Why your St. Catharines or Niagara Falls business isn't showing up in Google's map pack

The five usual suspects

The three businesses sitting in that little map box at the top of the results aren't there because they outspent you. In almost every case I look at, the business that's missing has one of five things wrong: the listing was never claimed, the address is set up as the wrong type, the primary category doesn't match what people actually type, the reviews are thin or stale, or the name and phone number say something different on four other websites.

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The five suspects, in checking order

1. Claim it
2. Fix the address type
3. Fix the category
4. Clean up listings elsewhere
5. Get reviews

That's the list, most of the time. Here's how to work out which one is yours, in the order I'd check them.

First, check from somewhere other than your own desk

Map results move block by block. Google shows a different set of three to somebody standing on Lundy's Lane than it shows to somebody on Lake Street, and it also leans on your own search history. Sitting in your shop, searching your own service, and seeing yourself right at the top is the most flattering test available and it tells you almost nothing.

So do it properly. Open a private window, or better, phone somebody at the other end of the city and ask them what they see. If you turn up when you're standing at your own front door but vanish three kilometres away, you aren't actually missing. You're just thin on the reputation side, which is a slower fix but a much better problem to have.

And if you're searching from Fort Erie for a St. Catharines result, of course you can't see yourself. That's the map doing its job.

Sitting in your shop, searching your own service, and seeing yourself right at the top is the most flattering test available and it tells you almost nothing.

The listing might not be yours yet

Google creates listings on its own, from directory data, from old submissions, from customers adding a place. Plenty of businesses have a listing they've never touched, and plenty more have one that a web designer set up years ago and never handed over.

Look up your business on Google and read the buttons. If you see "Own this business?" or "Claim this business," nobody has it. If all you're offered is "Suggest an edit," someone else does, and that someone is often a former employee or a company you stopped working with years ago. Either way you can start a claim and, if it's contested, Google will run a process to sort it out. It's slower than it should be, and it's worth doing, because an unverified listing is fighting with one hand tied.

Verification also lapses. If you moved, changed your name, or edited a pile of things at once, you may have been quietly pushed back into needing to verify again.

If you go to your customers, don't show an address

This is the one I fix most often, and it's the one people set up wrong with the best intentions.

Google treats two kinds of business differently. A storefront has a sign, a door, and somebody behind it during posted hours. A service-area business goes to the customer, and is supposed to hide its address and list the areas it covers instead. If you're a mobile welder working out of a driveway in Welland and your home address is sitting there in public on the listing, you've told Google you run a walk-in shop. That's a suspension waiting to happen, and in the meantime it can get you filtered out of results near businesses that do have real premises.

The reverse matters too. If you genuinely have a storefront with your name on the glass, show the address. Hiding it throws away the strongest signal you own.

Your primary category is doing most of the ranking

Of everything you can edit in the profile, Google leans hardest on the primary category to decide whether you're relevant to what somebody typed.

A roofer listed as "General contractor" is not going to be shown as a roofer, no matter how much the description talks about roofs. A physiotherapist listed as "Medical clinic" loses to the one listed as "Physical therapist." Go and look at the three businesses currently sitting above you. The category is printed right there on each listing. If all three say the same thing and you say something else, you've found your problem, and it's a two-minute fix that can take a week or two to show.

Set the primary category to the exact thing people type, then add secondary categories for the rest of what you do. Don't pile on ten of them. That dilutes the signal instead of widening it.

Reviews, and the phone number you changed years ago

Google's third factor is prominence, which is mostly reputation. Count the reviews on the three listings above you, then count yours. Look at the dates as well as the number. A dozen reviews that all landed the same year read like a business that quietly closed. A steady trickle, answered politely, reads like a business that's open and paying attention.

Then there's consistency. Your name, address, and phone number are sitting on Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp, the Yellow Pages, your chamber listing, and a handful of directories some web designer submitted you to a decade ago. When half of those disagree with your Google listing, Google gets less confident about all of them. Fixing the big ones isn't glamorous work, and it moves things.

Fix them in that order: claim it, get the address type right, fix the category, clean up the listings elsewhere, then start asking for reviews and keep asking. It's like a furnace that won't kick on in February. You want it to be the expensive thing so the bill feels justified, and nine times out of ten it's the thermostat or a filter nobody's changed in years.

If you'd rather not go through all five yourself, send me your business name and the town you want to show up in. Email hello@niagaraseo.com or call 905.682.4642, and I'll look at the listing and tell you which of the five is yours. It takes me about ten minutes and I'd rather you just knew.