Google Business Profile audit

1. Open your Google Business Profile in another tab — the manage view, not the public listing.
2. Work through the five groups and tick only the items that are genuinely in place today.
3. Pay particular attention to the identity group: exact-match name, address and phone are the cheapest wins available.
4. Generate the priority list and read the top three items. Those are your afternoon.
5. Copy the list as text and work down it, rather than trying to do everything at once.
6. Come back in a month, re-tick, and see what is left.

One check is worth failing loudly if it is untrue: no incentivised or gated review requests. That is a removal risk rather than a ranking risk, and it belongs at the top of any list it appears on.

A percentage tells you that you are at sixty-four percent. It does not tell you whether the missing thirty-six is one important item or nine trivial ones, and it does not tell you where to start. Most people read the number, feel mildly bad, and close the tab.

The queue is ordered by impact first and then by cheapness, so a high-impact five-minute correction always outranks an ongoing habit of the same importance. That ordering matters: a list that puts "post monthly" above "remove the keywords from your business name" is technically complete and practically useless.

The output is deliberately exportable as plain text, because the useful version of this is a list on your phone that you work down, not a dashboard you revisit.

Google publishes that local results are ranked on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. It publishes what those words mean in general terms. It does not publish weights, thresholds, or how the three combine — and it never has.

Everything more specific than that, including the impact labels on this page, is inference. Ours is drawn from what Google documents as mattering, from what changes when businesses change it, and from the consensus among people who work on this daily. That is a reasonable basis for ordering a list and an unreasonable basis for a confident claim.

So the labels here say High, Medium and Low rather than percentages, and the page says plainly that they are judgements. Any tool giving you a numeric ranking factor weight for a Google Business Profile item is inventing precision, and the invention is usually in the direction of whatever they are selling.

Two things are worth stating clearly because they are frequently oversold. Posting weekly has a modest direct effect on ranking, whatever the agencies selling posting packages say. And no amount of profile optimisation overcomes distance — a perfect profile across town loses to an average one next door, on most searches, most of the time.

• Be verified. An unverified profile ranks far worse and can be edited by strangers. Nothing else on the list matters until this is done, and verification can take a fortnight, so start it today.
• Get the primary category right. This is the single biggest relevance lever you control. The most specific accurate category beats a broader one — Emergency Plumber over Plumber over Contractor — provided it is genuinely what you do.
• Match your details exactly. Name, address and phone identical between the profile and your website, character for character. "Ste 4" against "Suite 4" is enough to weaken the association, and fixing it takes two minutes.
• Link your website. A profile with no website sends every interested visitor to a dead end, and loses the strongest signal connecting the two.
• Get recent reviews. Volume and recency both matter, and both are entirely within your control. Eight reviews from this year beat thirty from four years ago on the thing that actually persuades a reader.

Notice that four of those five are one-off jobs measured in minutes, and only the last is ongoing. Most of the available improvement in a neglected profile is an afternoon of work, which is why this is nearly always the cheapest marketing available to a local business.

You will find advice suggesting you add keywords to your business name — turning "Dave's Plumbing" into "Dave's Plumbing | Emergency Plumber Boise 24/7". It is presented as a hack, and it is against Google's guidelines.

It is also one of the more actively enforced rules, partly because competitors report it. Reporting a keyword-stuffed name is trivial and the edit frequently goes through, at which point your listing quietly reverts.

The worst case is not the reversion. Repeated guideline violations contribute to suspension, and a suspended profile is a genuinely difficult thing to recover — the appeals process is slow, opaque, and offers no guarantee.

The upside was never large. Google has become progressively better at discounting keywords in names, and the relevance you were trying to buy comes from the category and services fields for free, without the risk.

Two practices are explicitly prohibited and both are common. Incentivising reviews — a discount, a prize draw, anything of value in exchange — is against the policies. And gating, meaning asking customers how satisfied they are and only showing the review link to the happy ones, is also against them.

The penalty is not a ranking adjustment. It is review removal or profile suspension, which means the practice can wipe out the very asset it was meant to build.

The compliant version is straightforward and works better anyway: ask everyone, the same day you finish, by text, with the direct link. Do not filter. Include a line inviting anyone unhappy to come to you first — that is the honest version of gating, because it gives someone with a complaint a better option without hiding the link from them.

Then reply to everything, including the negative ones. A calm, specific reply to a one-star review persuades more prospective customers than the five-star reviews do, because it is the only place on your profile where a reader can see how you behave when something goes wrong.