A business not showing on Google is one of the most common worries we hear, and it is usually one of a small number of causes. The trick is to work out which one before spending money - because the fix for "Google has not indexed my website" is completely different from the fix for "my Business Profile has been suspended".
First, be precise about where you are not showing. The website in the normal results and the Business Profile in the map results are two different systems. You can be missing from one and fine in the other.
Quick triage: what are you actually missing from?
| What you see | Most likely cause | Where to check |
|---|---|---|
| Searching your exact business name shows nothing | Site not indexed, or profile not verified | site: search; Business Profile dashboard |
| Your profile shows for your name but not for "plumber near me" | Distance, category or prominence | Primary category; reviews; searcher location |
| Your profile has vanished entirely | Suspension or duplicate merge | Business Profile dashboard and emails |
| Your website shows for your name but not your services | Thin pages or a new site | Search Console performance report |
| You show at home but a customer says they cannot find you | Personalisation and distance | Search from their location, logged out |
1. Is your website indexed at all?
Type site:yourdomain.co.uk into Google. If nothing comes back, Google has not indexed your site. Common reasons: the site is only days old, a "discourage search engines" setting was left on from the build, a noindex tag is on every page, or robots.txt is blocking crawlers.
Set up Google Search Console (free), verify the domain, submit your sitemap, and use the URL Inspection tool on your homepage. It tells you whether the page is indexed and why not, and lets you request indexing. Google is clear that a request does not guarantee inclusion, and that it does not guarantee to crawl or index any page - but in practice a clean, working small site normally gets picked up.
2. Is your Business Profile verified and live?
An unverified profile does not show reliably, and a suspended one may not show at all. Log in at business.google.com and look for warnings. A "soft" restriction leaves the profile visible but uneditable; a harder suspension removes it from Search and Maps until an appeal succeeds.
If suspended, fix the guideline breach - keyword-stuffed name, virtual office, visible home address - then use the appeals tool with evidence. Do not create a new profile while the appeal is under review.
3. Is the searcher simply too far away?
Distance is one of the three factors Google names for local ranking, alongside relevance and prominence. A plumber based in Exeter will rarely appear in the map pack for someone searching in Plymouth, however good the profile is. Service areas on your profile tell customers where you work; they do not make you rank everywhere inside them.
Test properly: search from a phone at the customer's location, or ask them to send a screenshot. What you see at home is not what they see.
4. Is your primary category right?
The primary category is the strongest relevance signal you control. A heating engineer listed as "Plumber" can miss "boiler repair" searches; an electrician listed as "Contractor" is too vague to match much at all. Pick the most specific category that describes what the business is, then add secondary categories for other genuine core services.
5. Is it just new?
A new website, a newly verified profile and a business with three reviews will not outrank an established competitor with two hundred, and that is not a fault. Google says some changes take effect in hours and others can take several months. You should normally appear for your own business name fairly quickly; competitive terms take longer.
The full checklist
- site:yourdomain.co.uk returns your pages.
- Search Console is set up and the sitemap is submitted.
- No noindex tag on pages you want found.
- Business Profile verified, with no warnings or suspension.
- Only one profile for the business - no duplicates.
- Business name matches your real-world name, with no added keywords.
- Most specific primary category chosen.
- Address hidden if customers do not visit; service areas set.
- Phone number, hours and website link are correct.
- Name, address and phone match exactly on your website and main directories.
- Reviews coming in steadily, and replied to.