The most common question a local business owner asks, and it almost always has one of eight causes. Most you can diagnose yourself in about fifteen minutes.
Almost every owner who says they don't show up on Maps is testing it wrong. Search for your own business while standing inside it, on your own phone, logged into your own account, and you'll see yourself at the top. That tells you nothing.
Google weights distance heavily in local results. What matters is whether a stranger four miles away sees you, and there's only one honest way to test it.
Google generates listings on its own from other data sources. Yours may have existed for years without you touching it. An unclaimed listing can be edited by the public, has no owner controls, and can't be improved in the ways that matter.
Search your business name, and if the listing shows "Own this business?" or "Claim this business," that’s your answer. Claiming it’s free and takes a few days to verify.
This is the single highest-impact field in the whole profile and the one owners get wrong most often. Google uses your primary category to decide which searches you are even eligible for.
A roofer listed under the generic "Contractor" category is competing in a completely different pool than one listed as "Roofing Contractor." The specific category is nearly always the right choice, and you can add secondary categories for everything else you do.
If you travel to customers, your service area tells Google where you work. Most listings name one town when the business actually drives to eight, which throws away most of the reachable market.
The opposite mistake also hurts. Listing the entire state when you really cover three towns dilutes your relevance everywhere, and Google notices. Name the towns you would genuinely drive to and stop there.
Google cross-references your business information against other sources across the web. When it finds three different phone numbers or two addresses, it trusts you less, and lower trust means lower rankings.
Search your own business name and work through everything that comes back. Old directory entries with a disconnected number are actively costing you.
Review count and recency both feed how prominent Google thinks you are. A business with 200 reviews where the newest is eighteen months old looks dormant. One with 30 from the last quarter looks busy and current.
If everyone around you has hundreds of reviews and you have eleven, that alone can explain why you never appear. There’s no shortcut here that doesn’t risk your listing.
Suspensions often happen for reasons that aren't your fault: a suspicious edit, a keyword-stuffed business name, an address that looks like a residence, or too many changes at once. Google is rarely explicit about it. The listing just stops appearing.
Sign in to your Google Business Profile. If it says suspended, or the profile is missing from search while your website still ranks, that's likely the cause. Reinstatement is possible, takes time, and is never guaranteed.
Distance is one of the three factors Google uses and it’s the one nobody controls. If you are twelve miles from the person searching and three similar businesses are closer, you’ll lose that particular search almost every time.
What you can do is offset it. Real pages about the work you do in those towns raise your relevance there, and higher prominence raises you everywhere at once. That’s how a business at the edge of a market still gets found in the middle of it.