The mid-year audit of your local presence

The 4th is behind us, the schedule has gone quiet in the way July always goes quiet, and this is the point in the year where we stop adding things to accounts and go back over what is already in them.

Nothing about an audit is exciting, which is rather the point. Google’s guidance in the spring put a well maintained business profile on its own short list of what actually matters, so let us go and maintain one.

Here is the pass we run on every account at the halfway mark, in the order we run it.

Six months is long enough for everything to drift

We almost never find a strategy problem in a mid-year audit. We find drift, and it looks the same everywhere:

• Summer hours were agreed in a staff meeting in the spring and never typed into anything a customer can see.
• A service was added in February and exists on a price sheet, in the owner’s head, and nowhere else.
• The booking link points at the old scheduler, or at a page that now redirects twice before it loads.
• The newest photos are from a remodel two years ago.
• Someone answered a one star review in March and nobody has looked at the reviews since.

No single item on that list costs you much. All of them together are the difference between a business that reads as open, current and specific, and one that reads as abandoned.

The profile, field by field

Open the profile and read every field as a stranger would. Do not skim the ones you are sure about, because those are the ones that changed.

• Primary category. It does more work than anything else on the listing. Check what the businesses beating you in the map pack are using, and be honest about whether yours describes the money you actually want.
• Secondary categories. Only what you genuinely do. Every extra category is a claim, and a claim you cannot back up on the site is a weak signal rather than a bonus one.
• Services. Written out by name, in the words customers use next to the words you use. This is the cheapest place to add facts about yourself and it is nearly always half empty.
• Hours, including special hours. Set Labor Day and any late summer closures now, while you are thinking about it. Wrong holiday hours generate a bad review faster than anything else we see.
• Attributes. Accessibility, parking, payment, languages spoken, who you serve, appointment requirements. These get read back in answers almost verbatim.
• The description. Read it aloud. If it could sit on a competitor’s listing without changing a word, rewrite it.
• Booking and appointment links. Click every one on a phone and watch where it lands. Dead and redirected booking links are the single most expensive broken thing we find.
• Phone. Check that the number on the listing is the one that actually rings the office, and that the after-hours forward still points where you think it does.
• Photos and video. Date them. Add the team, the treatment room, the van, the finished work.
• Review replies. Anything unanswered from the last six months gets answered this week.

The facts that live somewhere else

Your profile is not the only record of your business, and the others are the ones that go stale quietly.

Work through the site footer, Apple Business Connect, Yelp, the data aggregators, your industry directories, any insurance or plan directory a patient might search, your booking platform’s own public page, and the social profiles nobody has logged into since the last staff change. Check the name, the address, the suite number, the phone, the hours and the service area in each.

The reason this matters more than it used to is simple. When a machine writes a sentence about your business and your own sources are quiet on a point, it fills the gap from whatever else it can find. A directory entry from a previous address will answer on your behalf, confidently, and the customer has no way to know it is five years old.

The questions nobody answered

The Q&A section on the profile is the one nearly every owner forgets exists. Anyone can ask there and anyone can answer, which means a competitor, a former customer or a confused stranger can be the published voice of your business. Read it. Answer every real question in your own words, and add the ones your front desk hears every day.

Three are worth writing out properly, with the answer on the page rather than a promise to call:

1. Do you take my plan. Not “we accept most major insurance”. The plans you are in network with, listed by name, the ones you are out of network for said plainly underneath, and what that difference means on a first visit.
2. How soon can I be seen. A real answer for this month. “New patients are usually seen within two weeks, and we hold two slots every morning for emergencies” is an answer. “Call for availability” is the absence of one.
3. Do you come out to my town. The towns, named, in the order people ask about them. A radius in miles is a number nobody can check against where they live.

What to do this month

• Block ninety minutes, open the profile, and go down every field in the order above. One sitting, one person, notes as you go.
• Set Labor Day and any late summer closures on the profile and anywhere else your hours are published.
• Test every booking link and phone route from a phone that is not yours.
• Take thirty new photos this week. Rooms, team, equipment, vehicles, before and after.
• Read the profile Q&A, answer what is there, and add six questions of your own with real answers.
• Work through the records you do not own: insurance directories, associations, aggregators, and the social profiles nobody has logged into since the last staff change.

The thing to watch for is the fact you are certain about. Every audit we run turns up at least one, usually the hours or the booking link, wrong in public for months while everybody inside the business knew the right answer. A business profile is worth what its worst field says, which is why this is local search housekeeping on a schedule rather than a project, and why the reviews get answered on the same afternoon.