Is your Google Business Profile costing you customers? A 10-point check.
For most local businesses, your Google Business Profile is the first thing a potential customer sees — before your website, before a review site, before anything else. If it's out of date, thin, or inconsistent, you're losing enquiries you never even hear about.
By Darren Lock
When someone searches “[your service] near me,” or Google surfaces the local map pack for a branded or category search, your Google Business Profile is what they see first — not your homepage. It's doing more first-impression work than any single page on your website, and most small businesses haven't looked at it properly in over a year.
The profile doesn't need to be perfect. It needs to be accurate, current, and complete enough that Google trusts it and a customer trusts you. Here's what we check first when we run a Business Health Check.
The 10 checks
- 01
Primary category is specific, not generic. “Plumber” beats “Home Services” — Google uses this to decide which searches you show up for.
- 02
Secondary categories are filled in. Most businesses only set the primary category and leave real search volume on the table.
- 03
Name, address and phone number match your website exactly. Even small mismatches — a missing suite number, an old phone number — quietly erode Google's trust in the listing.
- 04
Opening hours are current, including holidays. A listing that says “open” when you're closed is one of the fastest ways to lose a customer's trust.
- 05
At least one new photo in the last 90 days. Profiles with recent photos get materially more clicks than ones with a five-year-old exterior shot.
- 06
Services or products are listed with real descriptions. This is free space to say exactly what you do, in the words your customers actually search.
- 07
The Q&A section is monitored. Anyone can post a question — and anyone can post an answer. Unanswered or wrongly-answered questions sit there indefinitely.
- 08
Reviews from the last 60–90 days, and you've responded to them. Recency matters more than total count. A response — especially to a critical review — does more work for you than the review itself.
- 09
Monthly updates or posts. A profile that hasn't been touched in months reads as inactive, to Google and to customers.
- 10
No duplicate or abandoned listings competing with the real one. A second, forgotten listing splits your reviews and your visibility.
One accurate line of business hours, fixed today, can save the phone call that never comes because someone thought you were closed.
What this actually costs, if you skip it
None of these individually feel urgent. Together, they're the difference between a profile that quietly generates enquiries every week and one that sits there looking fine while it slowly loses relevance. We've seen businesses lose real, measurable local visibility over 12–18 months without ever touching a line of their website — just because the Business Profile stopped being maintained.
What to do next
If you've read this and your honest answer to at least three of these is “no” or “not sure,” that's a normal starting point — not a crisis. Fixing the checklist above is genuinely a few hours of work; the harder part is knowing which of the ten actually matters for your specific business and search landscape, and keeping it maintained rather than fixing it once and forgetting it again.
This is exactly the kind of thing we look at, alongside your finances, in a Business Health Check.
Want this looked at properly, on your own profile?
A Business Health Check goes deeper than any checklist can — a combined review of your visibility and your finances, delivered by both of us, with a clear set of priorities at the end.