Get found
Before anyone can choose you, they have to see you. This is the half most businesses never touch, because it lives in two places at once.
What this actually is
When someone nearby searches for what you do, Google shows a small map with three businesses on it, then the ordinary results underneath. Those are two different competitions and you can lose one while winning the other.
The map is decided mostly by your Google Business Profile — how complete it is, what categories you picked, your service area, your hours, and how many reviews you have. The results underneath are decided by your own website's pages.
Most owners have never opened their Business Profile since whoever set it up handed it over, and most small sites have never had their page titles written on purpose.
What we do about it
- ✓Claim and complete the Business Profile: the right primary category, the service areas you actually cover, real hours including holidays, and photos that are yours rather than stock.
- ✓Fix the on-page work on the site you already have — page titles, the description Google shows underneath, headings, image alt text, and the local business schema that powers the rich results.
- ✓Keep it current. A listing is not a thing you set up once; hours change, categories get added, and a stale profile quietly slides.
How you know it's broken
- →You come up when someone searches your business name, but not when they search what you do.
- →Your competitor two towns over outranks you in your own town.
- →Google shows a description of your site that you never wrote, because there wasn't one to use.
How the free check scores this
The checker reads your Business Profile for the basics — is a website linked, is there a phone number, is the listing live at all — and runs a full on-page audit of your homepage. If your site builds its content in the browser it says so, rather than pretending the things it can't see are missing.
Check my score, freeEach one only pays off if the others work too, which is why we do all four.