Why is my business not showing on Google Maps: the six usual reasons.

Suspension, an unverified listing, a category that does not match the search, being too far from the searcher, a duplicate listing, or the business genuinely being outranked. Most cases are one of the first three.

The reason the order matters is that people almost always assume the last one. They conclude they are being outranked and start buying work, when the listing is actually suspended or was never verified.

The six, plainly

• The listing is suspended.

  You will usually have had an email, but not always, and the listing simply stops appearing to anybody but you.

• It was never verified.

  Common with listings created years ago by somebody who has left the business.

• The category does not match.

  The business is fine, but Google does not think it does the thing being searched for.

• The searcher is too far away.

  Not a fault. The map is drawn from where the phone is, and you fall away with distance.

• There is a duplicate.

  Two listings for one business split the signals and often bury both.

• You are genuinely outranked.

  Real, and the only one on this list that costs money to fix.

Open the listing while signed in as the business, search for yourself from a private window, and search from a phone standing somewhere else. Between those three you can identify almost any cause on the list.

Signing in tells you the status immediately. A suspended listing says so, and an unverified one prompts you to verify. That is the first two possibilities eliminated in about a minute.

Searching from a private browser window, not signed in, shows you roughly what a stranger sees. Searching from the same phrase while standing somewhere else shows you how quickly you fall away with distance, which is the difference between a fault and simple geography.

The three checks in order

• Sign in and read the status.

  Suspended, unverified, or live. This settles the two most serious possibilities straight away.

• Search yourself in a private window.

  If you appear and rank, the listing is fine and your problem is that you were checking while signed in and seeing yourself favourably.

• Search from another suburb.

  If you vanish two suburbs away, that is distance, not a fault, and pages are the answer rather than listing work.

The primary category. It decides which searches your business is eligible to appear in at all, and a category that is too broad quietly removes you from most of what you do.

A business listed as a general contractor is competing for general contractor searches. Somebody typing a specific trade may never see it, no matter how good the reviews are, because Google has been told the business is something else.

The fix is free. Choose the category that matches the single thing you most want to be found for, then put everything else in the services list and the secondary categories, where they belong.

This is also the most common cause of the situation where a business ranks well for its own name and nothing else. Google knows who you are, it just does not know what you sell.

Suspensions get appealed, unverified listings get verified, categories get corrected, duplicates get merged, and distance gets answered with pages rather than listing work.

A suspension is the only one worth treating as urgent, because until it is resolved nothing else you do is visible to anybody. Appeals are free, need documentation showing the business is real and at that address, and take days rather than weeks.

A duplicate should be merged rather than deleted, so the reviews on it survive. Deleting the wrong one throws away years of reviews permanently and cannot be undone.

If the honest answer is that you are outranked, that is a normal position to be in and the work is the ordinary work: finish the listing, get reviews moving, and write the pages. It is slower than the other fixes and it is the only one that builds something.

The map is redrawn from wherever the person is standing, so a single listing is strong at its own address and fades with every kilometre. In a region cut up by water and distance, that fade does most of the deciding.

Lake Macquarie is the clearest case. It is a council area wrapped around a saltwater lake and it takes the best part of an hour to drive across, so a business at Toronto and a business at Belmont are in different results despite being in the same LGA.

The Central Coast is the same problem twice. Gosford and Wyong ran as separate councils until 2016 and they still return different businesses, and the Peninsula behind the water at Woy Woy commonly shows a third set again.

This is why searching for yourself proves nothing. Standing in your own premises you are at the strongest point on your own map, which is the one place the answer is guaranteed to look fine.

What actually changes how far the pin reaches

• The service area, set honestly.

  A business that travels should say so and name where. A shopfront should not use it at all.

• Pages that name the places you really go.

  They reach searches the pin never will.

• Categories that match what you do.

  A listing under something too general is removed from the searches that pay best.

• Hours that are right, including public holidays.

  A listing showing as closed at the moment somebody searches falls down the results.

Three ordinary explanations account for most of it: the profile is unverified, it is suspended, or it is a duplicate competing with itself. None of them is a ranking problem and all three are invisible from the outside.

Duplicates are the one that catches established businesses. A profile created years ago by a former staff member, a franchise head office or a directory can sit alongside the real one, splitting the reviews and the signals between them.

Suspension usually follows a change rather than an offence: a new address, a new name, a category swap, or several edits in one week on a profile that had been stable. It is why bulk-changing an established listing is a bad idea even when every change is correct.

The last one is simply that the business is genuinely new. A profile with three photographs, no reviews and a two-month history is not being punished, it is being ignored until there is something to weigh.

One last practical check before assuming anything is wrong. Ask somebody at the other end of your service area to search for you on their own phone, not yours, and tell you what they see. Their result is the one your customers are getting, and it is frequently nothing like the one you get standing at your own desk.