Local SEO Guide
Three completely different problems get described with the same sentence. Work out which one you have first — the fix for each is unrelated, and guessing wastes months.
Troubleshooting8 min read
Before you change anything, run three searches in a private browsing window while signed out of Google. Each one isolates a different failure.
Search your main service plus your city in an incognito window. If the three-listing map pack shows competitors and not you, this is a Google Business Profile problem — verification, category, address, or filtering. It is almost never a website problem.
Same search, but scroll past the map. If your website isn't in the regular results either, this is an indexing or content problem: Google may not have your pages, or you have no page that matches what was searched.
Search your exact business name in quotes. If nothing appears, something is badly wrong — an unverified or suspended profile, a duplicate listing outranking the real one, or a site Google can't crawl at all. Fix this before anything else.
Most "we've disappeared from Google Maps" cases end here. Run every check in order — the earlier ones make the later ones irrelevant.
This is the single most misunderstood part of local search. Google weighs the distance between the searcher and your business heavily, so the map pack you see standing in your own shop is not the map pack a customer sees three miles away. Someone searching from Wellington gets a different set of results than someone on Clematis Street, even for the identical query.
So "I don't show up" often means "I don't show up where my customers are." You can't move your building, but you can widen the radius where you're eligible: genuinely local pages for each area you serve, reviews that mention those areas, and links from organizations in them. Checking your rank from a single location — your desk — will keep hiding the real picture.
Google filters listings it thinks are duplicates or violations. The listing still exists, still looks fine in your dashboard, and simply never appears in results. Common triggers: two businesses at the same address in the same category, an old listing from a previous location, a name stuffed with keywords ("Bob's Plumbing — Best Plumber West Palm Beach"), or NAP details that conflict across the web.
Conflicting name, address, and phone data is the cheapest of these to fix and the one most businesses have. Cleaning up your citations resolves a surprising share of filtering cases on its own.
If your site is missing from the regular results, check the boring things first. A noindex tag left on after a redesign, a robots.txt blocking crawlers, or a staging site that got published will each remove you from Google completely. Search site:yourdomain.com — if few or no pages come back, that's your answer.
The other common cause isn't technical: you have no page that matches what people search. A homepage saying "quality service since 1998" can't rank for "emergency ac repair west palm beach" because it never says it. One clear page per service, per area you actually serve.
A brand-new profile with four reviews competing against firms that have been collecting them for a decade isn't broken — it's early. New listings typically need a few months of consistent activity, reviews, and local signals before they hold a map pack position. If every check above comes back clean, you don't have a bug; you have a ranking program to run.
We'll run through all of this for you and tell you exactly which of the three problems you have — free, and with no contract attached. Request a free local SEO audit and we'll check your profile, your map pack position from several points around Palm Beach County, and your site.
We'll run a free local audit — map pack position, competitor gaps, and the fixes that move the needle first. No contract, no pressure.
