You search "plumber Batemans Bay" on your own phone at smoko. Three businesses come up in a box at the top of the screen. None of them are you. You scroll past Yellow Pages, past Oneflare, past a bloke in Moruya who does exactly what you do. You're not on that page either.
That's almost never Google punishing you. It usually means Google has no reason to be confident you exist, or you've told it something that quietly hides you from the suburbs you actually drive to. Both are fixable, and most of the fixing is free.
Your own search results are lying to you
Search from your own phone and Google already knows who you are. You're signed in, it has your location, and it has watched you check your own listing eleven times this month. What you see isn't what a customer in Surf Beach sees.
Test it properly. Open a private or incognito window, or borrow a phone that's never been signed into your accounts. Then search the way a customer types, which is the problem plus the suburb: "blocked drain Batehaven", "electrician Catalina", "lawn mowing Long Beach". Don't search your business name. Google will always find you by name, and that will make you feel fine about a problem you still have.
Google can't rank a business it has never been told exists
On a phone, most trade searches show a map and three businesses before any ordinary blue links. That box is where the calls come from, and it's drawn almost entirely from Google Business Profile, the free listing Google used to call Google My Business.
No profile means no box. That holds for every suburb and every search term, however good your website is.
If you've never claimed one, that's the most likely reason you can't find yourself, and it costs nothing to fix.
An unverified profile is a profile nobody sees
Plenty of tradies create a profile, start verification, get called out to a job, and never finish. The listing sits there unverified, which means invisible.
For a mobile trade, verification is usually a short video these days: your ute with the signage on it, your tools, your invoice book, the front of wherever you work from. It takes a few minutes and it's the gate everything else sits behind.
Telling Google you're a shopfront hides you from the suburbs you drive to
This setting catches more South Coast trades than anything else. During setup, Google asks whether customers come to you or whether you travel to them. Work out of your house in Catalina, tick the first option, and Google treats you as a shop in Catalina. You then fade out of results in Batehaven, Broulee, Moruya and everywhere else you actually work.
The fix is to hide the address and list your service areas instead. There's a full walkthrough of that in the Google Business Profile post, because it deserves its own.
Your phone number has to match everywhere your name appears
Google cross checks what it finds about you across the rest of the web. If your mobile changed in 2023 and the old number is still sitting on TrueLocal, if one listing says "Smith Plumbing" and another says "Smith Plumbing Pty Ltd", if a directory still shows the house you sold in Nelligen, Google gets less confident that all of these are the same business. Less confident means shown less often.
You don't have to fix the whole internet. You need the same business name, the same phone number and the same suburb on the four or five listings that genuinely exist for you.
Reviews are the tiebreaker when Google can't separate you from the next bloke
Look at those three businesses in the box. They'll almost always have reviews, and recent ones. Google reads reviews as evidence that a business is real, active and worth putting in front of someone who's about to spend money.
Ten honest reviews from jobs you've already finished will move you further this month than any design work will. Ask on the day, while the customer is standing in front of the work.
You can run the whole diagnostic yourself in ten minutes
- In an incognito window or on a borrowed phone, search your trade plus three suburbs you work in. Write down who appears in the map box each time.
- Go to google.com/business and sign in with the account you'd have used. Is there a profile at all? Does it say verified?
- On that profile, check four things: the primary category, whether the address is hidden with service areas listed instead, the opening hours, and whether there are more than five photos.
- Search your business name in quotation marks. Open every directory listing that comes back.
- On each listing, check the phone number and the business name against your profile, character for character.
- Count your reviews. Count the reviews of the three businesses in the box.
Whatever's different between your listing and theirs is your job list, in order.
Most of what's broken costs nothing to fix
These are free and you can do them today: claiming and verifying the profile, switching to service areas, choosing the right category, correcting your hours, adding photos, asking for reviews, and tidying your details on the directories that already list you.
These cost money: a domain name and hosting, which come to a few hundred dollars a year at most, and a website if you don't have one. The studio's LAUNCH package is $1,490 for up to four pages, mobile first, with click to call, Google Business Profile setup and basic on page SEO, live seven days from deposit and content. No GST is added, because the studio isn't registered for it.
Put plainly: if your profile is missing or unverified, fix that before you spend a cent on a website. A verified profile with real reviews behind it will bring you more calls next month than a new site would.
If you'd rather someone else ran the check, email me your trade and the suburbs you cover, and I'll run the same ten minute check on your listing and send back what I find, free.