A 20-minute Google Business Profile audit you can run yourself

The usual version of this is a list of your own fields with boxes beside them. Fill the description, add more photographs, post twice a month, and so on.

The trouble is that a completely filled profile can still sit fourth, and a checklist of your own fields has no way of telling you why. It never looks at anybody else, and everybody else is what you are being ranked against.

So here is the same twenty minutes spent looking outward. You need a phone, a notepad, and a willingness to find out something you would rather not.

Minutes 0 to 4: find out where you actually are

Not from your premises, which flatters you. Pick a street in a suburb you want work from, three or four kilometres away, and search your main service as though you were standing there.

Write down the three businesses in the pack. Those three are the entire rest of this audit. If you are one of them, do this again from further out until you are not, because that is where your problem is.

Minutes 4 to 10: read the three above you

Open each and write down five things. This is the part nobody does and it is where the answer usually is.

1. 01Review count and rating. The count matters more than the rating here, because it is the number you have to close.
2. 02Date of their most recent review. Somebody gathering one a week is doing something you are not, and a steady trickle is the most common single difference.
3. 03Their primary category. Frequently more specific than yours, and frequently the whole explanation.
4. 04How many photographs and how recent. You are looking for whether anything was added this year, not for a total.
5. 05Whether they post, and when they last did.

Minutes 10 to 15: the fields that change what you appear for

Most of your profile does not affect what searches you show up in. These four do, which is why they are the only ones worth your time here.

1. 01Primary category. One field, more influence on what you appear for than everything else combined. If a competitor above you has a more specific one, that is a change you can make this afternoon.
2. 02Secondary categories. Every real service you offer, and nothing you do not, since a category you cannot deliver brings enquiries you have to turn down.
3. 03Services. Named the way customers say them, not the way your industry says them.
4. 04Attributes. Several are used as filters, which means a blank one excludes you from that filtered search rather than ranking you lower in it.

Minutes 15 to 18: what a customer actually sees

Search your own business name on a phone and read the whole result the way somebody deciding would.

• Is the pin on your building, or across the road, or on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. Satellite view settles it in ten seconds and a wrong pin sends people to a car park.
• Are the hours right, including next week's public holiday.
• Is there a second listing for you anywhere. Old addresses, a previous business name, one somebody created years ago. This is the check that turns up something real most often.
• Do the most recent reviews have replies. Not all of them. The recent ones, which is what a person reads, and the bad ones above all.

Minutes 18 to 20: write down one thing

One. The row where the gap was largest.

The reason to stop at one is that these audits usually produce a list of eleven improvements, of which nine are cosmetic, and a list of eleven gets done by nobody. The gap that showed up in minutes 4 to 10 is worth more than the other ten combined.

Two things to ignore while you are here

• Photograph counts. Thirty to fifty gets quoted everywhere with no source behind it. Recent and real beats numerous, and nobody has published a threshold worth acting on.
• Filling the description to its character limit. It is not a ranking field, and writing to a character count produces exactly what writing to a character count always produces.

For a completeness pass rather than a diagnosis, the Google Business Profile checklist is the artefact version of this. Categories are covered properly in choosing your categories.