First, check how you’re searching. Google tailors results to where you are and what you’ve searched before, so the quickest honest test is a private (incognito) window, searching the way a customer would — “plumber kamloops”, not your business name.
1. You don’t have a Google Business Profile
For “near me” and town-name searches, the first thing most people see is the map with three businesses under it. Those come from Google Business Profiles, not websites. If you haven’t claimed and verified yours at business.google.com, you can’t appear there. Fill it in completely: the right category, hours, photos, and your website.
2. Your site is telling Google to stay away
It happens more than you’d think: a “discourage search engines” box left ticked after a redesign, or a robots.txt file that blocks everything. Your site can look perfect to visitors and still be invisible to Google. A health check catches both.
3. The site is new, or just moved
Google can take weeks to find and trust a new site, and a redesign that changes page addresses without redirects can throw away years of rankings overnight. Make sure every old address redirects to its new one, and submit a sitemap in Google Search Console.
4. Your pages don’t use your customers’ words
If your services page says “residential climate solutions” and people search for “furnace repair”, Google has little reason to connect the two. Each main service deserves its own page that names it plainly, with the towns you serve. Keyword research shows the words people actually use.
5. The site is slow on phones
Most local searches happen on phones, and Google uses page experience as one of its signals. A site that takes six seconds to show anything loses visitors before they arrive, whatever its ranking. Our guide on why websites are slow covers the usual causes.
6. Missing or repeated page titles
The title of each page is what Google shows as the blue link. When every page is called “Home” or just your business name, Google struggles to tell them apart and searchers have no reason to click. A site audit lists every page with a missing or duplicate title.
7. Your competitors are simply ahead
Sometimes nothing is wrong — others have been at it longer, with more reviews, more links from local sites, and more pages about the service. That’s worth knowing too, because it changes the plan: you’ll want to see exactly who’s ahead, by how much, and for which searches. That’s what an SEO Report shows.
8. Few or no reviews
Reviews on your Business Profile are one of the clearest signals for the map results, and they’re what searchers read before they call. Ask happy customers — a short link in your invoice email works well — and reply to every review, good or bad.
Where to start
Claim your Business Profile if you haven’t, then find out where you actually stand: which searches you appear for in your own town, and who’s ahead of you. Our free report does exactly that.