The Google Business Profile Audit: A Room-by-Room Walkthrough

A Google Business Profile audit is a systematic check of five areas: identity (name, categories, address, phone, hours — correct and consistent), completeness (services, products, description, attributes filled in), reputation (review flow, ratings, replies, Q&A), media (fresh real photos, videos, recent posts), and technical health (your ownership, no duplicates, no warnings, insights readable). Each finding gets a concrete fix in the dashboard. Done properly it takes about an hour and needs no paid tools. :::

Room 1: Identity — Who Google Thinks You Are

The foundation room. Everything else underperforms if identity is wrong.

The category checkpoint deserves a second look even if you think you pass: Google renames and reorganizes its category taxonomy several times a year, and a category that was right in 2024 may silently no longer exist in the form you picked.

Room 2: Completeness — Every Field Filled or Deliberately Empty

Google treats profile completeness as an effort signal, and customers treat empty fields as red flags. Walk every tab:

• Services / products: listed with search-shaped names and one-line descriptions. "Same-day crowns" beats "Dental". Bilingual service names where genuinely bilingual.
• Business description: 750 characters, offering in the first 250, no keyword stuffing, no URLs.
• Attributes: every relevant toggle set — outdoor seating, halal, English-speaking staff, free Wi-Fi. Attributes feed the qualifier chips customers filter with.
• Booking/appointment links: present if you take bookings; a dead link is worse than none, so click it.
• Website link: correct URL, correct protocol, loads on mobile in under a few seconds.
• Opening date / social profiles: filled where the dashboard offers them.

{
  "completeness_targets": {
    "services": "all real offerings, search-shaped names",
    "description": "750 chars, offering first",
    "attributes": "every relevant toggle set",
    "link": "loads on mobile, tracked separately from direct traffic"
  }
}

A field left empty deliberately (you don't do deliveries — don't claim delivery) is a pass. An empty field you never got around to is a finding.

Room 3: Reputation — What Customers See and Say

• Review count and rating trend: not just the number — the last 90 days. A 4.8 built on reviews that stopped six months ago reads differently than a 4.5 flowing weekly.
• Review keywords: do reviews mention what you want to be found for? If nobody mentions your actual service, invite the mention naturally at the counter ("tell Google what you came for").
• Reply coverage: every review answered, in the reviewer's language, including the 3-star shrugs. Unanswered negative reviews are the loudest thing on your profile.
• Fake/hostile reviews: flagged (report in the dashboard), never argued with in public beyond one calm factual reply.
• Q&A: your top-5 real customer questions seeded and answered — both languages if your customers mix. Check for stranger-answered questions with wrong info and correct them with your own answer plus an upvote.

Room 4: Media — The Room Everyone Photographs Badly

• Photo count and freshness: something new in the last 30 days. Real phone photos; exteriors at night matter on dark Bangkok sois.
• Cover photo: deliberately set — the one photo that represents you in search, not whatever Google auto-picked.
• Category coverage: exterior, interior, product, team. A profile of only food photos tells Google and customers nothing about the place.
• Video: one short clip (even 15 seconds) if you have it.
• Posts (Updates tab): at least one post from the last 30 days, specific and true. The tab is also a trust signal: a ghost-town Updates tab reads as a closed business.
• Logo and cover: uploaded, current, not pixelated.

Room 5: Technical Health — The Room Behind the Walls

The checks most owners never open, where the expensive problems live:

• Ownership: you hold owner-level access with your own email — not an agency's, not a former employee's. Managers come and go; the owner account is the deed to the house.
• Duplicate profiles: search your business name and address on Maps. One listing only. If you find a second — old address, agency-created, employee-created — request merge/removal through support. (Full method in the NAP consistency piece; this is the checkpoint form of it.)
• Account warnings: the dashboard's policy section shows violations and suspension risk. A suspended profile explains most "sudden invisibility" mysteries.
• Verification status: verified, and re-verified after any address change.
• Insights readable: Performance tab shows calls, direction requests, website clicks, and the search phrases that found you. No data for weeks = something upstream is broken.

Scoring the Walkthrough

Don't aim for perfection; aim for findings with fixes attached. A useful output format:

IDENTITY       6/7   — primary category wrong (fix: Restaurant → Coffee shop)
COMPLETENESS   4/6   — attributes empty; description missing first-250 offering
REPUTATION     3/5   — 0 replies to last 6 reviews; Q&A unseeded
MEDIA          2/6   — no new photo in 5 months; cover auto-picked
TECHNICAL      5/5   — clean ownership, no duplicates
TOTAL         20/29  — biggest lever: media room, this week

That "biggest lever" line is the actual deliverable an agency would sell you: the one or two rooms where an hour of work moves the most. Re-run the walkthrough monthly — it takes 20 minutes once the first pass is done — and the scores become your progress log.

Frequently Asked Questions

How often should I audit my profile?

A full five-room walkthrough every quarter, with the technical room (duplicates, warnings, ownership) checked monthly — those fail silently and expensively. After any big change — move, rebrand, category edit, new branch — re-run the identity and technical rooms the same week.

Can I pay someone to do this audit?

Yes, and now you know exactly what you'd be buying: this checklist, run attentively, with findings written up. It's a legitimate service — but run this free version first. Either you'll fix everything yourself, or you'll hand the agency a precise scope instead of a blank check.

What's the most common audit finding in Bangkok businesses?

Three, tied: stale primary categories (taxonomy drift), unanswered reviews in the "other" language (Thai owners skipping English reviews and vice versa), and duplicate profiles left over from a previous agency or an enthusiastic employee. All three are fixable in a day.

Will fixing audit findings change my ranking?

Individually, each fix is modest — this is plumbing, not fireworks. Collectively, a profile that passes all five rooms removes the quiet caps that were holding back your reviews, categories, and content work. Judge it the honest way: grid-scan before the fixes, rescan the same grid a month after, compare shapes.

An audit isn't a judgment — it's a map. Twenty-nine checkpoints, an hour, and you'll know exactly which room of your shop Google has never been allowed to see properly.

Start with the "before" picture: run a free Google Maps grid scan at gbppeak.com/free-maps — no signup — then audit, fix, and rescan the same grid in a month to see what moved.