Not showing up on Google Maps?
Run the six checks in order.

You set up the profile, you got the email that says verified, and days after verification you still can't find your own business on the map. Six of the causes are yours to check, free, and they run from your phone. This page walks them in the order a working diagnostic should run: cheapest first.

Work it like a no-heat call. Nobody condemns the furnace from the driveway. You check the thermostat, the switch, the filter, the pilot, in that order, because most fixes are the cheap early ones. Same logic here. Four of the six checks need the Google login, so if someone else holds the passwords, this walk is a job for the two of you.

One electrician asked it on Google's own help forum: "How do I get my company to pull up when someone asked for electrician in my area?"

The wrong picture, first

A self-employed plumber laid out his case in an owners' thread. A 4.2-star rating. Reviews roughly even with his brother-in-law, who's an electrician. The brother-in-law "is showing up on Google left and right." He wasn't. His own summary: "I'm not really an SEO guy."

Nothing in that sentence is a character flaw, and his frustration made sense. The picture he was working from (good rating plus good reviews should equal showing up) is a common place to start. It just isn't how the machine is wired. Reviews feed one of the three things Google names. The other two never show up on a star rating: what your profile says you are, and where you're standing. Both get checked below.

And if your gut says the whole thing is rigged, your gut is doing its job — the fog around ranking is real, and there are people selling flashlights. But the six below are the ones with a screen you can actually look at. They are not every reason a listing goes quiet. Check 1 is two minutes if you're already holding the login, and a phone call to whoever does hold it if you're not.

The walk: six checks, cheapest first

Check 1Confirm the profile is actually verified

Don't trust memory on this one. Whoever holds the Google login signs in at business.google.com and reads the profile's status off the screen. That's login work: if the screens aren't your department, it's a two-minute ask of whoever runs them. Google's own line is flat: "Only verified businesses can show their business info on Maps and Search." Unverified means unshown, full stop. Finishing it also works in your favor past the gate — Google says verifying tells them you're authorized to represent the business, "so it's more likely to show up in search results."

Check 2Check the calendar: is the listing under a month old?

If you verified two weeks ago, the calendar alone can explain it. Google publishes this in plain sight: "Rankings for new businesses can take up to a month to appear in search results." Hold that loosely — "can take up to" is an estimate, not a promise, and it doesn't clear you either: a wrong category or a tripped rule sits there quietly whether the listing is two weeks old or two years. So run the rest of the checks while the month passes. They cost nothing, and no invoice speeds the clock up. Write the verify date on the sheet and set a re-check for four weeks out. If the month is up, every check below is green, and you're still nowhere on the map, you've moved from fixing to competing, and that's the three dials section further down. Worth knowing before you start counting places: Google increasingly answers a local search with an AI-written result naming one or two businesses instead of the old three.

One more thing about this window: a new filing draws sales calls, and those have their own page. A stranger offering to fix a two-week-old listing is charging you for time that was already passing.

Check 3Read every fact on the profile like an inspector

Google says both halves of this out loud. Complete, accurate info makes you more likely to show: "Businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results." And the reverse kills visibility: "If your business info isn't accurate, your Business Profile might not show up for relevant searches in your area." So open the profile (login work again) and check the facts a customer or a machine would trip over:

• The name. Exactly what the business is called, the way it's painted on the truck. Nothing bolted on.
• The address. A real street address, or none shown at all. Never a box number (next paragraph).
• The hours. The hours you actually answer, including the seasonal reality.
• The phone. The number that rings the truck today, not a line you retired.
• One listing. Search your own name and make sure an old duplicate isn't out there splitting you in two.

The address line has one landmine worth naming by itself: a PO box never goes in the address field. Google suspends profiles for it, and the policy wording plus the safe setup live on the setup chapter. That rule stings hardest in rural country, where a box number can be all the address you've got — one rural inspector fought it for months and settled on a service-area setup instead. The full walkthrough for rural and no-storefront shops is its own page: service-area or storefront.

Check 4Look for a tripped rule

A profile that breaks Google's guidelines gets pulled off the board entirely: "If your Business Profile violates our guidelines, it becomes disabled or suspended and won't show to other users on Google until you resolve the issue." The place to look is the same dashboard from Check 1 — a suspended profile says so when you sign in.

If the dashboard says suspended, stop here. The checks below can't help a listing that's off the board. And here's the number, as of July 2026: Google's appeals page says "Appeal reviews and decisions can take up to 5 business days." Up to — that's a ceiling, not a promised answer date. Google's own page for fixing a suspended profile posts no time at all, only "We'll review your appeal and send you an email with a decision."

What you can do with your own hands is get ready before you touch the form. Since 8 July 2026 the documents attach inside the appeal itself, in one pass — one button, several files. So what you send when you file is your whole case, and there is no second upload afterward. Have the paperwork photographed and on the phone before you start. The full walk back is the suspension recovery chapter: what to gather, why you don't file a second appeal before a decision comes back, and the one more look Google may take if it comes back denied. Run that, then come back and finish these checks. The tripwires themselves live on the setup chapter. And if a vendor built or ran the profile and the trouble traces to them, that's an ownership problem wearing a ranking costume: who really controls your accounts.

Check 5Read your primary category

Open the profile and read the primary category — the same screen you had open in Check 3. Google defines the matching side of ranking — it calls it relevance — as "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for." A wrong category is a matching problem: a shop filed as remodeling that lives on service plumbing has told the machine to match it against remodeling searches. The field-by-field fix is the categories and services chapter.

Check 6Stand where the customer stands and search

The last check needs no login at all. Open a private window on your phone (it's in the browser menu) so the results aren't shaped by your own search history, and search your trade plus your town. Later, run the same search from a job across your area, or have a friend clear across the county run it and send you what came back. Write down where you show and where you vanish.

That's the one small job to do today, and it turns "I'm not showing up" from a feeling into a map. If you show up fine near the shop and disappear across town, you've met the distance dial, and that's the next section.

The three dials, in plain words

Say all six checks pass and you're still not in the map box (the three businesses Google shows under the map; people call it the three-pack). At that point you're not troubleshooting anymore. You're competing. Google names what local results are "mainly based on": relevance, distance, and popularity. Then, farther down the same page, it renames the third one prominence. When the machine's own manual can't keep its labels straight, you're allowed to find the machine confusing. Here are all three in words that hold still — the same three, walked through as part of a full customer's-eye check of your whole shop online, live on the self-inspection page:

• Relevance. Does your profile say, in its fields, the thing the customer typed? "How well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for." This dial is fully yours: Check 3 and Check 5 are how you turn it.
• Distance. "How far each business is from the customer who's searching." The center of the map is her couch, not your shop.
• Prominence. How well-known the business is. Google says this one leans on "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have," and that more reviews and positive ratings can help local ranking. It's the slow dial, built over years of real work and real customers.

Distance deserves its own paragraph. When the search happens on a couch across town, shops closer to that couch carry an edge you cannot buy back, and no amount of profile polish moves your building. But distance is one of the three Google names, not the verdict — results are "mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity." Geography weights the answer; it doesn't hand it down. That's why checks 3 and 5 keep earning their keep: matching is the dial fully in your hands. Distance may still be the whole answer for the plumber up top — the one whose brother-in-law was showing up on Google left and right while he stayed invisible. It's the rural math too — a man serving customers 59 miles out is up against this dial every working day. What a service-area business can and can't win back here is walked in service-area or storefront.

One more of Google's sentences belongs in your pocket: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." So when the next caller guarantees you the top of the map box, hold that sentence up next to the pitch. He's selling a guarantee on a machine whose owner says the ranking isn't for sale. That's a guarantee on the weather. If any part of the call still sounds worth a minute, the five questions will take it apart properly.

Print this: the six-check sheet

Print the six-check sheet

Verified but not showing upsix checks, in order

1. Verified — confirmed on the dashboard at business.google.com, not from memory (login work). YES / NO 2. Listing older than a month? Date verified: ______ (new listings can take up to a month to rank — if you're inside the window, the fix is the calendar) 3. Every fact accurate (login work): name / real street address, never a PO box / hours / phone / exactly one listing. YES / NO 4. No suspended-or-disabled notice on the dashboard (login work). YES / NO — if suspended, stop here and run the recovery chapter; start gathering the paperwork tonight 5. Primary category read off the profile (login work) and checked against the categories chapter. YES / NO 6. Private-window search run from the shop AND from across town. Show up here: ______ Vanish here: ______ Nobody can sell you the ranking itself — a guaranteed-ranking pitch promises what Google says can't be bought. Owner sign-off: ______ Date: ______

Where this leaves you

Two things to carry away from this page. The verified email doesn't mean Google will show you — it means Google believes you exist. And the checks run cheapest-first for a reason: confirm the profile is actually verified before anything else, because nothing downstream matters until that gate is open.

If the walk turned up a broken check, the fix pages are one tap away: the recovery chapter if the listing came back suspended, the setup chapter for the profile itself, categories and services for the fields that decide what you match. If every check passed, the work shifts from fixing to competing, and it starts with understanding where customers actually look. The rest of the manual lives at the hub.