A website is not a Google listing. This surprises people, and it costs them months.
You can have a perfectly good site and still be missing from the top of the page for "dentist near me" — because local searches like that usually show a map of nearby businesses before the ordinary website results, and those map entries come from somewhere else entirely.
Here's what to fix, in the order that actually pays off.
First: is your Google Business Profile set up?
This is free, it takes an evening, and for the map results on local searches, it matters more than your website.
When someone searches for a service "near me", Google shows a map pack — usually three businesses with stars, hours and a Directions button — above the ordinary results. Those entries are Google Business Profiles — Google's own business listings — not ordinary website results. Without a Business Profile you cannot appear there, and website work alone won't put you there. Search for your business on Google Maps first: a profile may already exist that you can claim, rather than creating a duplicate.
Claim it, or set one up if none exists, and fill in every field: category, exact address, hours, phone, photos. Then verify it — Google will check that you really run the business, using whichever method it offers you (for example a video recording, a phone or email code, or a postcard to your address). Google says complete, accurate profiles are easier to match to relevant searches, and that businesses with photos get more requests for directions and more website clicks than those without.
If you do nothing else from this article, do this.
Link the profile to your website
Put your website's address in the profile's "Website" field, not a social media page. Google ranks local results mainly on relevance, distance and prominence, and prominence draws on what Google knows about your business from across the web, including links to your website. A linked site helps most when it shows the same business name, address and phone number as the profile (and, where you can, in LocalBusiness structured data), loads quickly on a phone, and gives a customer who taps "Website" one clear way to contact you, such as a tap-to-call button or a WhatsApp link to your number. No website change guarantees a place in the map results.
If you don't have a site yet, our website builder drafts one from a plain-English description. Once you've bought it, you can publish it, connect a domain you already own from your dashboard, and add that address to your profile.
Second: can Google find your site at all?
A new website is not automatically in Google. It has to be crawled and indexed first, and that can take days or weeks.
Two quick checks:
- Search
site:yourdomain.comin Google. If nothing comes back, none of your pages are indexed yet. - Set up Google Search Console, verify your site, and submit your sitemap. This is free and it's how you find out what Google actually thinks of your pages rather than guessing.
Search Console is also where you learn which searches already show your site — one of the most useful pieces of SEO information you can have, and it's easy to overlook.
Third: do you have a page for what people search for?
People don't search for your business name — they don't know it yet. They search for the service and the place: "bridal makeup Ludhiana", "root canal cost", "AC repair near me".
If your site is one page saying "Welcome to our salon", there's nothing for those searches to match. A page per main service, each one naming the service and the city in the heading, gives Google something to return.
Write them for a person, not for Google. A page that lists "bridal makeup Ludhiana bridal makeup artist Ludhiana best bridal makeup Ludhiana" reads like spam because it is, and Google has been able to spot that for over a decade.
Fourth: do you have reviews?
In the map pack, the businesses with more and better reviews generally sit higher — and even where ranking is equal, people tap the one with more stars.
The reliable way to get reviews is to ask, right after you've done good work, with a link that goes straight to the review form. Not a card with instructions. A link.
Don't buy these. Google's review policy forbids paying for reviews, in cash or in kind, and in the US the FTC has banned buying fake reviews since October 2024. Google's automated systems are built to catch them, and it reports blocking or removing more than 240 million policy-violating reviews in 2024 alone. Google may also restrict the profile that bought them — blocking new reviews for a while, hiding existing ones, or showing customers a warning that fake reviews were removed.
What matters less than you'd think?
Keywords stuffed into your text. Write naturally about what you do.
Meta keywords. Google has ignored that tag for many years.
Posting constantly. One genuinely useful page beats ten thin ones. Thin pages can actively hold a site back.
Paying for backlinks. Buying links breaks Google's spam policies. At best Google simply ignores them; at worst your site gets a manual action for unnatural links.
How long does it take to show up on Google?
Local SEO is slow. A new site with a fresh Business Profile typically takes weeks to start appearing and months to rank consistently for anything competitive. Anyone guaranteeing page one for a competitive search in a fortnight is either selling you ads or promising something they can't control. Google itself says no one can guarantee a top ranking.
The order above is deliberate: Business Profile first because it's free and fastest, indexing second because nothing else works until it's done, service pages third, reviews continuously.
Start with the profile. For many local businesses it's the biggest gap, and it costs nothing but an evening.
Once your site is indexed, our free SEO audit (sign in to run it) checks a page for common problems such as a noindex tag, a missing title or more than one main heading.