How to get your business to show up on Google

Almost everything written about this is published by someone who wants to sell you local SEO. We went through the first page of results for the obvious searches: nearly all of it was agency or software lead-gen, and a good deal of it repeats statistics that fall apart when you look for the original.

So this piece labels its sources. When Google states something, we say so and link it. When it's a practitioner study, we say who ran it and how. When something is widely repeated but unproven, we say that too — including the popular tactics that testing suggests do nothing.

What Google actually says

Google publishes its local ranking factors, and there are three: relevance (how well your profile matches the search), distance (how far you are from the person searching), and prominence (how well-known the business is). Reviews feed prominence — Google says directly that “more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking.”

The same page contains a sentence worth keeping in mind:

Note what that leaves out. Distance is a hard ceiling: you cannot out-rank a competitor for someone standing outside their door. Anyone promising you “#1 in the city” is describing something the local pack doesn't do — results are different on every street corner.

Start here: claim and verify the profile

A Google Business Profile is free, and it is the single highest-leverage thing on this list. If you do nothing else, do this. You claim it at business.google.com/add — or through Google Maps if an unverified listing already exists for you.

Verification is by video, phone, text, email, or a mailed postcard. Google says review takes up to five business days, and the postcard route takes about two weeks. If you go the video route, Google asks the recording to show three things: where you are (street signs, neighbouring businesses), that the business is real (equipment, branded materials, stock), and that you run it (access to staff-only areas, the till, storage).

One warning that isn't obvious: Google says editing your category can trigger re-verification. Get it right early rather than fiddling later.

The fields that actually move something

Reviews: the rules are stricter than most people think

Reviews are the part of prominence you can influence, so they attract the worst advice. Google's policy is short and clear. You may ask customers for reviews. You may not:

• Offer anything in exchange — payment, discounts, free goods, a prize draw. That includes offering something to change or remove a bad review.
• Selectively solicit positive reviews, or discourage negative ones. This is “review gating” — asking how someone feels first and only sending the happy ones to Google. It is against policy.
• Ask for specific content, or require people to review while on the premises.
• Have staff, contractors or family write them.

Google's own summary of what is allowed: solicit or encourage content that represents a genuine experience, without offering incentives. Ask everyone, ask plainly, offer nothing.

This is also US federal law now, not just a platform rule. The FTC's rule on consumer reviews took effect in October 2024, banning fake reviews, undisclosed insider reviews, and review suppression. And it's worth knowing that the FTC's headline enforcement case was about suppression, not fakery: Fashion Nova paid $4.2 million in 2022 for blocking reviews below four stars — which is the polite version of exactly what review gating is.

(If you see that fine quoted as “$4.2 billion”, or review gating attributed to the Consumer Review Fairness Act, both are wrong and widely copied.)

What testing suggests about quantity

• Sterling Sky found a threshold effect around 10 reviews — going from 9 to 10 moved rankings; 10 to 11 did nothing. Diminishing returns after that.
• Recency beats total. In their larger study, reviews received this month mattered more than lifetime count, and a client who paused collection for a couple of weeks saw rankings fall away.
• Reviews with written text outperform star-only ratings.

Things you can stop doing

This is the section the lead-gen content never writes, because most of these are billable. Each of the following is commonly sold as a ranking tactic and doesn't appear to be one.

• Google Posts. Sterling Sky tracked hundreds of keywords over nine weeks and measured no ranking impact. Posts are useful for telling customers things — not for rankings.
• The Q&A section. We found no credible evidence it affects ranking. Answer real questions because they're real questions.
• LocalBusiness schema for ranking. Google's documentation describes structured data as enabling rich results — it never says it affects ranking, and Google explicitly doesn't guarantee the features will show at all.
• Setting a bigger service area. It controls the map region shown, not where you rank.
• Blasting your details to 100+ directories. Citation signals rank near the bottom of practitioner surveys, and the strongest claim we could find for NAP consistency traced to a case study with no methodology on a site that sells directory listings. Keeping your name, address and phone consistent is basic hygiene — it is not a growth lever.

And one thing that does work but which you should still not do: stuffing keywords into your business name. Testing shows it moves rankings within hours. It also violates Google's name policy — the name must be the one you actually trade under — and competitors report it. The documented outcome of getting caught is a fall down the rankings, and at worst a suspended profile and total invisibility.

If you travel to customers

Mobile detailers, plumbers, handymen, mobile trainers: this is your fork in the road, and it's the one place where the honest answer is “the evidence conflicts”.

Google's policy is unambiguous: if you travel to customers, you should hide your address and define a service area. P.O. boxes and mailbox services are never eligible.

But the best available testing disagrees with the outcome. Sterling Sky ran a month-long controlled test on a home-services business: hiding the address produced a significant drop in rankings and calls, and restoring it restored them. Their 8,186-business study found the same direction — service-area businesses with hidden addresses correlated with worse rankings. Their own caveat matters, though: the effect is inconsistent, and they couldn't determine why some hidden-address businesses do fine.

Meanwhile Whitespark's 2026 survey placed a visible address only seventh among factors, and argued the industry may be overstating the damage.

What to take from that: if you have a genuine, staffed premises, showing it is probably better for visibility. If you work from home, you are choosing between a possible ranking cost and publishing your home address to the internet — with real suspension risk if the listing doesn't meet Google's rules. That is a legitimate trade-off, not a solved problem, and anyone telling you it's simple hasn't read the testing.

What a website actually contributes

Here's the honest version, since we have an obvious interest in the answer: you do not need a website to appear in the local pack, and no source we found — Google included — states that merely having one lifts your local ranking.

What is evidenced is narrower and more specific:

• A dedicated page per service was the top-ranked website factor in Whitespark's 2026 survey for local organic results. One page listing eight services is weaker than eight pages, one per service.
• Substantive content on the landing page correlated with better local pack rankings in the 8,186-business study — with the authors stressing quality and relevance over word count, and that correlation isn't causation.
• It's the surface that AI assistants and search engines can actually read and cite. Your Google profile can't answer “do they do ceramic coating on classic cars?”. A service page can.

The AI question, calmly

Every article on this subject right now says AI is upending local search. Two things are true at once, and nobody puts them side by side.

Consumer behaviour really has shifted. BrightLocal's February 2026 survey of 1,002 US adults found 45% now use AI tools for local business recommendations — up from 6% a year earlier — making AI the third most-used discovery channel. Google's share fell from 83% to 71%. Apple Maps nearly doubled, 14% to 27%.

But for the searches that actually bring you customers, the old surface still dominates. Whitespark studied 540 queries across three cities and six industries, split by intent. For local-intent searches — the “barber near me” type — local packs appeared 93% of the time and AI Overviews just 15%. The relationship inverts for informational queries: AI Overviews 92%, local packs 6%.

Sterling Sky's 2026 client data points the same way: for their largest multi-location client, ChatGPT referral traffic amounted to about 2% of Google's — still only a fifth of what Bing sends.

The practical conclusion is unglamorous. Keep your Google profile accurate, because it directly feeds Google's AI surfaces and Gemini. Spend twenty minutes on Apple Business Connect, which is free and — since late 2024 — open to businesses with no storefront. Then get back to work. You do not need an “AI optimisation” retainer.

What to actually expect

• Verification: days. Up to five business days, or about two weeks by postcard. This part is documented and fast.
• Profile changes: sometimes hours. Testing has measured service additions moving rankings in 24–72 hours. The blanket claim that “local SEO takes six months” is wrong for profile fields.
• Reviews: weeks, and then ongoing. The first ten matter most, and the effect decays if you stop.
• Everything else: genuinely unknown. There is no controlled study on how long local SEO takes. The “three to six months” figure comes from surveys of practitioners who bill monthly. Treat precise promises accordingly.

If you only do five things

• Claim and verify your Google Business Profile.
• Set the most specific primary category that fits, and get your hours right.
• Add your services using Google's pre-defined list.
• Ask every customer for a review. No incentives, no filtering. Get past ten, then keep going.
• Claim Apple Business Connect too — it's free and usage is climbing fast.

That's most of the available value, it costs nothing, and it takes an afternoon.