Why your Milton Keynes business is not showing up on Google

"I'm not on Google" is the most common thing a small business owner says to me, and it is almost never one problem. It is usually two or three, stacked, and they are not equally expensive to fix.

Here is how to work out which ones you have, in the order worth fixing them.

First, work out where you are not showing up

Search for what you do plus your town, on a phone, and look at what comes back. There are three separate places you can be missing from, and they have completely different causes.

The map pack is the box of three businesses with pins near the top. That comes from Google Business Profile, not from your website. You can have a perfect website and be nowhere in the map pack.

The organic results are the blue links underneath. Those come from your website.

The ads are the results marked "Sponsored". Those are whoever is paying.

If you are missing from the map pack but present in the blue links, your website is probably fine and your Google Business Profile needs work. If it is the other way round, the reverse. Most businesses who tell me they are invisible are missing from both, for different reasons.

One thing before you panic: do not judge by searching your own business name. Google personalises results heavily, and your own browser knows you. Use an incognito window, or ask someone across town.

1. Your Google Business Profile is incomplete, or not verified

This is the biggest one and the cheapest to fix, and it has nothing to do with your website.

An unverified profile does not appear in the map pack at all. A verified but thin one appears below businesses with less experience than you, because Google ranks on what it can see: categories, services listed individually, opening hours, photographs, and reviews.

What actually moves it:

• The primary category set precisely. "Plumber" and "Heating contractor" are different categories and they rank for different searches.
• Every service listed separately, not as one paragraph.
• Photographs, added regularly. Real ones from real jobs, not stock.
• Reviews, and replies to them. This matters more than almost anything else, and asking every happy customer is the whole technique.
• Hours kept accurate, including bank holidays.

If you do nothing else on this list, do this one. It is free and it is usually worth more than six months of everything else.

2. You have one page listing everything you do

This is the commonest website mistake I see, and it is invisible until someone explains it.

Most small business sites have a single Services page with a bulleted list: boiler repairs, bathrooms, leaks, drains, and so on. That page competes for nothing, because nobody searches for "plumbing services". They search for the thing that has gone wrong: no hot water, boiler making a noise, leak under the sink.

A page that tries to rank for twelve things ranks for none of them. Twelve pages, one per job, each one answering that specific problem, can each rank for their own search.

When I rebuilt Coyne's Plumbing, that was the single biggest structural change: a page for boiler breakdowns, a page for no heating or hot water, a page for gas safety certificates, and so on, rather than one page listing all of it.

3. You are using your words, not your customers' words

Trades and professionals describe their work accurately. Customers describe their problem badly. Google matches the customer.

A heating engineer writes "central heating system diagnostics". The customer types "radiators cold at the bottom". An accountant writes "statutory compliance services". The customer types "do I need to file a tax return".

Neither of those pages will ever meet. The fix is not to write badly, it is to make sure the customer's phrasing appears somewhere on the page: in a heading, in a question, in the first paragraph. Then write the accurate version underneath.

The quickest way to find the real phrasing is to read the last twenty enquiries you received and notice how people described what they wanted. That is the language to use.

4. The site is slow, or awkward on a phone

Google measures loading speed directly and most small business sites fail it, usually because they are built on a page builder with a dozen plugins and uncompressed photographs straight off a phone camera.

This matters twice over. It is a ranking factor, and it is also the reason people leave before the page appears. Someone with no heating is not waiting nine seconds.

Test yours at pagespeed.web.dev. If the mobile score is below 50, that is worth fixing before you spend anything on marketing, because you would be paying to send people to a page they will abandon.

The other half of this is whether the phone number is the easiest thing to find on a phone. For an emergency trade, a call button that follows the visitor down the page is worth more than most SEO.

5. Nothing links to you

Google treats a link from another website as a vote. A new site with no votes has nothing to rank on except being relevant, which is rarely enough in a competitive town.

You do not need hundreds, and you should not buy any. For a local business the realistic ones are:

• Your trade body or accreditation listing. Gas Safe, CIPHE, FMB, whatever applies.
• Suppliers and manufacturers you work with, many of whom run installer directories.
• Local sponsorship. A junior football team's site linking to the business that paid for the kit is a genuine local link.
• Local press, if you ever do anything worth a paragraph.
• Your own profiles kept consistent: Facebook, LinkedIn, the directories that actually get used in your trade.

Ten real local links beats a hundred bought ones, and bought ones can get you penalised.

6. It has not been long enough

This is the unsatisfying one.

A new page does not rank immediately. Expect roughly three months before rankings start moving and six to twelve before they settle, longer in a competitive town or a competitive trade. Every agency quoting faster than that is either running ads or telling you what you want to hear.

The useful thing to watch while you wait is not your position, it is Google Search Console. It is free, it takes ten minutes to set up, and it tells you which searches you are appearing for even when nobody has clicked yet. Appearing without clicks is the first milestone, and it comes well before anything shows up in your inbox.

If you need enquiries sooner than three months, that is what Google Ads is for. They start within a week and stop the day you stop paying, which is why running both for a while is usually the right answer: ads now, search rankings building underneath.

The order I would fix them in

1. Google Business Profile, properly filled in, verified, with reviews being asked for every week. Free, fastest, biggest effect on local visibility.
2. A page per service, written around how customers describe the problem.
3. Speed and mobile, especially the call button.
4. Links, slowly and genuinely.
5. Wait, and watch Search Console rather than your own rankings.

Most businesses can do the first one themselves this week. The second is the one that usually needs help, because it is a rebuild rather than an edit.

If you want to know what that costs before you ask anyone, I publish my prices. And if you want the whole thing handled, that is what the SEO work covers.