Self-audit
38 checks on a profile that already exists, in the order a fail costs calls. Identity first, because an unowned or duplicated profile loses everything below it, and measurement last, because a fix nobody recorded the start of cannot be proved.
An hour, the profile account and a phone. The spreadsheet at the end is free.
For most local businesses the profile is the first thing a customer sees and the last thing anybody checks. It was set up once, by whoever was there at the time, and it has been edited since by Google, by customers and by strangers suggesting changes. The audit below reads it the way Google reads it, in the order Google decides, and the way a customer reads it, which is faster and less forgiving.
Work down it in order. Anything you cannot answer is a finding.
Start here, because an unowned, duplicated or suspended profile loses everything below it. Every check can be done in the profile itself or on Maps in a browser.
The primary category decides which map results the profile can appear in at all, and the services list is what Google matches against what people type. Most profiles leave the services empty.
Ring the number from another phone and click the website link on a phone. The address decision is the one that suspends profiles when it is wrong.
Real photographs only. The person choosing between two profiles chooses the one that shows something, and posts are what keeps the profile looking open.
Compare against the three profiles in the map pack for your main search, from the area, and read the dates: a steady trickle beats a burst.
Neither feeds the ranking; both decide whether the person reading acts. Answer your own questions before a stranger does.
The least interesting section and the one that caps everything else. One canonical name, address and phone, checked everywhere they appear.
Record the figures before changing anything, or there is nothing to compare against later.
The 38 checks above as a file you can fill in: one tab per section in the same order, a result column that only takes pass, fail or not applicable, a column for the evidence (the screenshot name, the address or the figure, which is the one people leave out and the one that matters, because a fail with no evidence cannot be handed to anybody), and beside every check where to look, what a fail costs and the fix. Every fail is copied to a Findings tab, and the Findings tab becomes the plan for the next thirty days.
Download the profile audit (Excel)
It opens in Google Sheets as well. No score, no email address to give, no price of ours in it. Use it on your own profile, or give it to a client with your name on the summary.
Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether local businesses still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.
Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.
By a distance the most common cause of a real collapse. URLs change and nothing redirects, or the new site ships with the staging robots.txt still in it. Both are entirely preventable and both are usually discovered weeks later.
One checkbox marked "discourage search engines", one SEO plugin defaulting to noindex on a template, one caching layer serving a stale page. Small change, total effect.
The Business Profile owned by a former agency, Search Console verified to somebody who has left, the domain registered to a developer. None of this hurts until the relationship ends, and then all of it does at once.
For a business that serves an area this is worse than any algorithm update, because it removes you from the map entirely and on the same day.
Nothing dramatic happens. Reviews stop, hours drift, a competitor keeps going, and a year later the position has quietly gone. This is the most common ending and the least noticed.
Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.
Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.
Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.
It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.
A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.
Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.
Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.
The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.
The same 38 checks, run on your profile and reported from the profile account rather than from a dashboard you have to take on trust, then fixed and kept up month by month.
A check of a profile that already exists against what Google reads from it and what a customer sees: whether it is owned and unique, whether the category and services match the work, whether the contact details are right and answered, whether the photographs and reviews give a stranger a reason to choose it, and whether every listing of the business agrees. The output is a list of fails with a fix each, not a score.
The audit finds what is wrong and what it costs; optimisation is the work of fixing it and then keeping it up, month after month. Run the audit first, because most profiles have three or four fails that cost calls today and can be fixed in an afternoon.
Most of it. Identity, category, hours, address, photographs, reviews and Q&A are visible on Maps to anyone. Only the Performance figures and the access list need the profile account, which is why getting access is the first finding when a business cannot sign in.
Every quarter, and after any change of address, phone number or hours. Profiles drift: strangers suggest edits that get accepted, photographs age, and a competitor's review count moves.
No. It affects whether the person reading the profile calls, which is the only reason to write it well. Keywords in it do nothing; keywords in the business name get the profile suspended.
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.
Message us
Ask anything about your site or where your enquiries are going. It goes straight to a person, not a bot. Leave an email and you get a reply.
