How your business gets found on Google

Start with the business profile, not the website

A Google Business Profile is the panel that appears on the right when someone searches for a company name, and the thing that puts you on the map when someone searches “electrician Solna”. It is free, takes half an hour to fill in, and usually matters more for a local business than everything else in this guide combined.

Fill it in completely: the address or the area you work in, opening hours, phone number, what you do, and a few photographs of real work. Half-filled profiles rank worse and look abandoned to anyone who finds them.

Google verifies the profile by card, phone call or video. Expect a few days.

What the website needs in order to be found

Most of what people call SEO for a small business is four things, and they take an afternoon:

1. Write down what you do and where. Not “integrated property solutions”, but “we replace roofs in Nacka and Värmdö”. People search using their own words.
2. One page title per page, saying what the page is. The title is the blue line in the search result. If it is empty, or identical everywhere, Google has nothing to show.
3. Contact details as text, not inside an image. Neither search engines nor phones can read a number in a picture.
4. The site has to work on a phone. Roughly two thirds of visits come from one, and Google judges the phone version first.

With those four in place you have done nearly all of the work that matters. The rest is refinement.

What takes time

A new domain does not appear within a week. Google has to find the site, read it, and then decide whether to show it to anyone. Expect a few weeks before you can be found by company name, and considerably longer for general searches like “website for my business”.

The harder the competition for a phrase, the longer it takes. On your own company name there is usually no competition at all, which is why that search comes first.

What we do not promise

We never promise a position in Google, and you should be sceptical of anyone who does. No supplier controls Google’s results. What can be promised is that the site is readable by search engines, fast, works on a phone, and says what you do. That is the precondition. The position follows from it, from the competition, and from time.

Be especially sceptical of emails saying you “risk disappearing from Google” unless you pay. That is always sales, never Google.

A sensible order to do it in

1. Claim and complete the Google Business Profile. Free, largest effect, can be done today.
2. Make sure the website says what you do and where, in text.
3. Add the site to Google Search Console, a free tool that shows what people searched for when they found you.
4. Ask satisfied customers to leave a review on the business profile. Reviews show up directly in the search result.
5. Wait. Steps four and five are the only ones that keep paying off over time.

What should be on the page once it is found is covered in what a business website should contain and in homepage copy.