Why isn’t my Google Business Profile showing up?

The triage checklist, in order

• 1. Is it verified? An unverified profile doesn’t appear in the pack — full stop. Sign in to your Business Profile and check the status. If verification stalled or the postcard never arrived, that’s almost always step zero before anything else is worth doing.
• 2. Is it suspended? A suspended profile vanishes from search. The two usual triggers: a business name padded with keywords (“Tampa #1 Emergency AC Repair & Heating Co”) instead of your actual registered name, and an address problem — a virtual office, a co-working space, an address that doesn’t match what’s on the building or in public records. Fix the underlying violation first — rename to your real name, sort the address — then file for reinstatement through the profile, with evidence (registration, a utility bill, signage photos). Don’t appeal without fixing the cause; it’ll just get denied again. The name-and-address traps are unpacked on Google Business Profile: the settings that move the pack.
• 3. Is the primary category right? If you’re an electrician listed under “Electrical supply store”, Google won’t surface you for “electrician near me” — the category is how it knows what searches you belong in, and the primary one carries the most weight. Set it to the closest match to what you actually do, then add secondaries for the rest.
• 4. Is the address / service-area set correctly? If you serve customers at their location and don’t have a storefront they visit, you should be a service-area business — address hidden, service areas listed — not a storefront with a fake address. Get this wrong and Google either can’t place you or flags you. The legitimate way to do it is on can I rank without a storefront address.
• 5. Is it brand-new? A freshly verified profile takes time to settle into the rankings — days to a few weeks before it stabilises, longer to climb. If everything above checks out and the listing is young, the answer may just be: not yet. How long it takes covers the realistic timeline.
• 6. Is there a duplicate? Two listings for the same business — an old one from a previous owner, an auto-generated one, a “suite B” variant — split your signals and confuse Google about which is real. Find them (search your name, your old phone numbers, your old addresses), claim them, and merge or remove the dupes. This is the same NAP-hygiene problem covered on citations and NAP consistency.
• 7. Are you searching from outside your service area? The pack is personalised to where the searcher is. Searching your own business name from a hotel two cities away and not seeing yourself near the top doesn’t mean you’re not ranking — it means you’re not near that searcher. Check from inside the area you actually serve, or use a tool that simulates location. This is the same effect that makes a worse-reviewed competitor outrank you for someone standing near their door.
• 8. Is there a real website behind it? A profile pointing at a three-page site that says nothing about what you do or where gives Google little to confirm the listing’s relevance. A slow or thin site also burns the click once you do rank — see site speed and conversions. The site is the slowest of these to fix but it’s the one that lifts the ceiling.

If you’ve worked the list and it’s still wrong

Once verification, suspension, category and address are all clean and a duplicate isn’t fighting you, “not showing up” usually becomes “not showing up high enough” — which is a ranking problem, not a visibility one, and that’s a different question. The whole system, from the profile out to the site and reviews, is on the local SEO hub. If you’d rather have someone read the listing and the site and tell you which of the eight it is, that’s what the SEO audit does — or send your URL for a free 5-minute version first.

“It’s not showing up” is rarely a mystery. It’s verification, a suspension, a category, or you’re standing in the wrong place when you check. Work the list before you panic.