What a Google Business Profile audit actually checks

Most business owners in Miami have never opened the back of their Google Business Profile. Someone set it up years ago, maybe a previous agency, maybe a nephew who was good with computers, and it has been quietly wrong ever since. That profile is the first thing a person sees when they search for what you do. Before your website, before your reviews in full, before anything, they see your name, your hours, your rating and one photo. If any of those is wrong, you lose the call, and you never find out it happened.

When I audit a profile, I go through it in the same order every time. I do it that way because the mistakes cluster in the same places, and because fixing them in the right order means you never redo work. Here is the whole checklist, in the order I run it, and what usually turns out to be broken.

Start with the boring facts, because they are wrong the most

The first four checks take five minutes and catch more lost calls than everything else combined. They are not exciting. They are just the difference between a customer reaching you and a customer reaching your competitor two blocks over.

• Hours. About one profile in three we audit has hours that do not match the door. Holiday hours are worse, because Google keeps showing last year’s until you change them.
• Primary category. Choosing "Dentist" instead of "Dental clinic" changes which searches you show up for. This one setting quietly decides half your visibility.
• Phone number. It has to match your website exactly, including the way it is formatted. A mismatch tells Google it might be looking at two different businesses.
• Address. Suite numbers get dropped, and a dropped suite number breaks the match between your profile and the directory listings that vouch for you.

None of this needs an agency. You can check all four in the time it takes to drink a cortadito. But almost nobody does, which is exactly why it is worth checking first.

Categories deserve their own paragraph

Your primary category is the single most important field on the whole profile, and Google gives you a secondary set on top of it. A roofer who only picks "Roofing contractor" is invisible for "gutter installation" and "storm damage repair", even though he does both every week. I look at what you actually get paid for, then I match it to the categories Google offers, primary first, then the handful of secondary ones that are genuinely true.

The trap here is picking too many. Categories you do not really serve dilute the ones you do, and they can trigger the wrong searches in the wrong neighborhoods. Fewer, truer categories beat a long hopeful list every time.

Photos, because Google shows them before your site

Google puts your photos in front of people before it puts your website. If your newest photo is from 2019, a blurry one of a sign, that is what a potential customer judges you on. I check when the last photo went up, whether the storefront is actually recognizable, and whether there is a single picture of a real human being who works there.

Two new, real photos a month beats fifty stock images that could belong to anyone. People can tell the difference, and so can Google.

The mix I aim for is simple: the storefront so people recognize it from the sidewalk, the team so it feels like a place run by humans, and the work so people see what they are buying. Phone photos are fine. Staged, over-lit, obviously-stock photos are not. They read as a business hiding something.

Reviews, and the replies underneath them

Everyone watches the star rating. Almost nobody watches the replies, and the replies are where the real signal is. Google reads them. So does every person deciding whether to call you. A profile where the owner answers every review, including the unhappy ones, in a calm sentence or two, outperforms a profile with a higher rating and total silence underneath.

When I audit reviews I look at three things: how many there are compared to the businesses ranking above you, how recent the newest one is, and whether anyone has bothered to reply. A business with forty reviews and no replies looks absent. A business with twenty reviews and a thoughtful answer under each one looks like somewhere a person actually works.

The parts people forget exist

Below the obvious fields there is a second layer that most owners never touch, and that is usually where I find the easiest wins.

1. Services and products. You can list every service with its own short description, and each one gives Google another true thing to rank you for.
2. Attributes. "Woman-owned", "wheelchair accessible", "free parking". These show as badges and they matter more than you would guess to the person choosing between you and the next result.
3. The Q&A section. Anyone can post a question, and anyone can answer it, including a competitor. I check for questions sitting there unanswered, and for wrong answers left by strangers.
4. Posts. Most profiles have never used them. A short post once a week keeps the profile looking alive, which is a small signal that you are open and paying attention.

Then I check that the rest of the internet agrees

A profile does not live alone. Google cross-checks your name, address and phone against dozens of other listings, from big directories to old ones you forgot you had. When those disagree, an old address on a defunct directory, a phone number from two offices ago, Google trusts you less. The last thing I do in an audit is pull your listings across the web and flag every one that does not match, so we can fix them and stop them quietly costing you.

What we almost always find

If I had to bet on your profile without seeing it, I would bet on wrong hours somewhere in the year, a primary category that is too broad, no photo newer than a year, and at least one review sitting there without a reply. That is not a criticism of you. It is what happens to every profile that nobody owns. The good news is that all of it is fixable in a couple of weeks, and most of it is free to fix yourself once you know where to look. When the website itself is the thing holding the profile back, that is where our web work comes in.

A special note for businesses with no storefront

If you are a plumber, an electrician, a mobile detailer, anyone who goes to the customer instead of the customer coming to you, your profile works differently and the audit changes with it. You run what Google calls a service-area business, and you should hide your street address and instead list the areas you actually drive to. I see two mistakes constantly here. The first is leaving a home address visible, which many owners do not want public and which can hurt you if it does not match a commercial listing anywhere. The second is claiming too large a service area out of hope, listing all of Miami-Dade and half of Broward when you really work a twenty-minute radius. Google can tell, and stretching the area thin makes you weaker everywhere instead of stronger somewhere. On a service-area profile I spend most of the time getting that radius honest and the hidden address set correctly, because those two settings decide whether the phone rings at all.

The description field almost nobody fills in

There is a business description box on every profile, seven hundred and fifty characters, and most owners leave it blank or paste a line from 2015. It does not move rankings much, but it is the first paragraph a curious customer reads, so I always rewrite it into a few plain sentences that say what you do, where, and what makes calling you the easy choice. It costs nothing and it is the difference between looking abandoned and looking run by someone who cares.

How often you should look at it

A profile is not a set-and-forget thing. Google changes fields, adds features, and sometimes edits your listing based on what other people submit, which means a profile you fixed in January can be wrong again by June without you touching it. I tell owners to open the back of theirs once a month for ten minutes: check the hours against the calendar coming up, add the two photos, answer any new review, and glance at the Q&A for anything a stranger posted. Once a quarter, do the longer pass and re-check the categories and the directory listings. It is fifteen minutes of maintenance that protects the single most valuable piece of real estate you have in local search.

If you would rather we ran the whole thing for you, this checklist is the backbone of our local SEO service and it is part of every audit we do, which is free. Ask for the audit here. You get the written findings either way, and you can take them to whoever you like.