You search your own business and can't find it. Or your competitors show up first for stuff you know you do better. When that happens, there's usually one specific thing in the way. Here's what I'd check, roughly in this order.
The site is brand new
Google doesn't trust new sites right away. It takes time to find your pages and figure out where they belong. If your site went live in the last few months, part of this is just waiting.
No Google Business Profile
If you want to show up on Maps and in local results, you need a claimed and verified Google Business Profile. Without one, Google has no good way to show you to people nearby. Local SEO basics walks through how to set it up right.
Your site doesn't use the words people search
Google still leans hard on the actual words on your page. If you're a roofer in Seattle but "roofer" and "Seattle" barely show up on your site, Google has no reason to match you to that search.
Something technical is blocking you
A stray noindex tag, a bad robots.txt file, super slow pages, or a site that breaks on phones can all quietly hold you back. You usually don't see these unless you go looking.
And if you used to show up and your traffic dropped without you changing anything, that's a different problem. I wrote about why that happens. None of these are permanent. Once you know which one it is, the fix is usually simple. If you'd rather have someone look at it for you, that's what SEO and content work is for.