Google Business Profile Help: The 15-Item Check I Run Before I Touch Anything

Somebody within two miles of you searched for what you do today. They didn’t visit your website. They looked at three Google profiles side by side — photos, hours, reviews, whether there was a button to press — and they picked one.

That comparison happens hundreds of times a month and you never see any of it. You see the result: a slow month you can’t explain, or a good one you can’t repeat.

Most “Google Business Profile help” you’ll find is a list of things to improve. The problem with a list of improvements is that it has no failing grade. You read it, you recognise a few items, you feel broadly fine, and nothing changes. What’s missing is a score — a number that tells you plainly whether your profile is working, so “probably fine” stops being an available answer.

So here’s the check I actually run, and five of its fifteen items in full. Open your profile in another tab. Score each one honestly: Pass 2 · Partial 1 · Miss 0.

1. Who actually holds the keys?

Is the profile claimed, is it verified, and do you hold owner access — or does a former agency still have it?

Open the Users panel. If your name is there as Manager rather than Owner, that’s a Partial at best. A manager can edit the profile. Removing somebody else from it is a different permission, and the person who set this up for you in 2019 may still be sitting on it.

While you’re there: does the business name match your signage? Not your signage plus the city. Not your signage plus the service. The name on the door.

2. Your category is probably one notch too general

This is the single highest-leverage field on the whole profile, and the one most often set wrong.

Pizza restaurant is a category. Restaurant is also a category. If you serve pizza and you’re in the second one, you are not competing badly for pizza searches — you are frequently not in them at all.

That’s the part owners miss. Category isn’t a ranking factor you optimise. It’s closer to an eligibility gate. It decides which searches you appear in; everything else decides how you do once you’re there.

Check your primary category, then check your secondaries. Most profiles have room for more than one and most owners set one.

3. When were the photos last touched?

The standard here is ten or more real photos, with something added in the last 90 days, so the profile reads as open rather than abandoned.

Nobody checks a date stamp. They don’t have to. They read the haircut, the signage, the menu board, the car in the background — and they can tell when the newest photo is two years old. A profile full of photos from a renovation you finished in 2023 tells a stranger something you didn’t intend to say.

4. Press your own booking button

Is there a button, does it work on a phone, and if messaging is turned on, can you answer fast enough to deserve having it?

Do this on your own phone, standing up, the way a customer will — not on the desktop where you set it up. Tap it. If it lands on your homepage and the person now has to hunt for the thing they wanted, that’s a Miss, regardless of how good the homepage is.

And if messaging is on but nobody is watching it, turn it off. An unanswered message is worse than no message option, because it’s a promise you visibly didn’t keep.

5. The quiet one: an empty Q&A

Reviews, you probably think about. Asked for on purpose, responded to every time — not just the bad ones.

Q&A is the one almost nobody looks at. It’s a section on your profile where anyone can ask a question, and anyone can answer it. Including people who don’t work for you. An empty Q&A isn’t neutral; it’s an open invitation, and the answer a stranger leaves there sits on your profile looking official.

Seed it. Ask and answer the five questions you get on the phone every week — parking, hours, whether you take walk-ins, what it costs, whether you come out this far.

The other ten, and what a score is for

Those are five of fifteen. The rest cover core information — name, address, phone, hours, holiday hours, website, attributes, service area, the boring fields that decide whether Google trusts you — plus products and services described in the words people actually search, and recent activity on the profile.

At the end you get a number out of 30 and a band that tells you where you stand, plus three lines to write down your lowest scores. That last part is the point. A score you don’t act on is just a slightly more specific bad feeling.

The Google Profile Check — free, 15 items, scored out of 30

If the number comes back low and you’d rather not spend a month working out the order to fix things in, the GBP Optimization Kit is $39 and carries a 30-day activation calendar and the review-request templates.

And if you’d rather someone just did it — that’s what I do. But run the free one first. You should know your own number before anyone quotes you a price.

Jamie Snow · Zipline Creative · Rochester, NY · 603-540-9238