Someone three suburbs over needs exactly what you sell. They pull out their phone, type a few words into Google, glance at what comes up, and pick someone. The whole thing takes minutes — and if your business doesn't show up properly in that moment, you never even knew you were in the running.
That moment is winnable, and it doesn't take a big budget. Most of it comes down to a free Google listing, a handful of recent reviews, and making sure the basic facts about your business are correct everywhere they appear.
People decide much faster than you think
Research from BrightLocal's 2026 consumer search behaviour study found that 75% of consumers decide which business to use in under 30 minutes, and 28% decide in under five. Even more telling: 72% look at three or fewer businesses before making up their mind, and only 1% look at more than ten.
So there's no long, considered shortlist. There's a quick scan, a gut call, and a phone call. Around 73% of local searches start on a mobile phone, which means the thing most people see first isn't your carefully designed homepage — it's a small listing card on a map.
That's your real shopfront. It's worth treating it like one.
Claim and finish your Google Business Profile
A Google Business Profile is the free listing that shows your business in Google Maps and in the little box of local results that appears above the normal search results. It's the single highest-leverage thing most small businesses can fix, and a surprising number haven't: BrightLocal's 2025 SMB marketing research found only 35% of small businesses had one at all.
Google's own guidance says customers are 2.7 times more likely to consider a business reputable when they find a complete Business Profile, and 70% more likely to visit. "Complete" is the important word. Half-finished profiles are common and they quietly cost you work.
Worth doing properly:
- Pick the right primary category. Local SEO practitioners surveyed for Whitespark's 2025 Local Search Ranking Factors report ranked your primary category as the single biggest influence on whether you appear in local map results. "Electrician" and "Electrical supply store" send very different signals.
- Fill in every field. Hours, phone, website, services, service area, payment options, the lot.
- Get your hours right, including public holidays. 62% of consumers say they'd avoid a business if they found incorrect information about it online. A Christmas closure you forgot to add is a customer walking to your competitor.
- Add real photos. Your actual team, premises, and work — not stock images. People are checking whether you look like a real operation.
- Answer the questions section. You can post and answer your own frequently asked questions, and it's a genuinely useful place to handle things like parking, callout fees, or after-hours availability.
Reviews are usually the tiebreaker
Once someone has two or three options in front of them, reviews decide it. BrightLocal's 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 85% say they're more likely to use a business after reading positive ones. Separately, 54% go on to visit the business's website after reading good reviews — reviews and your site work as a pair, not as alternatives.
The practical version of this is simple, and it isn't about gaming anything:
- Ask, every time. Most happy customers will leave a review if asked directly and given a link. Most won't think of it on their own. Google provides a short review link you can paste into an email, invoice, or text message.
- Keep them coming. A wall of glowing reviews from 2021 reads as a business that peaked years ago. Recency matters as much as volume.
- Reply to all of them. Especially the critical ones. A calm, specific reply to a two-star review does more for the next reader than the review itself does against you.
- Never buy them. It breaches Google's policies, and it's transparently obvious to anyone reading closely.
Make sure your details match everywhere
Your name, address and phone number are probably sitting on your website, your Google profile, your Facebook page, an old directory listing, and an industry association page you forgot about. When those disagree — an old suite number, a disconnected mobile — it creates friction for customers and confusion for search engines.
This is a boring afternoon's work with a real payoff. Search your business name and check the first few pages of results. Fix or claim anything that's wrong. Then keep a note of where you're listed so the next time something changes, you can update it all in one go.
Don't forget AI assistants are now part of the picture
This is newer, and worth knowing about without over-rotating on it. BrightLocal's 2026 survey found 45% of consumers now use ChatGPT or similar generative AI tools for local business recommendations. Research from SOCi's 2026 Local Visibility Index found that only 68% of business contact details shown in ChatGPT and Perplexity actually match what's on the business's Google profile.
There's no separate trick to optimise for this yet, and anyone selling you one is guessing. The honest answer is that the same fundamentals do the work: accurate details in lots of consistent places, clear pages describing each service you offer, and genuine mentions of your business elsewhere on the web. Getting the basics right is still the strategy.
Where to start
If you do nothing else this month: claim your Google Business Profile, complete every field, add ten real photos, and ask your last five happy customers for a review. That's a weekend's work and it will do more for your enquiries than most things you could pay for.
If you'd rather not spend that weekend on it — or you've done the basics and want to work out what's next — we're happy to take a look at how your business currently shows up and tell you plainly what's worth fixing. No jargon, no pressure. Get in touch and we'll have a chat.
A note on the figures above: BrightLocal's consumer research surveys US consumers. Australian behaviour is broadly similar, but treat the exact percentages as a direction of travel rather than gospel.