How to get your small business found on Google

When somebody searches "barber near me" or "Indian restaurant Croydon", the top of the screen is not a list of websites. It is a map with three businesses on it. Those three get the overwhelming majority of the calls, and which three they are is decided mostly by things that have nothing to do with how good your website looks.

That is good news for a small business, because the work is unglamorous and most of your competitors have not done it.

First: the free listing, done properly

A Google Business Profile is the listing that appears on the map and to the right of the results. It is free, it takes an afternoon, and for a local business it is worth more than any other single hour of marketing work.

• Claim it, and verify it. Unverified listings are largely invisible, and an unclaimed one can carry wrong hours that you cannot correct.
• Categories matter more than anything else on the profile. Pick the most specific primary category that describes you, then add secondary ones.
• Hours, including holidays. Wrong hours is the single most common complaint customers have about local listings, and Google demotes profiles it cannot trust.
• Photos, added regularly rather than once. Profiles with recent photos look alive; profiles whose last image is from three years ago look closed.
• Services and prices, filled in fully. Most owners skip these fields, which is exactly why filling them in helps.
• Post occasionally. An offer, a new opening time, something new on the menu. It is a small signal that the business is active.

Second: reviews, and how to ask

Reviews decide two things at once - whether you appear, and whether the person clicks you rather than the shop next door. A steady trickle beats a burst: twenty reviews arriving over a year reads as a working business, twenty in a week reads as a campaign.

• Ask at the moment someone is visibly happy. Not by email a week later.
• Make it one tap. A short link, a QR code on the counter, a line at the bottom of a receipt or a message.
• Reply to all of them, including the bad ones. A calm, specific reply to a complaint persuades more readers than a wall of five stars does.
• Never buy them, and never incentivise them. It is against Google's rules, it is detectable, and the penalty lands on the business that paid.

Third: what the website has to do

The listing is not independent of your site - Google checks one against the other. A site that supports the listing does four things.

1. Say where you are, in text

   Your address and the areas you serve, written on the page rather than only inside an image or an embedded map. This is what connects the site to the place.

2. Match the listing exactly

   Name, address and phone number identical everywhere - site, Google, Facebook, directories. "Street" in one place and "St" in another is the kind of small inconsistency that quietly weakens the whole thing.

3. Load fast on a phone, on mobile data

   Most local searches happen on a phone, often outdoors on a weak signal. A site that takes six seconds loses people before it has said anything, and Google measures this directly.

4. Have a page per thing you want to be found for

   One page listing eight services will rarely beat eight pages each about one service. This is why our own site has a separate page for restaurants, for barbers and salons, and so on, rather than one page that mentions all of them.

What to ignore

Two things will be sold to you hard and neither is where a small local business should start.

• Cold emails promising a first-page ranking. Nobody can promise a position; the ones who offer to are selling something else. Any real answer starts with "it depends on your area and your competitors".
• Ads, before the free work is done. Paid search can be excellent, but paying to send people to a weak listing and a slow site is paying to accelerate the problem. Fix the free half first, then buy traffic if you still want it.