Why is my business not showing on Google?

First, separate "not showing" from "not showing to me"

Local results are personalised by the searcher's location, their search history and the device they use. Searching your own business name from your own premises, on a phone that has visited your website a hundred times, tells you almost nothing about what a customer two miles away sees.

Before assuming you are invisible, establish where you actually appear. A business can rank in the top three for someone standing outside the shop and be nowhere for someone in the next postcode. That is normal, and it is measurable.

The five common causes

• No Google Business Profile, or an unclaimed one. Google may have auto-generated a listing for you from other data. Until you claim and verify it, you have no control over it.
• Verification failed or the profile is suspended. Suspensions are usually triggered by address changes, a virtual office, a keyword-stuffed business name, or multiple listings at the same address.
• Wrong or thin categories. Your primary category is one of the strongest relevance signals Google has. A plumber filed under "Handyman" will lose plumbing searches.
• Conflicting business information. A different phone number on your website, an old address on a directory, or two spellings of your name make Google less confident about you.
• A website with no local signals. No town or service named in your page titles, no address in the footer, no page for the thing people search for.

How to diagnose it in order

• Search your exact business name plus your town. If nothing appears, the problem is the profile itself, not ranking.
• Sign in to Google Business Profile and check the status banner. "Suspended" or "Pending verification" explains everything else.
• Check your primary category against the wording customers actually use, not your industry's internal language.
• Compare the name, address and phone number on your profile with your website, Facebook page and the three largest UK directories you appear on.
• Open your homepage source and check whether the town you serve appears in the title tag.

What to fix first

Fix in this order: existence, then accuracy, then relevance, then strength. Claiming and verifying the profile beats every other action. Correcting conflicting details beats adding content. Getting the category right beats collecting reviews.

Most businesses skip straight to reviews and blog posts because that advice is everywhere. If the foundations are broken, that effort is wasted.

Common mistakes

• Creating a second profile because you cannot access the first — this usually gets both suspended.
• Adding service keywords to your business name. It works briefly, then gets reported and suspended.
• Using a home address you do not want public instead of setting a service area.
• Assuming a new website automatically carries over your local signals. It often does not.

When you should expect to see a change

Verification and information fixes can show within days. Category changes typically settle over two to four weeks. Relevance and prominence work — reviews, content, consistency — moves over one to three months, and it compounds.