You searched your own business this morning and three competitors came up in Maps before you. Here are five things worth checking, how to check each in a few minutes, and the order we would work through them.
There is a specific moment owners describe. They open Google on their phone, type their service and their neighbourhood, and watch three competitors fill the local pack while their own business sits further down. They have been open for years and their reviews are good. None of it seems to count.
Google is open about what it weighs: its own guidance says local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change distance. Most of the other two is made of things you control, and it tends to come down to the same handful of gaps. The website usually gets the blame first, and it is rarely the whole story.
1. Your Google Business Profile is half-finished
The profile is what Google shows in Maps, so it carries much of the relevance signal. The parts that get skipped are the unglamorous ones: the primary category (the most important single choice on the profile), secondary categories, a services or products list, service areas, holiday hours, attributes such as accessibility, payments and languages spoken, and a booking link.
Several of these sit a few menus deep, so an owner who set the profile up years ago may not have seen them since. None of it needs a developer.
HOW TO CHECK YOURS IN 60 SECONDS
Open Google Maps on your phone, search your business, tap the profile, then tap "About." If you do not see a category, hours, a services list, attributes, photos, products, posts and a website link, those are gaps Google has to guess around.
2. Your reviews have stopped arriving
Google says review count and score factor into local ranking, and recency matters to the people reading them: a page of glowing reviews that stops two years ago reads like a business that changed hands. What you want is a steady flow, which comes from asking every customer at the right moment rather than a push every few months.
The fix is not asking harder. It is making the request automatic and timing it well. For most service businesses the right moment is shortly after the visit, by text, with a one-tap link to the review form. For ecommerce or retail, it is after the product has arrived and been used. Asking before the customer has had the value is the common mistake: you get no review, or a confused one.
Two rules hold whatever you automate. Ask every customer, not only the ones you expect to be happy, and never offer anything in return. Google's policies prohibit both selective asking and incentives for reviews. Then reply, to the poor reviews especially: every future customer reads the reply.
3. Your website has no structured data
Structured data (schema markup) tells Google in plain terms what your business is, where it is, when it is open and what it offers. Without it, Google infers all of that from your prose and does not always get it right.
For a local service business the core set is LocalBusiness, or a specific subtype such as Dentist, Plumber or Restaurant, with the address, opening hours, phone number and the services you offer. Keep it identical to your Business Profile: the same name, address and phone number everywhere is what lets Google connect the two.
One caution. Marking up your own reviews will not earn star ratings in search results for a local business; Google stopped showing those for reviews a business publishes about itself. Structured data will not lift you up the pack on its own either. What it does is remove guesswork, and it is a contained job a developer does once.
4. One services page doing the work of ten
The most common content mistake is collapsing every service into one page called "Services". A dental clinic with a single services page has nothing that is specifically about teeth whitening or Invisalign, which gives Google little reason to show it for those searches. Each service people search for by name deserves its own page.
A good service page names the service and the area in its main heading, answers the questions customers actually ask (what it costs if you publish prices, how long it takes, what happens first), shows real photos of the work and links to the related services. Write it for the customer reading it. Filler written to hit a word count helps nobody.
5. Your site breaks on a phone in a specific way
Someone looking for a local business is often standing somewhere with a phone in their hand, so the mobile page is the one that has to work. The failures worth checking are specific:
- Slow main content. Google's Core Web Vitals call a Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds good and anything over 4 seconds poor.
- A page that jumps as it loads. A layout shift score above 0.25 is poor, and it is what makes people tap the wrong thing.
- Phone numbers that are not tap-to-call links, so a tap does nothing, or worse, links that dial a different number from the one on the screen.
- Booking widgets that collapse to a sliver inside a frame on a narrow screen.
- Tap targets that are too small. WCAG 2.2 sets 24 by 24 CSS pixels as the minimum and recommends 44 by 44.
Each of these can be measured, so you can check it rather than argue about it. PageSpeed Insights gives you the speed and layout-shift figures for free. For the rest, try calling and booking from your own phone.
The order we would fix them in
The order matters more than the speed, because the early fixes are cheap and the later ones build on them.
- Measure first. Score the site and the profile so you know which gap is largest. Our audit uses six dimensions: first impression, mobile, search, call to action, trust and booking.
- Finish the Business Profile. Categories, services, attributes, hours and photos. No code involved.
- Add structured data that matches the profile exactly.
- Build pages for the services that matter most, starting with the most valuable.
- Automate the review request: timed to the visit, sent to every customer, with replies drafted for a person to approve.
Google does not publish how long ranking changes take, and anyone who promises a date is guessing. What these five are is the foundation. Ads, links and deeper content all work better on top of them, and there is little point paying to send traffic to a profile with the basics missing.
You can put this to work on your own business: build a brief. It takes about five minutes, it assembles as you answer, and it ends in a free written audit against the six dimensions, with no obligation either way.
Revised October 17, 2026. An earlier version quoted figures from our audits that we could not trace to a dataset, so they have been removed.