You're Invisible on Google. Your Competitors Aren't.

For a business people search for near them, the Google Business Profile is doing more work than the website. It is what fills the map pack, it is what shows the phone number, and on a phone it is frequently the only thing a searcher ever looks at. A profile with the wrong hours or a category that does not match what you sell will quietly cost you calls that never register anywhere you can see them.

The work is unglamorous and mostly a matter of being thorough. Primary category chosen to match the service people actually search for rather than the one that describes your legal entity. Secondary categories added where they genuinely apply. Service areas set to the places you will actually travel to. Hours that reflect reality, including the holiday overrides most profiles never get. Products and services filled in with the words a customer would use. Photographs that are yours, geotagged or not, rather than stock.

Then it has to be maintained. Google changes the profile interface and its rules regularly, competitors suggest edits to your listing, and an unattended profile drifts. We check it, and when Google introduces a field that matters we fill it in. If the profile is the whole of what you need handled, Google Business Profile management is that work on its own, without the rest of the SEO retainer.

If you want the background before you talk to anyone, we wrote up what a Google My Business listing does and does not do, and what Google looks for when it decides which website to show first.

A citation is any place online that names your business and its contact details — directories, chambers of commerce, industry bodies, data aggregators that feed other directories without ever telling you. Search engines use the agreement between those records as one signal that the business is real and that the details are current.

The problem is almost never that citations are missing. It is that they disagree. A suite number that appears on some listings and not others. A tracking number from an old campaign. A previous address that three directories still carry because they copied each other in 2019. Each individual mismatch is minor; the aggregate is a business that looks slightly uncertain to a system trying to decide whether to show it.

So the work is: find every record, decide the one canonical version of the name, address and phone number, and correct the records that disagree — starting with the aggregators, because those propagate. It is slow, and some directories take weeks to update. It is also the kind of thing that stays fixed once it is fixed.

This runs alongside our citation service, and it pairs with the business-identity check inside our own tooling, which flags a phone number appearing on your site that does not match the one you have told us to use.

On-page work is where most of the durable gains are, and it is the part most often skipped because it requires writing. A page that ranks tends to answer one question thoroughly, in language a customer would recognise, with the specifics — prices, timelines, what is included, what is not — that a competitor is hedging on.

In practice that means: one clear subject per page rather than four services crammed onto one; a title and description written for the person choosing between six blue links; headings that pose the question and sentences underneath that answer it directly rather than warming up for a paragraph; and enough depth that the page is genuinely the better result, not merely longer.

Depth and readability pull against each other, which is why sections like this one exist. The text in every tab on this page is in the HTML the moment the page loads — it is hidden with an attribute, not built by JavaScript after the fact — so a search engine reads all of it while a visitor reads only the part they asked for.

Location pages are their own discipline and the place most local sites go wrong; we set out what to include and what to avoid on location pages separately. If you would rather work through it yourself, the SEO checklist is free and does not ask for an email.

Reviews affect two different things at once, and it helps to keep them separate. They are a ranking input, and they are the thing a human reads immediately before deciding whether to call you. A business can be winning on the first and losing on the second.

The asking has rules. You may ask every customer; you may not ask only the happy ones, offer anything in exchange, or set up a form that filters people to a private complaint box when they select fewer than four stars. Review gating is against Google’s policy and it is not subtle to detect. We set up an ask that is simply well-timed — while the work is fresh, from the person who did it, with a link that lands directly on the review box. That is the right way to ask customers for Google reviews in more detail.

Replies matter more than most owners expect, and a bad review with a calm, specific, non-defensive reply often reads better to a prospect than an unbroken wall of five stars. We wrote about why people trust businesses with more reviews, and about how online reviews and word of mouth now feed each other.

We do not write reviews, and we do not buy them. If an agency offers to, that is the moment to end the conversation. When reviews are the whole problem rather than one part of it, our review and reputation management service is the asking, answering and watching done as a job of its own.

Two numbers are worth watching and most reports bury them under twenty that are not. The first is enquiries — calls, forms, messages — because that is the thing the business actually needs. The second is which pages and which searches produced them, because that tells you where the next hour of work should go.

What we can measure honestly: how many people arrived from search, which pages they landed on, which queries Search Console attributes to you, how many enquiries came in, and how those moved compared with the previous period. What nobody can measure honestly is the counterfactual. We can show that enquiries rose; we cannot prove what would have happened if we had done nothing, and any agency presenting a graph as proof of causation is overstating what the data supports.

Rankings themselves are a poor headline metric. They are personalised, they vary by the searcher’s exact location down to the street, and a position that looks good on your screen may not be what anyone else sees. We report them as context, not as the result.

Timelines are the other place expectations go wrong. Local search moves on a scale of months, not weeks, and the honest answer depends on your competition and your starting point — how long SEO takes to work goes through what actually drives that. If you would rather buy attention while the organic work matures, organic and paid ads solve different problems, and pay-per-click advertising is the faster of the two to switch on.