Stop Assuming Your Google Business Profile Is Fine
Most owners fill out their Google Business Profile once, at the start, and never open it again. Categories go stale. Hours drift out of date after a holiday nobody remembered to update. Meanwhile a competitor two doors down is adding photos monthly.
A real audit, the kind you should expect from anyone charging you for local SEO, does not start with a checklist. It starts with a question: what would what a real GBP audit looks like actually reveal if someone competent sat down with your specific profile for twenty minutes instead of running a generic template against it.
Start with categories. Your primary category should be the single most accurate description of what you do, not the broadest one. Add every secondary category Google offers that genuinely applies, since these are searchable fields most businesses leave half filled.
Photos matter more than owners expect. Profiles with recent, real photos of the actual location tend to get noticeably more engagement than ones running on a single logo image from the day the business opened. Same with the services and products sections, which are also searchable and almost always neglected.
Then check your Q and A section. Anyone can post there, including competitors posing as customers, and stale or wrong answers sitting unanswered do not help you. Same with posts. A profile with no update in six months reads as inactive even if the business behind it is thriving.
A distinction worth making here, since people tend to blur it: a Google Business Profile audit is not the same thing as a full website SEO audit, even though both get sold as SEO. The profile audit lives entirely inside Google’s own ecosystem, categories, photos, posts, reviews, hours, attributes. A website audit looks at your actual site, page speed, meta tags, internal linking, content quality. A business can have a flawless website and a neglected profile, or the reverse, and an agency that only ever audits one while billing for both is not giving you the full picture.
Attributes are the field almost nobody checks, and they matter more than their small size on the profile suggests. Wheelchair accessible entrance, women led, identifies as veteran owned, outdoor seating, these are searchable and filterable, meaning a customer can specifically filter search results by them. If your business genuinely qualifies for attributes you have never selected, you are invisible to anyone filtering by that exact criteria, which is a small but real slice of lost visibility that costs nothing to fix.
Messaging and booking features are worth a look too, if your category supports them. A profile with messaging turned on and actually monitored responds to the exact moment a searcher is deciding between you and a competitor, standing in their kitchen deciding who to call first. A profile with messaging turned on but never answered is arguably worse than having it off, since an unanswered message signals neglect directly to the person deciding whether to trust you.
None of this requires an agency. It requires twenty minutes and a willingness to look at your own profile the way a stranger searching for you would. Do that first. Then decide whether you need help, and if you do, ask specifically what part of this list they intend to touch, not a vague promise to manage the profile.
Products and services descriptions get overlooked constantly, and they matter more than their placement on the profile suggests. Google allows a short description for each service and product listed, and leaving these blank while only listing the name means missing an entire field of searchable text that a competitor with fully written descriptions is capturing instead. Ten minutes spent writing a sentence or two for each service listed is one of the highest return, lowest effort fixes available on the whole profile.
Ownership and access are worth confirming too, separate from the content of the profile itself. It is common for a profile to have been originally claimed years ago by a web developer, a former employee, or a marketing contractor who has since moved on, leaving the actual business owner without primary access to their own listing. Check who currently holds owner level access under your profile’s settings, and if it is not you or someone currently on your team, request access transferred before anything else on this list matters, since none of these fixes are possible without it.
Suspensions are the risk almost nobody thinks about until it happens to them, and a routine audit is also the moment to check whether your profile is in good standing at all. Profiles get suspended for reasons ranging from a genuine policy violation to an inaccurate address flagged by an automated system that got it wrong. A suspended profile disappears from search entirely, not just drops in ranking, and catching an early warning sign, a sudden unexplained drop in visibility, before it becomes a full suspension is far easier than appealing one after the fact.
Set a recurring date for this whole review, quarterly at minimum, and treat it the same way you would treat checking your business bank statement. Profiles drift. Competitors add features you have not noticed yet. A recurring date on the calendar is the only reliable defense against a profile that quietly falls behind while everything else about the business keeps moving forward.