Almost always one of six things. Your profile was never verified. Your categories are wrong or missing. Your name, address and phone number don't match everywhere they appear. You have too few reviews. Your website never says in plain words what you do and where you do it. Or somebody down the road is doing all six and you're not.
Take your phone off wifi and search the way a stranger would. Not your business name. The thing you actually do, plus the town. "Pool service Palm Coast." "Newborn photographer St. Augustine."
If you find yourself, the problem is smaller than you thought and it's fixable in an afternoon. If you don't, keep reading.
One more. Search your business name and look at the phone number Google shows next to it. If that's an old number, you just found something worth a lot of money.
In the order I usually find them.
Creating a Google Business Profile and verifying it are two different steps. Until Google confirms you're real and located where you say you are, the listing sits there and almost nobody sees it. A lot of owners did step one years ago and assumed that was it.
Your category is how Google decides which searches you belong in. Pick "contractor" when you do kitchens, or leave the secondary categories empty, and you go missing for the exact work you want.
Old number on one directory, old address on Facebook, suite number on one listing and not the other. Google sees three different businesses instead of one and doesn't fully trust any of them.
Reviews are a real chunk of how Google ranks local businesses. Six reviews against a competitor's ninety is not a close race, and it has nothing to do with which of you does better work.
The page says "quality craftsmanship since 2009." It never says "kitchen remodels in Palm Coast." One of those is a sentence a person types into Google. Google can only match you to the words you actually put on the page.
Not a bigger company. Usually a guy your size who claimed the profile, asks every customer for a review, and has a page for each thing he does. That's the whole advantage. It's copyable.
Google now writes an answer at the top of the page, above the map, above the list of businesses. If you're not in that answer, a lot of people never scroll far enough to reach the place where you are.
Nobody sent out a notice about this. It just started happening. Which means most of the advice you'll find about getting found on Google was written before it did, and it's quietly out of date.
That's the one nobody warns you about. You finally show up. Somebody taps through. Eleven seconds later they're back on Google looking at the next name on the list.
Not because you're not good at what you do. Because whatever you're good at feels completely ordinary to you, so it never made it onto the page.
I've sat across from owners who told me flatly there was nothing special about how they work, and forty minutes later told me a story that would have closed the customer by itself. It was in there the whole time. They just didn't think it counted.
That's the part I go looking for. Not a logo. Not a rewrite. The proof you already have and forgot about, and then a place where people can actually see it.
Everything above this is yours. Go fix it. You don't need me for any of it.
The other question is the one I'd rather sit down and ask you.
Book a sit-down