Google My Business (GMB) Audit is an SEO tool that lets you quickly assess the status of your Google My Business profile, and how it compares to your top online competitors.
Understanding what you need to do in order to improve local search performance is hard work — even experienced local search practitioners spend hours manually researching and checking various tools to get the data they want.
Google doesn’t return much data around your competitors. In fact, this is all Google provides:
It’s nearly impossible to understand what you can do to beat your competition without an intelligent tool. To solve this issue, the Google My Business Audit was introduced to help businesses by offering a useful report with actionable insights.
You simply enter your target search terms/keywords, and the report returns crucial local search metrics for your business, plus the top 10 ranking competitors for that search term — this enables you to easily see which metrics your business needs to improve, and lets you prioritize your campaign and strategy accordingly.
If you'd like some help knowing which keywords to track, check out this course in the BrightLocal Academy: How to Master Local Keyword Research.
For example, if you saw that your top ranking competitors all had the business category “Attorney” on their Google My Business listings, but you had the business category “Legal Services”, you could quickly update the business category to improve your performance.
The product also gives crucial metrics on Google My Business Insights data, allowing you to see the listing’s performance around clicks, calls, and other important metrics.
Only three months' worth of this data is viewable in your Google My Business dashboard, whereas this tool lets you see a full 18 months' data, giving you a far better understanding of your performance over time.
It would take a local search expert around two hours to collect all of the data in this report using several different tools, and this is why the Google My Business report is used by thousands of agencies to shape and prioritize their client’s local search strategy.