You have a website. You’ve had it for a while. But when you search your services in Myrtle Beach or wherever your customers are actually looking, your business isn’t there. Maybe a competitor you know is less good is sitting right at the top. That’s a frustrating place to be, and it’s one I see constantly with Grand Strand businesses.
Here’s what’s usually going on.
Your Google Business Profile is incomplete or wrong
The map results you see at the top of local searches — the three-pack with stars and hours and a phone number — those come from Google Business Profile, not your website. If your profile is unclaimed, has the wrong category, lists the entire United States as your service area instead of Horry and Georgetown counties, or just hasn’t been touched since 2019, you’re invisible in the most valuable local real estate Google gives away for free.
Fix it: claim and verify your profile, set your actual service cities, pick the most specific primary category you qualify for, and add photos that look like a real business took them.
Your website is slow on phones
More than 70 percent of local searches happen on a phone. Google knows this and factors mobile load speed into rankings. If your site takes four seconds to show anything on a phone, that’s working against you. Page builders, bloated plugins, uncompressed images, and shared hosting that can’t keep up are the usual culprits.
You can check your own site right now at pagespeed.web.dev. If the mobile score is under 70, it’s hurting you.
Nobody links to you and your content doesn’t exist
Google decides how authoritative your site is partly by who links to it and partly by whether your content actually answers questions people are asking. A five-page brochure site with no blog, no citations in local directories, and no other sites linking to it is starting from zero in authority. You’re competing against businesses that have been building that for years.
This isn’t a crisis — it just takes time and consistency to fix. Getting listed in the right local directories builds citations. Writing useful content that answers real questions your customers have builds topical authority. Neither one is fast, but both compound over time.
Your site doesn’t have location-specific pages
If you serve Myrtle Beach, North Myrtle Beach, Conway, Murrells Inlet, and Pawleys Island, but your website only mentions “the Grand Strand” in a footer, you’re not targeting any of those cities specifically. Google wants to see that you’re relevant to a specific place. That means content that mentions the city by name, talks about what you do there, and signals that you’re an actual local business.
Location pages done right aren’t just the same paragraph with the city name swapped. Myrtle Beach has a huge tourism economy. Conway is a residential county seat. Pawleys Island skews toward higher-income homeowners. Those aren’t the same customer, and the content shouldn’t read like it either.
Your site was built in 2017 and nothing has changed
A site that hasn’t been updated in years sends a quiet signal that the business may not be active. Regularly publishing content, keeping your service pages current, and adding new things tells Google the site is alive and worth crawling. You don’t need to post every week. You just need to not go dark for two years.
What to actually do
Most Myrtle Beach small businesses can make a real dent in their local rankings by doing a handful of things well: a complete Google Business Profile, a fast mobile-friendly website, a few location-specific service pages, and consistent content over time. None of it is magic. All of it takes work.
If you’re not sure where to start or want someone to look at what’s actually holding your site back, get in touch. I work with Myrtle Beach and Grand Strand businesses directly and a straight answer about what’s broken doesn’t cost anything.