FREE GOOGLE BUSINESS PROFILE CHECKLIST
Will optimizing your Google Business Profile do anything if your website is bad?
Partly, and there is a ceiling. Fix the listing first anyway, because it is free and it takes an afternoon. Here are 26 checks on the Google Business Profile of a small-town service business. You answer for your own listing, and this sorts what you tell it into what to fix this week, what to fix this month, and what is only polish. No email, no signup, nothing saved.
Open your profile in another tab before you start. Search your business name on Google while signed in, or go to the Google Business Profile dashboard. If it turns out you cannot get into it at all, that is the first finding and the first section deals with it.
Why every checklist you have read stops before it answers this
Because a Google Business Profile guide is scoped to the profile. Its subject is the categories, the hours, the service area, the photos, the reviews and the posts, and every one of those lives inside one dashboard. The website shows up in that corpus as a field you fill in. The moment a guide follows the searcher through that field, it has walked out of its own subject, so it does not, and neither does the next one.
The reader's question lives on the other side of that boundary. Think about what a listing actually does when it works. Somebody searches, your profile comes up, and there are three things they can do with it: call, get directions, or tap through to the website. Two of those three end somewhere the profile cannot reach, and the one that ends on your website is the one chosen by the person who wanted a longer look before deciding. That is not the tire kicker. That is usually the bigger job.
So a good listing on a bad website is not wasted, it is capped. You keep everything the listing collects on its own surface and you lose the part that gets handed on. Nobody can tell you in advance how big that part is for your business, and anybody who quotes you a percentage is quoting an average of other people. What you can do is stop guessing in the right order: fix the free half first, then look at what is left.
That is what this is for. Answer it for your own listing and it will tell you what to do this week.
First, how does the work happen?
Two of the checks are the opposite of each other depending on the answer, so this swaps them rather than asking you a question you should skip.
Who controls the listing
Before anything else. A profile somebody else controls is not an asset you own, and a profile nobody controls is Google guessing about you in public.
Is the profile claimed and verified, with the verified badge showing in your dashboard?
Search your business name on Google while signed in. A profile you own shows you owner tools instead of a Claim this business link.
Do you personally hold the owner login, rather than a past marketing company or an employee who left?
Users in the profile settings lists everyone with access and their role. The owner role is the one that matters.
Name, address and phone
The three details every other system copies. Get them wrong here and the mistake spreads to places you will never think to check.
Does the business name on the profile match the name on your sign and your website exactly, with no extra words?
Compare it letter for letter against your truck, your sign and the top of your website.
Is the phone number on the profile the one that actually gets answered during working hours, and the same number as on your website?
Call it from your own phone and let it ring.
Are your service areas listed, with the street address hidden, because you travel to the customer?
In the location settings, a business that goes to the customer should show towns or counties, not a house address.
Categories and services
This is the part most owners never touch, and it is the part that decides which searches you are eligible to appear in at all.
Is the primary category the most specific one that describes the main job you do?
Not Contractor when Plumber exists, and not Plumber when the money comes from septic work and the list offers Septic System Service.
Have you added the other categories for real work you do, without adding ones you do not?
Additional categories sit under the primary one and you can hold several.
Is the services list filled in with your real jobs, rather than left empty for Google to guess at?
The Services section is separate from categories and most profiles have it half empty.
Does each service carry a short description in your own words?
Tap a service in the list and there is a description field under it.
Hours
The cheapest way to lose a job is to be listed as closed when you are working, or open when nobody will answer.
Are the regular hours right, including the day you close early?
Check the Friday and Saturday rows in particular. They are the ones that go stale.
Are special hours set for the next holiday that falls in the next month or two?
Special hours is a separate section from the weekly hours.
If you are listed as open twenty four hours, does somebody genuinely answer at two in the morning?
If the honest answer is that it goes to voicemail, answer no here.
Photos
The listing is the first thing people see and the photos are most of it. Stock images of somebody else's van are worse than no photos.
Are there at least ten photos on the profile, all of them your own work, trucks or crew?
Photos you added, not ones customers or Google added.
Has a new photo gone up in the last month?
Sort your photos by date added.
Are the logo and the cover photo both set deliberately?
These are two specific slots, separate from the photo gallery.
Is there a photo of an actual person from the business, with a face?
You, or the crew, not a van from a distance.
Reviews
The one part of the listing your competitors cannot copy, and the one most likely to be quietly out of date.
Is your newest review from this year?
Sort reviews by newest.
Do you reply to reviews, the bad ones as well as the good?
Every review has a reply option in the dashboard.
Do you have a simple, repeatable way of asking, and does everyone doing the work know it?
A short link or a card counts. A vague intention does not.
Are all of your reviews from real customers, with nothing offered in exchange?
Discounts, entries in a draw and free work in exchange for a review all count as offering something.
Messages, questions and posts
Three features Google puts on your profile whether you use them or not. Unanswered, they work against you.
Is messaging either switched on and genuinely answered, or switched off?
The half state, switched on and ignored, is the one that hurts.
Have the questions on your profile been answered by you, rather than by strangers or nobody?
The Questions and answers section. Anybody on the internet can answer these, including someone who has never used you.
Has an update been posted to the profile in the last month?
The Updates or Posts section, not the photos.
The link back to your website
The profile hands somebody off to your site at the exact moment they are ready to call. What happens next is on you.
Does the website link on the profile go to a page that loads quickly on a phone?
Tap it on your own phone, off wifi, and count.
Do the business name, address and phone number on your website match the profile exactly?
Check the footer of your website against the profile, character by character.
Once somebody is on your website from the profile, is there a phone number they can tap in the first screen?
No scrolling, no menu, on a phone.
0 of 26 answered
Why we give this away
Because every item on it is something you can do yourself, in your own dashboard, for nothing, and saying so costs us less than pretending it is complicated. Most of what agencies charge a monthly fee to manage on a small-town listing is the work above, done once and then kept up in ten minutes a month.
What we sell is the other half: the website the listing points at. Once the listing is right, the question becomes whether the site it hands people to is worth the handoff, and the free site check reads that side automatically in about thirty seconds. If the answer turns out to be that the site needs rebuilding rather than patching, then whether you need a new website before local SEO will work is the next thing to read. Fixing your listing first is the right order either way.
Honest answers
Will optimizing my Google Business Profile do anything if my website is bad?
It will do something, and there is a ceiling on how much. The listing can win you the impression and the map pack place on its own, and the call button works without any website at all, so a business with a bad site and a good listing is still better off than one with neither. What the listing cannot do is finish the job for the searcher who taps through to your website instead of calling. That person has already chosen you far enough to want a look, and what they find is the site. So the honest answer is: fix the listing, because it is free and it is fast and some of what it earns is collected on the listing itself. Just do not expect it to fix what happens after the tap, because nothing you do in the profile dashboard reaches that page.
Should I fix the listing or the website first?
The listing, nearly always, and not because it matters more. Because it is free, you can do it yourself in an afternoon with the checklist on this page, and it needs no decision from anybody. A website rebuild is money and weeks and a choice about who does it. Doing the free thing first also tells you something useful: if the listing is fixed and correct and the phone still does not ring the way the impressions suggest it should, you have narrowed the problem down to the website by elimination rather than by somebody selling you one.
Is this free, and do I have to give you my email?
It is free and there is no email field anywhere on the page. You answer the questions in your browser, the fix list is built in your browser, and nothing is sent to us or saved. Closing the tab loses it, which is why there is a print button on the results.
Why does it ask me the questions instead of just reading my listing?
Because reading Google Business Profile data automatically takes a paid data connection we do not have, and we would rather tell you that than imply otherwise. You can see your own listing in about ten minutes, and the useful part was never the reading anyway. It is knowing which of the things you find actually costs you work and which is polish.
How long does it take?
About fifteen minutes with your profile open in another tab, and you can answer not sure on anything you cannot settle quickly. Those come back in their own section at the end with instructions on where to look.
Does my Google listing really matter more than my website?
For somebody searching for a trade near them on a phone, the listing is usually what they see first and often what they act on, because the call button is right there. That does not make the website optional, because the listing sends people to it at the moment they are deciding. The two are one system, which is why the fix list ends by pointing you at the website side.
I fixed everything on the list. What happens now?
Nothing instantly, and anybody who promises otherwise is guessing. Category, name and service area changes can take a little while to settle, review and photo habits show over months rather than days, and none of it is a ranking guarantee. What you have done is stop losing the jobs that were reaching a wrong number, an unanswered message or a listing that looked abandoned.
Are you going to call me about this?
No. We collected nothing, so we could not contact you if we wanted to. If you want more from us afterwards there are links at the end of the fix list, and using none of them is a perfectly good outcome.