Most local business owners already sense something is off in their marketing. They just do not know what, and they do not have three hours to go find out. This is the audit we would run if we walked into your shop for free: fifteen checks across your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your ad tracking, and your booking funnel, each one you can do yourself this afternoon with a phone, a notes app, and about fifteen minutes per point. Run it before you call an agency. Either it confirms you are in decent shape, or it hands you a real punch list, and either way you walk into that first sales conversation knowing more than the person pitching you.
Why run this yourself first.
Most owners handle their marketing one of two ways. They ignore it until something feels slow, or they call an agency cold and hope the first pitch they hear is the right one. Both approaches skip a step that costs nothing: finding out what is actually broken before you pay someone to tell you, or before you keep guessing on your own.
This is not the same ground as our piece on how to know if your marketing is working, which is about the metrics that matter once campaigns are already running. This is earlier and narrower than that. It is a structural check: is the foundation your marketing sits on actually sound, before you spend another dollar trying to drive more traffic to it. If your Google Business Profile is half filled out, your reviews have gone quiet, your ad tracking is not actually tracking, or your booking funnel loses people at step two, no amount of additional ad spend fixes that. It just funds the leak faster.
Fifteen points, four categories, roughly fifteen minutes each if you move at a normal pace. You will need your Google Business Profile login, access to your website (or at least the ability to view it on your phone), and a second phone or a friend willing to call your business during business hours. Nothing else. Grab a notes app or a spreadsheet, score each point pass or fail as you go, and by the end you will have a real document, not a vague feeling, to decide what to fix yourself and what to hand off.
The 15-point checklist at a glance.
Here is the full list up front, so you can screenshot it or copy it into your own notes before working through each section in depth below.
An agency cannot fix a leak you have not found yet. This audit exists to find it first.
Google Business Profile
- Profile is 100 percent complete, with the correct primary category and accurate hours.
- Photos are current, real, and not stock images or ones from three renovations ago.
- The Q&A section is seeded with your own answers and checked monthly.
- Your name, address, and phone number match exactly across every listing and your website.
Reviews
- You have received at least one new review in the last 30 days.
- Your rating trend over the last 20 reviews is flat or climbing, not sliding.
- Every review, positive or negative, gets a specific owner response within 48 hours.
- Asking for a review is a system that fires after every job, not something you remember to do sometimes.
Ad tracking
- Conversion tracking is installed and firing on the right action, not just the page loading.
- Calls from ads are tracked back to the specific campaign that generated them.
- Every campaign link is tagged consistently so a booked job can be traced back to its source.
Funnel leaks
- Your website loads fast on a phone and the phone number is tappable without scrolling far.
- A call to your business during business hours gets answered by a human, not voicemail.
- A form submitted on your site gets a response within minutes, not hours.
- Getting from "I want an appointment" to "it is on the calendar" takes as few steps as possible.
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Get My Free Audit →Google Business Profile: points 1 to 4.
For most local businesses, the Google Business Profile decides more revenue than any single ad campaign, because it is the listing that shows up in the map pack for the exact person searching for what you do, right now, near them. It is also the piece owners neglect most, because it was set up once years ago and nobody has opened it since.
Point 1: Profile completeness
Log into your profile and look for the completeness indicator. It should read 100 percent. Check that your primary category is the single most accurate description of your business, not the broadest one, and that secondary categories cover the real services you offer. Confirm your hours are correct, including holiday hours, since a wrong "closed" listing on a day you are actually open loses the call before it ever happens.
Point 2: Photo freshness
Open the photos tab. If the most recent upload is older than 90 days, or the photos are stock images instead of your actual team, your bay, or real finished work, that reads as an inactive listing to anyone scrolling the map pack. Fresh photos are also a mild ranking signal, but the bigger cost is the customer who scrolls past a listing that looks abandoned.
Point 3: Q&A seeded and monitored
Almost no owner checks this section, which means almost no owner notices when a competitor, a bot, or a confused stranger posts a wrong answer to a common question. Seed it yourself with the three or four questions you get asked most, answer them accurately, and check back monthly.
Point 4: NAP consistency
NAP means name, address, phone. Pull up your Google Business Profile, your website footer, your Facebook page, and your Yelp listing side by side. One digit off in a phone number or a suite number missing from one listing quietly breaks the trust signal Google uses to confirm you are a real, stable business, and it sends a fraction of every call to the wrong number.
Reviews: points 5 to 8.
Reviews do two jobs at once. They influence how Google ranks your map pack listing, and they are the single biggest piece of proof a stranger looks at before they decide to call you instead of the shop next door. Most owners treat them as a nice-to-have that happens on its own. It does not.
Point 5: Review velocity
Count how many reviews you have received in the last 30 days. If the answer is zero and it has been more than 45 days since your last one, your profile is starting to read as inactive to both Google and to anyone scrolling past it, regardless of how strong your overall star rating is. Review recency and review velocity carry real weight in local ranking, often more than your total review count.
Point 6: Rating trend
Pull your last 20 reviews and look at the trend, not just the current average. One rough month buried inside a strong year is normal and not worth panicking over. A steady slide over the last quarter is a different problem, and it usually points to something operational, not marketing, that is worth fixing before you spend another dollar trying to attract new customers into the same experience.
Point 7: Owner response rate and quality
Read your last ten responses as if you are a stranger seeing them for the first time. Are they specific and personal, or generic copy-paste lines that could apply to any business on earth? Every review, good or bad, should get a response within 48 hours. A calm, specific reply to a negative review often does more to earn trust with future customers than the complaint itself did to lose it.
Point 8: A real review request system
Ask yourself honestly: is asking for a review something that happens automatically after every completed job, by text or email, or is it something you remember to do occasionally when a customer seems especially happy? If it is the second one, you are leaving most of your available reviews on the table, and the shops that beat you in the map pack are almost never better than you. They just ask more consistently.
Ad tracking: points 9 to 11.
This is the category most DIY audits skip entirely, because it lives behind the scenes and nothing looks visibly broken. It is also the category that quietly wastes the most money, because a business can run ads for months believing they are working, or not working, on data that was never actually accurate.
Point 9: Conversion tracking is firing on the right event
Open your Google Ads account and check that a conversion action exists for the events that actually matter, a call, a form fill, a booking, not just a page load. If you run Meta ads, confirm the Pixel is installed and, just as important, that Conversions API is also live. Pixel-only tracking has undercounted real results for years now, since browser and device privacy changes started blocking a meaningful share of pixel events before they ever fire.
Point 10: Calls are tracked back to their source
If a customer calls from a Google Ads listing, does that call get attributed back to the specific campaign that generated it, or does it land in a general business line with no source data attached? At minimum this means call extensions or call assets tagged correctly. A cleaner setup uses dynamic number insertion, a different tracking number shown depending on where the visitor came from, so every call has a paper trail.
Point 11: Consistent UTM and source tagging
Every link you run in an ad, an email, or a social post should carry consistent tagging so your CRM or spreadsheet can trace a booked job back to the channel that produced it. Without this, "which channel actually books work" turns into a guess dressed up as a strategy meeting.
The Shortcut
We already know where the leaks hide.
We have run this exact audit across auto repair, home services, and more. Get a free audit and a 90-day roadmap built on what we already know to check.
Get My Free Audit & Roadmap →Funnel leaks: points 12 to 15.
The funnel is everything that happens between a customer deciding to contact you and that customer actually landing on your schedule. This is where good marketing quietly dies. You can win the click and still lose the customer four different ways before they ever speak to a human, and this section of the audit for conversion rate optimization for local business websites goes deeper on the page-level fixes once you have found the leak here.
Point 12: Site speed and tap-to-call
Load your own website on your phone, on cellular data, not office wifi. It should load in under three seconds and the phone number should be tappable without scrolling. If a visitor has to hunt for how to contact you, most of them simply will not.
Point 13: Missed call handling
Call your own business number from a phone that is not saved in your system, during normal business hours. Does a human answer within four rings? Does it go to voicemail? If it rings through to voicemail, that call almost never gets called back in time, because the person on the other end has already moved to the next name on their list.
The best ad in the world cannot save a phone call that rings through to voicemail three times before someone picks it up.
Point 14: Speed to lead on form submissions
Fill out your own website form as if you were a real customer. Time how long it takes to get any response, a text, an email, or a call. Under five minutes is the standard worth chasing. Anything past an hour and you are competing with whoever answered the customer's next inquiry first, and in most local categories that competitor exists.
Point 15: Booking friction
Count the literal number of steps between "I want an appointment" and "it is on the calendar." A phone call that ends in a booked slot is one step. A phone call that ends in "we'll call you back to schedule" is two, and every additional step past that is a place a customer can quietly disappear. The shortest path almost always wins, even against a competitor with a stronger brand.
Score it, then decide.
Add up how many of the 15 points passed. The number tells you something more useful than a gut feeling ever will.
13 to 15 passed means your foundation is solid, and if growth still feels slow, the problem is budget, creative, or offer, not infrastructure. 9 to 12 means real, fixable gaps, most of them a weekend or two of focused work. Under 9 usually means enough is broken that a professional audit and a managed fix pays for itself within the first month it prevents.
If you scored well, keep this checklist and re-run it quarterly, since tracking breaks silently after website updates and review velocity slows without anyone noticing until it has been months. If your score was rough, prioritize by leverage, not by what feels easiest to fix first. A broken conversion tracking setup or a phone that rings through to voicemail is costing you customers today. A slightly stale photo library is not.
And if the honest answer is that you found more broken than you have time to fix, that is exactly the moment hiring an agency starts to make sense, not before you have looked, and not as a way to avoid looking. An agency's real value on a list like this one is not that they know things you cannot learn. It is that they will actually keep checking, every month, after the novelty of a DIY audit has worn off and you are back to running the counter.
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We'll run the deeper audit, tracking, funnel, and competitive gaps a DIY checklist can't fully catch, then hand you a 90-day plan.
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Frequently asked
questions.
How long does this audit actually take?
Budget two to three hours if you move briskly, longer if you get pulled away by the phone or the counter. Most owners split it into two sittings: one for the Google Business Profile and reviews checks, one for tracking and the funnel walkthrough.
What tools do I need to run it?
Nothing paid. Your phone, your Google Business Profile login, your website login or a way to view page source, and a notes app or spreadsheet to score each point. A second phone helps for the call-handling test.
What counts as a good score on this audit?
13 to 15 passed means your foundation is solid and any growth problem is likely budget, creative, or offer, not infrastructure. 9 to 12 means real gaps worth fixing over a few weekends. Under 9 usually means enough is broken that a professional audit pays for itself within the first month it prevents.
Does fixing all 15 points guarantee more customers?
No. This audit fixes leaks, it does not create demand. A clean Google Business Profile, working tracking, and a fast funnel mean the customers you already attract stop falling through cracks. If you need more volume on top of that, that is a paid ads or SEO conversation, not an audit one, and our guide to SEO or Google Ads is the next stop.
How often should I re-run this audit?
Quarterly at minimum. Google Business Profile features change, review velocity slows without anyone noticing, and tracking breaks silently after a website update more often than owners expect. A 20-minute quarterly re-check catches most of it before it costs you a month of blind spend.
