How to check what Google shows for your own business name and services in five minutes

Open a private window on your phone, search your business name, then the three things you sell, with your town added. Do it again with a friend in another locality. Write down what appears in the top five results and whether the map shows you. That takes five minutes and shows you roughly what a buyer sees on the device they are likely to use, which a ranking report often does not.

Why your own search lies to you

Google remembers you. You have opened your own website a hundred times, signed in with your business email and searched from your office. Google shapes your results around all of that. Your site rises. Your map pin appears first because you are standing next to it.

A buyer in another part of the city sees a different page. So does a buyer on a different phone. The routine below strips out as much of your own history as it can. It cannot remove it entirely, which is why we use three places and not one.

The five-minute routine

Keep a pen or a notes app open. Each step takes about a minute.

1. Private window, phone first. Open a private or incognito tab on your mobile, not your laptop. Many local searches are made on a phone.
2. Your exact name, in quotes. Type your business name with quote marks around it. You would normally expect to be the first organic result, and the map should show your profile with the right phone number and hours.
3. Your name without quotes. A buyer who half remembers you types it loosely. See whether directories sit above you, and whether the wrong address appears anywhere.
4. Your main service plus your town. For example, "AC repair Indiranagar" or "CNC job work Peenya". Scroll past adverts, and note who is in the map block and who is in the plain results.
5. A question a buyer would ask. "How much does a root canal cost", "how to choose a packing machine". See whether a page of yours is cited, or whether a competitor's or a directory's page answers it.

Do not search for one phrase and decide anything. Run five and look for a pattern.

Repeat from three localities

Local results change by a few kilometres. Ask two people in different parts of your service area to run steps 4 and 5 and send you a screenshot. If nobody is available, change your location in your phone's search settings, or visit another area and try there.

Use a sheet like this one. Fill one row per search and one column per place.

If all three localities show the same row, the problem probably lies with your pages or profile. If only one locality differs, geography may be the reason, and a page for that area may be worth trying.

What the sheet tells you to do next

Read it row by row, using these rules.

• Missing for your own name. This is a basic fault. Look at your profile verification, your site's visibility to Google and whether your name is spelt the same everywhere. The post on why a website is not ranking lists the causes in order.
• First in your own area, absent elsewhere. You have a proximity result, which means Google is favouring whoever is closest. Pages for the areas you serve may help; local SEO covers the service side.
• Present in the map, weak in plain results. Your profile is fine and your pages are thin. Write one page per service.
• Directories above you for every service. Do not fight them on those searches. Make sure your listing on them is correct and aim for the searches they do not cover.
• A competitor answers the buyer's question and you do not. That is a page to write, not an advert to buy.

A packers and movers firm in Vijayawada

An invented example. An agency tells the owner of a packers and movers firm that the site is "on page one". The owner searches "packers and movers Vijayawada" from the office, sees the firm third in the map and almost renews the contract.

A nephew runs the same search from a phone in Benz Circle, in a private window. The firm is not in the map at all. Two friends in other localities confirm it. The business name search shows the old Gunadala phone number in a directory. The problem was never the website. The profile was set to the office address and the service area was empty, and a directory carried the wrong number. The owner corrects the number, sets the service area and writes a page for the household-shifting search, then re-runs the same sheet. The firm now appears in two of the three localities, but the directory still lists the old number, because it needs a form that takes its own time to process.

What this check cannot tell you

It shows one moment for a handful of searches. It cannot tell you how many people searched, how many clicked or how many became enquiries. For that you need your own enquiry register and the search reports your site owner can open. Use the sheet to find the first problem. Use the register to learn whether fixing it paid.

Run the sheet tonight

Draw the table, run the five searches on your phone in a private window and ask two people to send the same screenshots. Then, before you hire or fire anyone, bring the sheet to the conversation. Search is one front door among the many in your marketing, and a sheet like this tells you whether it is open. If the gaps are ones you cannot explain, see SEO strategy, or tell us what you need.