5 Simple Ways to Show Up Better on Google

Someone a few suburbs over just typed "electrician near me" into their phone. They're going to ring one of the first businesses they see. The job isn't to beat Google or outsmart anyone — it's to make it easy for Google to work out who you are, what you do and where you work. Do that and you turn up more often.

Here are five things worth doing, in the order we'd do them. None of it needs an agency and none of it needs you to learn what an algorithm is.

1. Finish your Google Business Profile

This is the free listing that puts you on the map and in that panel beside the search results. Most businesses claim one and then leave half of it blank, which is why this is first.

Claim it, verify it — properly, the postcard or video step that everyone starts and nobody finishes — then fill in every field:

• The right primary category. This is the single most important field on the profile. "Electrician" and "Electrical supply store" are completely different businesses to Google.
• Contact details you actually use. The number you answer, and a website link that works.
• Real opening hours, including whether you pick up on a weekend.
• Your services, listed one by one. Not "electrical work" — switchboard upgrades, safety switches, ceiling fans, EV charger installs. Each one is something a customer types.
• Your service areas, if you drive to customers rather than them coming to you.
• Photos. Ten decent ones off your phone — your work, your van, your team.

The reason this works isn't clever. A complete profile gives Google real information to match against real searches, and it gives a customer enough to decide you're worth ringing. A blank one gives neither.

If you haven't set one up at all yet, start with how to get your business on Google — it walks through the whole thing.

2. Get genuine reviews, and reply to them

Reviews are the closest thing to word of mouth that Google can read. They help you look like an established business, and more to the point, they decide who gets the call when three of you show up next to each other.

The practical version:

• Ask on the day, while the job's fresh and they're happy. Not three weeks later.
• Text them the direct review link. Nobody goes hunting through Google for it.
• Reply to all of them. A calm reply to a bad review does more good than the review does damage.
• Don't buy them, don't write them, don't offer a discount for them. It gets found out and it's not worth the risk to a profile you've spent years building.

Ten honest reviews from real customers beat fifty suspicious ones, every time.

3. Make your website say what you actually do

A lot of small business websites open with something like "Quality You Can Trust" or "Excellence Since 2004". It sounds professional and it tells nobody anything.

Compare that with "Electrician in Adelaide". One of those is a slogan. The other is a sentence a customer would type and Google can understand.

Your website should make four things obvious within a couple of seconds:

• What you do — the trade, in the words people use for it.
• Where you work — the city and the suburbs you cover.
• Who you help — homeowners, builders, strata, commercial, whoever it actually is.
• How to reach you — a phone number that's visible without scrolling.

Being plain isn't unprofessional. It's the thing that gets you rung.

4. Add pages for the work you actually do

One page that lists everything you offer in a paragraph is one page. A page for each main service is several — and each one can turn up for a different search.

For a sparky that might be:

• Electrical services in Adelaide
• Emergency electrician
• Switchboard upgrades
• Commercial electrical work

For a plumber: hot water repairs, blocked drains, emergency plumbing, bathroom renovations.

One rule, and it matters: only build pages for services you genuinely offer and areas you genuinely work in. The old trick of spinning up a hundred near-identical suburb pages doesn't work any more, and it makes a site look like spam to Google and to a customer who lands on one.

5. Keep your details the same everywhere

Your business name, phone number and website should match — character for character — everywhere they appear:

• Your Google Business Profile
• Your website
• Facebook and Instagram
• Any directory you're listed in
• Anywhere else you've ever put your number

When Google finds three different numbers for the same business, it has to pick one, and sometimes it picks the mobile you stopped using in 2021. Half an hour tidying this up is worth more than most of the clever stuff people will try to sell you.

Usual culprits: an old suburb from before you moved, "St" on one listing and "Street" on another, a trading name on Facebook and a business name on Google.

Quick Google visibility check

Run through this. Anything you can't tick is your next job.

How this shows up on the map

These five jobs do double duty. The same information that helps you turn up in normal search results is what Google leans on when someone searches locally or opens Google Maps — your category, your service areas, your reviews and whether your website backs any of it up.

If most of your work comes from a local area, it's worth reading how Google Maps works for tradies next. It goes into why the map picks who it picks, which explains a lot of the "why am I not showing up" frustration.

How long before any of it works?

Depends, and anyone who gives you a number is guessing. A finished profile can start showing up fairly quickly. Moving up in a busy category takes longer, and some searches are crowded enough that you'll never be first — you'll just be one of the few businesses that turns up at all, which is usually enough for the phone to ring.

None of this is magic and none of it is complicated. It's mostly just finishing things.

And if you've done all five and still can't find yourself, why your business isn't appearing on Google works through the rest of the usual causes.

And if you haven't got time for the website bit

Points one, two and five are genuinely DIY. Do them yourself and don't pay anyone a monthly fee for them.

Three and four need a website, and that's where most people stop — not because they don't see the point, but because the quotes come back at three or four grand. That's the gap ONYA fills: we build it, you pay monthly instead of upfront, and the domain, hosting and ongoing care come with it — $0 upfront, from $49/month, usually live in 7 days or less.

Have a look at how it works or some of the sites we've built if you want the detail.