How to get found on Google Maps and check where you rank

When someone in Gloucester needs an emergency electrician, or a family in Cheltenham is looking for a dentist taking on new patients, they rarely scroll through page after page of Google. They tap the search, glance at the little map with three businesses pinned to it, read a couple of star ratings and pick one. That box of three results at the top is called the local pack, and for a lot of local businesses it matters more than the website ever will.

The thing that decides whether you show up there is your Google Business Profile. It is free, it takes an afternoon to set up properly, and yet most of the businesses we speak to have either never claimed theirs or filled it in once years ago and forgotten about it. If that sounds familiar, this is the most worthwhile afternoon you will spend on your marketing this month. And once it is set up, the second half of this piece explains how to check where you actually rank, because the obvious way of checking is misleading.

What a Google Business Profile actually is

Your profile is the listing that appears when someone searches for your business by name, and the entry that can show up in that map pack when someone searches for what you do. It carries your opening hours, phone number, photos, reviews, the categories you fall under and a description of the business.

It used to be called Google My Business, which you might still see written down here and there. The name changed, the idea did not. It is the single most important free tool a local business has for getting found, and Google leans on it heavily when deciding who to show for searches with local intent, the "near me" and "in Cheltenham" type searches where the person clearly wants someone nearby.

Claim it and verify it first

If you have never done anything with your profile, search for your business name on Google. One of three things will happen. There is no listing at all, in which case you create one. There is a listing but it says "claim this business", which means Google built a basic version automatically and you need to take ownership. Or you already own it and can sign in and edit it.

Verification is the step people get stuck on. Google needs to confirm you really are the business, usually by posting a postcard with a code to your address, sometimes by phone or video. It is tedious, but until you are verified you cannot control what the listing says, and an unverified listing can carry wrong information you have no way to fix. Get this done before anything else.

The settings that decide your rankings

Once you are in, a handful of details do most of the heavy lifting. Get these right and you are ahead of most of your competitors, who have usually rushed through them.

Your primary category is the big one. Google treats it as the main signal of what you are, so it needs to be specific. "Electrician" will serve you far better than "Contractor". A café that lists itself as "Restaurant" is competing in the wrong race. Pick the category that describes precisely what you do, then add secondary categories for the other services you offer.

Your name, address and phone number need to be identical everywhere they appear online: on the profile, on your website, on your Facebook page, in old directory listings. Google cross-references these to decide whether to trust you, and inconsistencies, even something as small as "Street" in one place and "St" in another, chip away at that trust. Marketers call this NAP consistency, and it is dull but it counts.

One word of warning. It is tempting to stuff keywords into your business name, turning "Hartley Plumbing" into "Hartley Plumbing Boiler Repair Gloucester". It does nudge rankings, which is exactly why people do it, but it breaks Google's guidelines and competitors can report it. We have seen businesses suspended over it. Use your real, trading name and earn your rankings the honest way.

Reviews are the part you cannot fake

After relevance and distance, reviews are the thing that most affects whether you appear in that map pack and whether anyone chooses you once you do. A business with forty reviews at 4.8 stars will be picked over one with three reviews at 5 stars almost every time, because volume reads as established and trusted.

The only reliable way to get reviews is to ask, every time, while the job is still fresh in the customer's mind, and to make it easy with the short review link Google gives you. Reply to every review, the good and the awkward. A calm, professional reply to a one-star complaint tells the next reader far more than the complaint itself does, and Google's own advice is that responding to reviews improves your local visibility. Never, ever buy fake reviews. I have set out the whole process, including how to handle a bad or unfair review, in how to get more Google reviews.

Keep it alive, because a stale profile slips

A profile is not a set-and-forget job. The listings that hold the top spots tend to be the active ones. A few habits make the difference.

Add real photos and keep adding them: your premises, your team, your work, finished jobs. Profiles with photos get noticeably more clicks and calls than bare ones, and customers trust what they can see. Keep your opening hours accurate, especially around bank holidays, because nothing annoys a potential customer like driving to a shut shop the listing said was open. Use the Posts feature to share an offer or a recent project now and then. And answer the questions people leave in the Q&A section before a competitor or a passer-by answers them for you, possibly wrong.

How to check where you really rank

Here is a conversation I have had more times than I can count. A business owner rings up worried. "I've just searched for us on Google and we're not there. Have we dropped off completely?" Or the other version, said with a bit of a shrug: "We're already number one when I search, so I'm not sure we need to spend anything on this."

Both of them are looking at their phone and reading it as the truth. And both are, more often than not, wrong, because the results you see when you Google your own business are not the results your customers see.

Google shows you a personalised version

If you are logged into your Google account, which most people are on their own phone, Google factors in your history. You have visited your own website hundreds of times, clicked your own listing, looked at your own reviews, maybe searched your own name a dozen times this month to check exactly this. To Google, that is a very strong signal that your site is the one you want, so it puts you near the top, for you.

Your customer has done none of that. As far as Google is concerned, you are one of several options they have never interacted with, and you are ranked accordingly. The number one position you are so pleased about might be a number six for them.

And a local version on top of that

Then there is where you are standing. Local results shift based on location, sometimes street by street. Picture a plumber based in Stroud checking "emergency plumber near me" while sat in their own kitchen in Stroud. Of course they come up. They are physically at the centre of the area Google is drawing results from. Now imagine the same search run by someone in Nailsworth, a few miles down the road. The map reshuffles around that person's location, and the plumber who looked like the obvious top result at home might not make the first three.

This is why I never trust a ranking check done from the business owner's own premises. You are standing on the most favourable spot on the map. It tells you almost nothing about how you look to someone across town who has an actual job that needs doing. (If you want work in a town you are not based in, how to get found in a town you're not based in covers what is and is not possible.)

The map pack and the blue links are two different races

When you search for a local service, you are usually looking at two separate sets of results without realising it. The map pack is drawn from Google Business Profile listings, which is what most of this article is about. Below the map are the ordinary blue links, the organic results, which is what most people mean when they say SEO. You can be sitting pretty in the map pack and nowhere in the organic listings, or the other way round. "Are we ranking?" is really two questions, and the honest answer is usually different for each.

A better way to check

None of this means you cannot get a real picture. It just means the quick glance on your own phone is not it.

• Search signed out. Open an incognito or private window and make sure you are signed out of Google. That strips away your personal history, though it still uses your location.
• Search from your customers' side of the patch. The simplest honest test is to ask someone who lives there to search and tell you what they get, or to check while you are actually over that way.
• Look at your profile's own figures. Inside your Google Business Profile there is a section showing how people found you, how many called, and how many asked for directions. That is real customer behaviour, not a snapshot staged from your own kitchen.
• Use Search Console. If you have a website, your analytics and Search Console show the search terms people genuinely used to land on you, which beats guessing every time.

Where the website still fits in

A strong profile gets you found, but it rarely closes the deal on its own. Plenty of people read your reviews, then tap through to your website to size you up before they call. If that website is slow, dated or vague about what you actually do, you lose them at the final hurdle, having done all the hard work to get them there. Relevance comes from pages that clearly say what you do and where you do it, in the words your customers use. The two work as a pair, which is part of why we build websites and handle local SEO together rather than treating them as separate jobs.

Your profile also feeds your paid advertising. The same reviews and location signals that lift you in the map pack make your Google Ads more credible, and location extensions can pin your map listing right onto the ad. Sorting the free profile first usually makes every pound you later spend on ads work harder.

Judge it by enquiries, not by your own screen

The real problem with checking your ranking on your own phone is not just that it is inaccurate. It pulls your attention towards the wrong scoreboard. A position on a page is not the point. Enquiries are the point.

A business can slip a place or two in the rankings and still have its best month for calls. Another can be sitting at number one and hearing nothing, usually because the thing letting it down is the website, not the ranking. Count the enquiries and where they came from; how to know if your marketing is working sets out a plain way to do it. And be patient: there is no trick here, anyone promising you an overnight jump should be treated with suspicion, and how long SEO takes to work is a subject in its own right.

Start with the basics, today

You do not need a budget or a marketing background to make a real difference here. Claim your profile, verify it, set a specific primary category, make your contact details consistent everywhere, and start asking every happy customer for a review. That alone will put you ahead of most local competitors, because most of them have never bothered.

SearchMaven manages Google Ads for businesses in Gloucestershire and, under white label, for agencies across the UK. If you want a second opinion on your account, ask for a free audit.