Why doesn't my business show up on Google Maps?

You've typed "joiner in Perth" into your phone. Three firms come up in the wee map box at the top. None of them are you.

That map box is where local work comes from. Not the website — the map box. People tap the top result, hit call, and that's the job gone.

Here's why you're not in it, and how to sort it. You can do all of this yourself, for nothing, in about an hour.

First: do you actually have a profile?

Google Business Profile is the free listing that puts you in the map. It's separate from your website — you can have one without the other.

Search your business name on Google. If nothing appears with a map pin, opening hours and a phone number, you haven't got one, or you've never claimed it.

Fix: search "Google Business Profile", create one, verify it. Google will confirm you're real, usually by post or phone. That verification step is the one most people start and never finish, and until it's done, you don't exist on the map.

Your address might be the problem

Google is a local directory. It wants to know where you are.

If you work from home and don't fancy your address being public, you can set a service area instead — "I cover Perth and Perthshire" — and hide the address. That's fine, and Google supports it.

What isn't fine is leaving it blank. No location, no map.

The category matters more than you'd think

Pick the wrong primary category and you vanish from the searches that matter.

If you're a joiner, your primary category should be Carpenter or Joiner, not "Construction Company". Google matches the category against what people type. "Construction Company" doesn't match "joiner near me".

Set one primary category that's exactly what you do, then add secondary ones for the rest.

You're probably too far away

Here's the one nobody tells you: Google ranks the map box largely by distance from the person searching.

If you're in Scone and someone searches from Crieff, you're competing with everyone closer to them. There's no trick that fixes this — you'll rank strongly near where you're based and weakly further out. That's the system working as intended.

What this means practically: don't panic if you're not top for the whole county. Check what you rank for near your own base. That's the number that matters.

Reviews are the lever you actually control

Between two joiners the same distance away, the one with more recent reviews wins. Almost every time.

You don't need a hundred. Going from two reviews to fifteen makes a visible difference. Going from fifteen to sixty makes much less.

The bit that works: ask on the day you finish, while they're pleased with you and standing in front of your work. Not by text a fortnight later.

Recent counts too. Twenty reviews from four years ago look worse than six from this year.

Fill the thing in

Half-finished profiles rank badly. Google is straightforward about preferring complete ones.

Add:

• Opening hours, and keep them right over holidays
• Your phone number, the one you actually answer
• Photos of finished jobs — real ones off your phone, not stock images
• Your website, if you've got one

Photos matter more than people expect. Profiles with real job photos get noticeably more taps than ones with a logo and nothing else.

Give it time

Changes take days to weeks to show. Two things trip people up:

You're logged in. Google personalises results for you. Search in a private window, or ask someone across town to check.

You're standing in your own workshop. Of course you're top — you're right there. Check from somewhere else.

The short version

1. Claim and verify your profile — finish the verification
2. Set your address or service area
3. Get the primary category exactly right
4. Ask every happy customer for a review, on the day
5. Fill in hours, phone, and real photos
6. Wait a fortnight before judging it

That's it. It costs nothing and it's the single highest-value hour a local trade can spend.

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If you'd rather someone just did it, it's part of every site we build — prices are here, published up front. But there's nothing on that list you can't do yourself, and we'd rather you knew that.