A profile built for a shop does not fit a yard off the M62. Eligibility, category and address are the three decisions that settle whether a Wakefield depot shows up or quietly gets suspended.
Google expects a location with staff present during its opening hours and permanent signage on the building. Those two conditions exist to keep the map honest.
A gated compound at Whitwood with nobody on it fails both. Listing it anyway usually works for a while and then stops working at the worst moment, because suspensions arrive without warning.
The safer arrangement puts the profile at the staffed office and describes the yard on the website. The yard still gets found, just through a page rather than a pin.
Primary category is not a label. It is the filter that decides which local searches your listing is allowed to enter at all.
A contract packer listed under a general business category is excluded from packing searches before ranking is even considered. No amount of description text recovers that, and the fix takes about a minute.
Pick the category matching the service that earns most, then add the rest as secondary. Distribution firms frequently discover their primary was set years ago by whoever created the listing.
Trades face the same trap in a different shape. An industrial door engineer listed simply as a builder competes against builders and never appears where facilities managers are looking.
Staffing and signage are the two tests worth applying before anything else. A staffed transport office qualifies comfortably. A locked compound with a keypad does not, and building a profile on it invites a suspension later.
Primary category is the single largest lever on local eligibility. Choose the term a buyer would use for the service that earns the most money. Everything else you offer goes in as a secondary category.
Unit number, estate name, town and postcode in a fixed order. The same string then goes on the website footer, the contact page and every directory entry. Variation between those copies is what makes a listing hard to trust.
Castleford, Normanton, Pontefract, Featherstone and Ossett are places Google recognises. A mileage radius is not. Listing the towns you genuinely cover beats claiming the whole of West Yorkshire, which dilutes rather than widens.
Drivers and visitors need to recognise the gate from the road. A picture of the entrance with the signage visible saves a phone call on nearly every first delivery. Interior shots of a warehouse rarely earn their place.
This case qualifies without argument. The common error is an address written three different ways across the profile, the website and an old directory entry.
Fixing the wording is a half hour job. It reliably outperforms a month of posting updates nobody reads.
Shared postcodes put unrelated firms in the same place as far as any map is concerned. The unit number is the only thing separating you from your neighbours.
Write it first and write it identically everywhere. Where the estate has a signed name, use the signed name rather than the developer marketing version of it.
A business travelling to its customers hides its address and sets service areas instead. Google supports that directly and it is the correct setting for most Wakefield trades.
List the towns actually covered rather than the whole county. Ranking in a service area still depends on where the searcher is standing, so an honest list costs nothing and a padded one earns nothing.
Map results are calculated from where the searcher happens to be. A Pontefract firm ranks well in Pontefract and poorly in Ossett, regardless of effort.
That ceiling is the reason a depot cannot rely on the map alone. National procurement buyers sourcing storage are not standing near your gate, and they never see the local results at all.
The rest of this material sits in the distribution and trades room, including the guide on how those buyers actually search.
Google asks for a location that is staffed during its stated hours and carries permanent signage. A gated yard with nobody on it fails that test and a profile there is at risk of suspension. The safer route is a profile at the staffed office with the yard described on the website instead.
The one that matches how buyers describe the thing they want, not the one that flatters the business. Primary category governs which searches you are even eligible for, so a warehouse listed as a general contractor is excluded from warehouse searches. Secondary categories widen the picture but never override the primary.
Write the unit number, the estate name and the town in full, in that order, everywhere the address appears. Several unrelated firms share these postcodes, so the postcode alone identifies nothing. Consistency across the profile, the website and any directory entry is what stops the listing drifting.
They matter less for ranking here than they do for a domestic trade, and they still matter for confidence. A procurement manager checking a shortlist reads whatever is visible. Two or three specific reviews from named business customers do more than a large count of vague ones.
Category, address consistency and service areas take ten minutes to check. Send the profile link and the towns you cover and I will tell you what is wrong with it, at no cost.