Nobody searches for your name

Ask a business owner where people find them and you usually get the same answer: word of mouth, and Instagram. Both are true, and both describe people who already know you exist.

The other kind of customer types something into a phone. Not your name — they have never heard your name. They type "dog groomer near me", "emergency plumber Saturday", "physio that takes evening appointments".

Why Instagram does not answer that

Your profile is built for people who are already on Instagram, already following you or already sent your handle by a friend. It is a good place to be remembered. It is a poor place to be discovered by someone who does not know you.

The practical part: the text inside your posts and your captions is not laid out for a search engine to read as a page about a service in a place. Your opening hours are in an image. Your prices are in a carousel from March. Your address is in the bio, abbreviated.

Search engines match a question to a page that answers it. If nothing you own is shaped like a page, there is nothing to match.

The three questions you are being asked

Almost every local search is one of three questions, and they are the ones a page can answer in plain text:

• What do you do, exactly? Not "beauty" — "gel nails, brows and lashes in Stockport".
• Are you open, and when? As text and as structured data, not as a story from last week.
• How much, roughly? The single most common reason someone leaves without messaging is that they could not tell whether you were in their budget.

Answer those three on an address you own, and you have something that can be found, linked to, and quoted. None of which your profile can be.

What to do this week

Two things, and the first is free. Claim your Google Business Profile if you have not: it is what puts you on the map, literally, and it takes an afternoon.

The second is to have one address that is yours, where those three questions are answered in text that a machine can read. It does not need to be a ten-page website. It needs to exist, load fast, and say what you do, where, when and for how much.

How to tell whether yours counts

Open your link on a phone, in a private window, and read it as a stranger. Then search for what you do plus your town, and look for yourself. If you are not there, the question is not whether your page is pretty. It is whether it exists as far as a search engine is concerned.