How to get your business found on Google

You've built a business. Maybe a plumbing firm, or a dog groomer. A bookkeeping practice, even a bakery with a loyal queue. Then you type your own name into Google and wonder where you are. Fair question. Here's the short version: getting found is mostly a matter of making your business easy to find and easy to understand, then checking in now and then. There's no secret handshake. There are four steps, a few things to avoid, and a way to tell whether any of it is working. So let's go through them.

Before the steps, a bit of plain talk, because it saves you money and grief.

Nobody can pay Google to rank their site higher. Google says it doesn't accept payment to crawl a site more frequently or rank it higher. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you something that doesn't exist.

And here's the part people skip over. Even if you do everything right, Google doesn't guarantee it will crawl, index or serve a page. Even if you follow its Search Essentials to the letter. That's not a loophole or a warning sign. It's just how the thing works.

So what are you actually doing? You're removing obstacles and giving Google good material to work with. That's it. Calm, steady, a bit dull. And to be fair, dull tends to work better than clever.

Google Search works in three stages: crawling, indexing, serving results. Keep those three words in your head. They'll make the rest of this guide easier to follow.

Google finds pages using crawlers, automated programs that explore the web. You don't have to knock on the door. Most of the pages listed in Google are found automatically rather than submitted by their owners.

So if your site is live and linked to from somewhere, there's a decent chance Google already knows about it.

How do you check? Search for your business name. Exact name, in quotes if you like. Does your website show up? Does it show up with the right title and a sensible description underneath?

If it does, good. Move on.

If it doesn't, don't panic. That isn't proof of a fault, and as we said, nothing here is guaranteed. What you can do is make it easier. A sitemap is a file listing the pages on your site, and it might speed discovery. Might. Pages get discovered without one, so it's optional, but it's a cheap bit of help. Most website builders can produce one for you, and if yours does, it's worth switching on.

Also check the basics. Is every important page reachable by a normal link from another page on your site? Can a visitor get from your home page to your services page in a click or two? If a human struggles to find something, a crawler will too.

This one matters most if customers find you by searching for something nearby. "Electrician near me." "Hairdresser" plus a town. That sort of thing.

Your Google Business Profile is the listing that can appear in local results and on maps. Adding or claiming your business costs nothing. Only eligible businesses can add or claim a location, so there's a check built in, and you'll need to select a verification option to prove the business is yours. Do that.

Then keep it consistent with your website. Your business name, the services you offer, the areas you cover: they should say the same thing in both places. If your profile says "boiler repairs" and your site says "general maintenance", you're making Google guess. Don't make Google guess.

Do you work from a van and visit customers rather than welcoming them into a shop? Then you're a service-area business. In that case, remove your address from the profile and set up your service areas instead. You can add up to 20. Pick the places you genuinely serve, not the ones you'd like to.

Now, how does Google decide who shows up locally? Local results are based mainly on relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far each business is from the person searching; if they don't share where they are, Google uses what it knows about their location. Prominence is how well known your business is.

You can't control distance. Sorry. And there's no way to request or pay for better local ranking. That's worth repeating, because plenty of people will offer to sell it to you.

What can you do? More reviews and positive ratings can help. So ask happy customers to leave one. Reply to the reviews you get, politely, including the unflattering ones. At the end of the day, a profile full of real feedback tells people you're a real business doing real work.

This one is free.

Search Console is a tool from Google that helps anyone with a website understand how they perform on Google Search. It shows you how Google crawls, indexes and serves your site. In other words, it shows you those three stages from earlier, applied to your own pages.

Setting it up goes like this:

1. Verify ownership of your site. Google needs to know it's really yours before it shows you anything.
2. Make sure Google can find and read your pages. Open the indexing report and see which pages are in and which aren't, along with any reasons given.
3. Consider submitting a sitemap. It's optional, as we said. Pages can be discovered without it, but a sitemap might speed discovery.
4. Monitor performance.

That last one is where the interesting stuff lives. The performance report shows how much traffic you get from Google Search, with breakdowns by queries, pages and countries, and trends for impressions, clicks and other metrics.

Read it with curiosity, not dread. Which searches are bringing people in? Are there queries you didn't expect? Are there services you offer that nobody seems to be finding you for?

And you don't need to sign in daily. Around once a month is plenty. Put it in the diary alongside the bills.

Here's where the real work happens, and it's the part no tool can do for you.

People search for what they need. "Emergency plumber." "Wedding cakes." "Self-assessment help." If your site has no page about the thing they typed, you're not in the running. Simple as that.

So give each service its own page. One page per service. Say what it is, who it's for, what's involved, and how to get in touch. Use plain language, the way you'd explain it to a customer across the counter.

Do the same for places, with one condition: be honest. If you genuinely serve a particular town, write one honest page about serving it. What you do there, what's special about working there, which parts you cover. Not a copy of your other pages with the town name swapped in.

Google's own advice is to create helpful, reliable, people-first content. That sounds like a slogan, but it's a decent test. Would a customer who landed on this page leave knowing what they came to find out? If yes, you're on the right track.

If you want to go deeper, we've written two guides that help. Our SEO for small business guide covers the wider picture, and content gap analysis for small business shows you how to spot the topics your site is missing. There's also a directory of pages you should have, with a guide for several trades.

Some shortcuts look tempting. They aren't.

Scaled content abuse is the big one. That means producing lots of pages mainly to manipulate rankings, and Google treats it as spam however the pages were created. By hand, by software, by a very keen cousin. The method doesn't matter. The purpose does. Fifty near-identical "plumber in [town]" pages are the pattern the policy describes.

The other thing to avoid is anyone promising guaranteed rankings. We've covered why. Google doesn't guarantee its own crawling, indexing or serving, so nobody else can guarantee your position. If someone says they can, ask how. Then watch what they say.

The same goes for paying for ranking: Google says it doesn't accept payment to rank a site higher.

Keep this simple, or you'll never do it.

Once a month, open the performance report in Search Console. Look at the queries, the pages, the clicks and the impressions. Are they moving in a sensible direction over time? Are the pages you built for your services showing up at all? Don't chase a single week's wobble. Look for the trend.

Then do the human check. Search for your own services, the way a customer would. Search for what you do plus your area. Does your site appear? Does your Business Profile appear? Does what you see look right?

Write down what you find. Even a couple of lines. Next month, you'll have something to compare it with, and that's worth more than any dashboard.

If something looks off, go back to the steps. Can Google find the page? Is it in the indexing report? Does the page actually answer the search? The answer is usually in one of those.

If you'd like a second pair of eyes, Seracu offers a free snapshot. It's a free look at which topics your site lacks compared with its competitors. It gives you a clearer picture of where your gaps are, so you know which pages to write first. If you'd rather not, the four steps above stand on their own.