How to Check if Your Business Shows Up on Google

Here’s something most business owners never think about: when a potential customer types “plumber near me” or “best bakery in Clapham” into Google, does your business actually appear?

You’d be surprised how many people assume they’re showing up, simply because they have a website or a Google Business Profile. The truth is, you might be invisible to most of the customers searching for exactly what you offer - and you’d never know unless you check.

The good news: checking takes about two minutes and costs nothing. Here’s exactly how to do it.

Step 1: Google yourself in incognito mode

Open Chrome (or whatever browser you use) and open a new “incognito” or “private” window. In Chrome, that’s Ctrl+Shift+N on Windows or Cmd+Shift+N on Mac.

Why does this matter? Because Google personalises your results. If you’ve visited your own website, clicked on your own listing, or searched for your business name before, Google learns that and starts showing it to youmore often. It’s like the teacher calling on the kid whose hand is always up - except in this case, only you see it.

Incognito mode strips away that personalisation. What you see in an incognito window is much closer to what a brand-new customer would see.

Step 2: Search the way your customers would

This is the bit most people get wrong. Don’t search for your business name. Your customers don’t know your name yet - that’s the whole point.

Instead, think about what someone would actually type in when they need what you sell. If you’re a plumber in Marylebone, search for “plumber marylebone” or “emergency plumber near marylebone”. If you run a hair salon in Leeds, try “hair salon leeds city centre” or “balayage leeds”.

Try three or four different searches - the obvious ones and a couple of specific ones. You might find you show up for your exact service but not for the broader terms that get far more searches.

Step 3: Check Google Maps separately

When you search on Google, you’ll usually see two things: the regular blue-link results and, if it’s a local search, a map with three businesses listed below it. That map section is called the Local Pack, and it’s incredibly valuable - it gets more clicks than the rest of the page combined.

But here’s the catch: the businesses that appear in the Local Pack can be completely different from the ones in the regular results. You might show up in one but not the other.

To check the Local Pack properly, go to maps.google.com directly and search for your service there. Are you in the top three results? Can customers even find you if they scroll?

Step 4: Check from different locations

This is the one that catches people off guard. Google results change depending on where the person searching is standing. If you’re a jewellery shop in Shoreditch, someone searching from Hackney might see you, but someone two miles away in Islington might not.

You can test this roughly by asking a friend or family member in a different part of town to run the same search. If their results look completely different from yours, that tells you your visibility drops off quickly with distance.

For a more precise picture, professional tools use something called a “geo-grid” - they check your ranking from dozens of different locations at once, like a grid overlay on a map. That gives you a heatmap showing exactly where you’re visible and where you disappear.

The problem with doing this manually

Everything above works - but it gives you a snapshot of one moment in time. Google rankings shift constantly. A competitor gets a flurry of new reviews and suddenly leapfrogs you. Google tweaks its algorithm and your position drops three places overnight. A new business opens round the corner and pushes you off the first page entirely.

You wouldn’t know any of that happened unless you repeated this whole process every week. And realistically, you’re not going to. You’ve got a business to run.

What if this happened automatically?

That’s exactly what LocalPulse does. Every week, we check where your business ranks on Google for the searches that matter to you - both in the regular results and in the Local Pack. Every fortnight, we run a full geo-grid scan so you can see a heatmap of your visibility across your area.

You get a simple dashboard showing whether things are getting better or worse, which keywords are worth focusing on, and where you’re losing customers to competitors. No jargon, no hundred-page reports - just a clear picture of where you stand, updated weekly.

Not sure where you stand right now? Start with a free visibility audit. It takes 60 seconds, there’s nothing to sign up for, and you’ll get a report showing your current scores for speed, technical SEO, and Google Business Profile presence. If you want ongoing tracking after that, LocalPulse is £29/month, cancel anytime.