How to audit your Google Business Profile in 20 minutes
Your website is the page you built. Your Google Business Profile is the page most people actually see.
Someone searches for what you do, your profile appears with your photos, your hours, your reviews and a list of what you offer, and they decide whether to walk in or keep scrolling. Most of them never reach your website at all. Yet almost every owner I speak to has spent hours on the website and has never once sat down and properly read the profile.
This is that sit down. It takes about twenty minutes and you only need to do it properly once or twice a year.
Before you start
Open Google, make sure you are signed in with the account that manages the business, and search for your own business name. Your profile appears with an editing panel across the top. There is no separate app any more, you manage it from here.
Have a notepad open. You are going to find things you want to change but cannot fix in the moment, and the point of the twenty minutes is to get through the whole audit, not to get stuck on step two.
1. Your primary category, three minutes
This is the single most important field on the profile and the one most often left on whatever was picked in a hurry three years ago. It largely decides which searches you turn up in at all.
Read yours. Then search for the two or three competitors who consistently appear above you and check theirs. If they are all using a category you are not, that is not a coincidence, that is the reason.
Be specific rather than broad. If you are a barber, "Barber shop" beats "Hairdresser". If you fit tyres, "Tyre shop" beats "Car repair". The narrow category matches the way people actually search.
2. Secondary categories, two minutes
You can add more, and you should, but only for things you genuinely do. A cafe that also does breakfast can add it. A cafe that once catered a birthday party cannot honestly call itself a caterer.
Two or three real ones is better than nine hopeful ones. Wrong categories pull you into searches you cannot win, and losing those searches quietly teaches Google that you are not a strong result.
3. Services or products, three minutes
Most profiles have this section empty, which is a gift to whoever filled theirs in.
Add what you do, in the words customers use rather than the words your industry uses. Not "aesthetic treatments" but "wax", "facial", "gel nails". Not "domestic installations" but "boiler service", "radiator fitting". Price them if you are comfortable doing so. If you are not, a range still beats silence, because a customer who has no idea what something costs frequently decides not to find out.
4. Hours, including the ones you forget, two minutes
Check the normal week first. Then find special hours and put in your bank holidays and your Christmas closure now, while you are thinking about it.
Wrong hours are the fastest way to earn a one star review from somebody who never became a customer. They drove over, you were shut, and the only interaction they will ever have with your business is leaving that review.
5. Photos, three minutes
Look at what is actually showing, in the order it shows.
Customer photos eventually outnumber yours, so the question is not whether you have photos, it is whether the first four say the right thing. You want the outside of the building so people recognise it when they arrive, the inside so they know what they are walking into, the thing you sell at its best, and a person, because a business with a face in it feels open in a way an empty room does not.
If any of them are more than two years old and things have changed since, replace them.
6. Questions and answers, three minutes
This section is on your profile whether you use it or not, and if you ignore it a stranger will eventually answer on your behalf, incorrectly.
You are allowed to post questions and answer them yourself, and it is the correct thing to do. Write down the four questions you get asked on the phone every week. Do you have parking. Do you take walk ins. Do you do gluten free. Are you dog friendly. Post each one and answer it plainly.
Every one of those is a phone call you now do not have to take, and a customer who now does not have to guess.
7. Description and attributes, two minutes
The description matters less than people think and is still worth two minutes. Write what you do, who for, and where, in plain sentences. No slogans, no "passionate about excellence".
Attributes matter more than people think. Wheelchair accessible, outdoor seating, free wifi, women owned. These appear as filters, which means they are how somebody narrows a list of ten businesses down to three. Tick every one that is genuinely true.
8. Your review link, one minute
Find the share review form option and copy the short link. Save it somewhere you can actually reach, because a review link you have to go hunting for is a review link you will not use.
Put it on your receipts, in your email signature, and in the message you send after a job. That one link is the difference between meaning to ask and asking.
After the twenty minutes
Fix what you noted, then leave it alone. This is not a weekly job.
Put a reminder in for six months and do it again, because categories change, competitors change theirs, and the photo of the shop front stops being true the day you paint it.
The reason this is worth doing at all is that it is one of the very few things in your business where twenty minutes of attention has a lasting effect. Most of what you do has to be done again tomorrow. This does not.