How to audit a Google Business Profile

Most profile problems are not subtle. They are a missing primary category, hours that were right in 2023, four photos, and eleven reviews nobody answered. An audit is just a systematic pass over the fields, in the order of how much each one is worth. This is the checklist we encoded into the Growbiz score, with the weights we assigned and why.

How to score it

Each check is pass, warn or fail, and each carries a weight. A warn earns half credit — a 200-character description is not the same failure as no description at all. Total the weighted passes and you have a number out of 100 you can watch move. The absolute value matters less than the direction.

Foundations

Verification (weight 10)

Unverified listings are heavily limited: you cannot reply to reviews, your edits may not publish, and your visibility is capped. If this check fails, stop and fix it before anything else on the list. Everything downstream depends on it.

Primary category (weight 10)

The field with the widest blast radius. It determines which searches you are eligible for at all. Check two things: that it is set, and that it is the most specific accurate option. A med spa filed under "Beauty salon" is competing in the wrong category entirely.

Additional categories (weight 4)

Add the ones that describe services you genuinely offer, and only those. Zero additional categories is a missed opportunity for most businesses; six invented ones is a suspension risk.

Core information

Business description (weight 6)

Up to 750 characters. Warn below 250 — that usually means one sentence that says nothing. Write for the human deciding whether to call: what you do, who you serve, what makes the choice easy. Skip the keyword stuffing; it does not rank and it reads badly.

Hours (weight 9)

Regular hours must be set for every day you are open. Then check special hours for the next holiday. Missing hours cost calls directly, because Google prompts searchers that your hours may be wrong and some of them move on rather than risk a closed door.

Phone number (weight 7)

A local number, ideally the one that matches your website and your other citations. Call tracking numbers are workable but put the tracking number as primary and the real local number as additional, not the other way round.

Website (weight 5)

Point at a page that is about this location. Multi-location businesses that send every listing to the homepage waste the click and confuse Google about which page describes which branch.

Address or service area (weight 8)

Pick one and get it right. Storefront customers visit: full address, no service area hiding it. Business travels to customers: hide the address, define the service areas. A home-based service business showing a residential address publicly is a classic suspension cause.

Visual completeness

Logo (weight 4) and cover photo (weight 4)

Two specific slots, both frequently empty. The cover is the image Google prefers to lead with, though it does not guarantee which photo appears first.

Photo count (weight 5)

Fail under five of your own photos, warn under fifteen. Customer photos do not count here: the check is about what you have published, because that is the part you control.

Photo freshness (weight 4)

Warn if the newest photo you uploaded is over 90 days old. A listing whose latest image is two years old signals an inactive business even when the count is high.

Depth and engagement

Services (weight 5)

Structured service items with names, descriptions and prices where it makes sense. They surface in the listing and they give Google concrete terms to match against specific searches.

Unreplied reviews (weight 9)

The heaviest engagement check. Fail with any unanswered review older than a week, warn with unanswered reviews inside that window. Reply coverage is visible to every customer reading the listing, and Google recommends responding. See the review management guide for how to keep up without it eating your week.

Action links (weight 4)

Booking, ordering, appointment and menu links, where they apply to your business type. For businesses that take appointments, this converts directly and is often just absent.

Running the audit repeatedly

The first audit finds the obvious gaps and you fix them in an afternoon. The value is in the second and tenth audit, because profiles decay: hours drift, reviews accumulate, photos age past the freshness threshold, and Google applies its own edits to your fields without a loud announcement.

Growbiz runs these fifteen checks automatically against the official Google Business Profile API, keeps a history so you can see the score move, and links each failed check to the screen that fixes it. Connect your Google account and the first audit takes about a minute.

What an audit cannot tell you

A completeness score is not a ranking prediction. A profile at 100 can still sit below a competitor at 70 who is closer to the searcher or has four times the review volume. What the score tells you is whether you are leaving anything on the table that is actually within your control, which is a different and more useful question. The local SEO guide covers the factors the audit deliberately does not score.