You don't need a tool, an agency, or a course to know whether your business is visible on Google. You just need five minutes and your phone.
Run through these five checks right now. If any of them flag a problem, that problem is costing you customers every week — and it's fixable today.
The five checks
Search your business type + suburb on Google
Open Google on your phone. Search "[what you do] [your suburb]" — for example, "bookkeeper Fitzroy" or "massage therapist Newtown." Don't search your business name. Search what your customers would type.
Do you appear in the map results? Do you appear in the regular results? If someone else shows up where you should be, that's a missed customer.
Your Google Business Profile is likely unclaimed, incomplete, or missing the right keywords. This is the most fixable problem on this list.
Check whether your Google Business Profile is claimed
Go to business.google.com and sign in with your Google account. Is your business listed? Is it verified? An unclaimed profile means Google has basic information about you — but you don't control it. Wrong hours, wrong address, no description, no photos.
Claim it today. The verification process takes a few minutes to start. It's free. It's the single highest-impact thing you can do for local visibility.
Read your business description out loud
Go to your Google Business Profile and find your business description. Read it out loud. Does it include the suburb or city you work in? Does it include the specific service words your customers would type? Or is it a vague tagline about your passion and values?
Google uses this description to understand what your business does and match it to searches. If it's blank or generic, Google is guessing.
Rewrite it with your location, your specific services, and the words your customers actually search. Be concrete. "Remedial massage therapist in Newtown, Sydney. Specialising in back pain, stress, and sports recovery" beats "passionate about healing" every time.
Get your description written for you.
Answer 7 questions about your business. The Visibility Toolkit finds your exact keywords and writes your Google Business Profile description — specific to your business, suburb, and customers. One session. $49.
Get your visibility report — $49 →Count your Google reviews — and check the date of the last one
How many reviews do you have? When was the most recent one? Google weights recent reviews more heavily than old ones. A profile with 3 reviews from the past month can outrank one with 30 reviews from two years ago.
Also check: have you responded to your reviews? Responding signals to Google that your business is active and engaged.
Send one review request today. Not a mass email — one person, a personal message, a direct link to your review page. That's the most effective approach. Repeat monthly.
Check that your details match everywhere
Search your business name in Google. Look at your Google Business Profile, your website footer, any directory listings that appear (True Local, Yellow Pages, Yelp). Does your business name, address, and phone number match exactly across all of them?
"St" vs "Street." "Pty Ltd" in one place but not another. A phone number with a different format. These inconsistencies confuse Google and reduce your ranking in local results.
Update each listing to match exactly. Start with your Google Business Profile and your website — those are the two that matter most.
How to score yourself
The businesses that show up consistently on Google aren't doing anything complicated. They've just done the basics correctly — and their competitors haven't. That gap is still very much open.