulation.
- Paying someone to take a bad review down. Same rule, other direction.
Since 7 April 2025, this is also UK law. The consumer protection provisions of the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 came into force that day, and they include an explicit ban on posting and commissioning fake reviews. The Competition and Markets Authority can fine up to 10% of global turnover for breaches. That is not a rule aimed only at Amazon sellers — a small business buying a handful of five-star reviews is doing exactly the banned thing.
So the compliant version is also the easy version. Ask every genuinely happy customer, once, at the moment they’re pleased — job finished, invoice paid. Send the link. Reply to every review you get, including the bad ones, because Google notes that helpful replies help a profile stand out and because everyone reading can see how you handle criticism.
Where the website actually comes in
Your profile gets you into the map results. The website does three jobs after that.
It’s the prominence signal. Google names links to your website as part of how it judges prominence. Nothing to link to means nothing to count.
It’s where the click lands. Someone finds you on Maps, taps through, and decides in a few seconds whether to ring. A slow or confusing page loses the enquiry you’d already won. This is the bit people underestimate — you can do everything right on the profile and lose the customer in the four seconds after the tap.
It settles the details. Your name, address and phone number should read identically on the profile, the website and the invoices. Inconsistent details make you look like two half-businesses to Google and to customers.
If you want the technical reasons a site loads instantly or slowly, we’ve written that up in our guide to Astro and why it makes small-business sites fast. If you’re at the earlier stage of finding someone to build it, the questions to ask are in how to choose a web designer in the UK.
When paid ads make sense — and when they don’t
Ads are worth it when you need enquiries this month and prominence hasn’t built yet, or when the searches you want are genuinely competitive.
They’re not a substitute for the free work. If your profile is unverified and your website is slow, ads will faithfully deliver traffic to a leaky bucket at a pound or two a click. Fix the free things first, then decide. We manage Google Ads for a flat £199 a month, never a percentage of your spend, precisely so there’s no incentive on our side to talk your budget up — details on the Google Ads page.
What to do this week
August is a sensible moment for this. Trades and local services are in their busiest stretch, so there’s a steady flow of finished jobs to ask for reviews on — and prominence builds slowly, so profile work started now is working properly by the autumn and Christmas run rather than being started in it.
The whole job, in order:
- Search your own business name on Google. See what’s already there — often there’s an unclaimed profile with the wrong hours on it.
- Claim it, or create one, and start verification today so the clock runs.
- Set the correct primary category. This is the single most load-bearing field on the profile.
- Fill in everything: hours, services, description, service area, payment methods.
- Add real photos of real work. Not stock.
- Fix the name field if someone has stuffed it with keywords.
- Ask your last ten happy customers for a review. No incentives, no exceptions.
- Check your name, address and phone match everywhere they appear.
The businesses that win locally aren’t usually the ones doing something clever. They’re the ones who finished the boring setup and kept it current.
If you’d rather someone just did it
Our Business Site (£1,500 to £2,500 inc VAT, live in three to four weeks) includes full on-page SEO setup and Google Business Profile as part of the build, with the copy written for you from a short interview. The Starter Site is £999 inc VAT for a focused five-page site, live in two to three weeks. An optional Care Plan at £70 a month keeps it hosted, patched, backed up and edited. Full inclusions are on the pricing page.
If you’d rather have an opinion than a quote, our free website review checks your current site for speed, security, search and email problems and tells you what to fix first. No sign-up. Or email us — that’s a free 30-minute review, a reply within one working day, and no sales call unless you ask for one. If the honest answer is “your website’s fine, go and finish your Google profile”, that’s what we’ll tell you.
Sources
- Guidelines for representing your business on Google — Google Business Profile Help (eligibility; PO boxes; service-area address and ~two-hour driving-time guidance; business name rules and suspension risk)
- Verify your Business Profile — Google Business Profile Help (five verification methods, automatically determined; up to five working days; postcard arrives within 14 days and expires after 30)
- Improve your local ranking on Google — Google Business Profile Help (relevance, distance, prominence; no way to request or pay for better local ranking; replying to reviews)
- Prohibited and restricted content — Google Maps user-contributed content policy (incentivised reviews, conflict of interest, soliciting genuine reviews)
- CMA to boost consumer and business confidence as new consumer protection regime comes into force — GOV.UK / Competition and Markets Authority (DMCC Act 2024 consumer provisions in force 7 April 2025; explicit ban on posting and commissioning fake reviews; fines up to 10% of global turnover)
Prices quoted for our own services are correct at the date of publication.