Get found when someone nearby searches for what you do — and stay found.
Someone a few kilometres away picks up their phone and searches for exactly what you do. Three businesses appear on the map above the results. If you are not one of them, that customer never knows you exist — and you never know you lost them.
For most South African small businesses this is not because their Google Business Profile is bad. It is because nobody has touched it since it was created, or nobody ever claimed it at all. The categories are wrong or missing, there are three photos from 2019, the hours have never been corrected, and no one has replied to a review in years. Google reads all of that as a business that may not still be trading.
Four screenshots from profiles we manage, in the order the work happens — the first three are one customer, start to finish.
Google Business Profile stages: item 1 of 4
When Google chooses the three businesses to show on the map, it weighs three things: how relevant you are to what was typed, how close you are to the person searching, and how prominent your business appears to be. You cannot change the second one. The other two are almost entirely down to how your profile is set up and how alive it looks.
Relevance is the mechanical part — categories, services, and the words in your profile matching the words people search. It is also the part most often left half-finished, because Google does not tell you it is wrong. It just quietly ranks someone else.
Prominence is slower. It is built from reviews, from photos, from posts, from consistency between what your profile says and what the rest of the web says about you. It is the part that rewards showing up every week rather than once.
Google works out that your Business Profile, your website, and any directory listing all refer to one business by checking whether the name, address and phone number agree. When they disagree — an old suite number here, a different phone there — Google is less certain the listings are the same business, and less certain businesses rank lower.
Fixing this is unglamorous and it is one of the highest-return things we do. It is also why we keep your details consistent across everything we manage for you rather than treating the website and the profile as separate jobs.
Local search is not a project that finishes. The businesses around you are adding reviews and photos every month, and a profile that stops moving slides down as theirs move up. That is the reason this is a subscription and not a once-off setup fee.
It also means the work is not urgent in any single week and compounds across many. The monthly report exists so you can see that happening rather than take our word for it.