There are streets in your own town where your business doesn’t exist

Right now, four miles from your front door, somebody is typing your trade and your town into their phone.

They will get three businesses. They will ring one of them.

You have probably assumed you are one of the three. Most owners do — and near your own postcode, you very likely are. But go two miles north and it changes. Go three miles east and it changes again.

Google does not have one set of results for your town

It has a different set on every street. Where somebody is standing when they search matters as much as what they type, and for local trades it often matters more.

Which means “we come up on Google” is not a fact about your business. It is a fact about the specific spot you were standing in when you last checked — usually your own kitchen.

Why nobody checks

Because until recently, checking properly cost a few hundred pounds a month and you had to know what a geo-grid was. So owners check from home, see themselves at number one, and get on with their day.

The way to actually check is to sample your position at dozens of points across the area you serve and plot them on a map. Green where you are in the top three. Red where you do not come up at all.

Most owners look at that map for about four seconds and understand their entire marketing problem. The red usually starts about a mile from the front door.

What to do about the red

Three things, in this order, and none of them cost money.

Fix what is wrong before adding anything new. Somewhere out there a directory has your old phone number on it. Inconsistent details across the web actively work against you, and a wrong listing does more damage than a missing one.

Then claim what already exists. Plenty of directories have already created a page for your business from scraped data. It is your business and somebody else’s information.

Then, and only then, add the ones that matter. A handful of the right directories beats two hundred of the wrong ones, and most of the long tail are scrape-farms that exist to pad a report.

Check yours

We will run the map for you for nothing — put your details in here and we will email it within a day. No card, and nobody will ring you.

If it comes back green everywhere, genuinely well done, and you can stop reading. Almost none do.