How long until my business shows up on Google?

The first two or three months

Pages start getting listed and showing up for the searches nobody else wants: long, specific questions with your town in them. You'll see a handful of visits and think it isn't working.

It is. Google's own starter guide says some changes show up on its end in a few hours and others take several months. There's no way to skip that, which is the whole reason to put the site up before you need the work.

This is the stretch where it's tempting to quit and rebuild. Leave it alone, keep adding real pages, and keep asking every finished job for a review.

Three months to a year

Your home town comes first, because Google already ties you to it through the listing and the address. Then the towns next to it, then the ones a half hour out. Each one is a separate list you have to earn a place on.

How fast depends on things nobody controls: how many other businesses do your trade in that town, how long they've been at it, and how many reviews they have. A fencing company in a town of four thousand moves faster than a roofer in a metro. Nobody can promise a spot or a date, and anyone who does is selling something.

What speeds it up and what slows it down

What speeds up the listing is what Google says it looks for. It says businesses with complete and accurate information are more likely to show up in local results, and that more reviews and positive ratings can help. Fill in every part of the profile, keep it current, and ask every finished job for a review.

What slows it down: town pages that are copies with the name swapped, which Google's spam policies warn against as unoriginal pages made to rank; a listing that says one name and a site that says another; and moving the site to a new web address, which Google says can make rankings move around for a while as it recrawls.