SEO SOP: Audit the Google Business Profile and Conversion Tracking First

Two fixes, both nearly free, both broken on almost every local business you will ever audit. This SOP is the onboarding pass Isaac Justesen of PatientPartners runs on every new clinic before he touches anything else, from his Unscripted SEO interview. It works on any local service business, not just clinics.

Objective

Close the two gaps that cost a local business the most visibility per hour spent: an unfinished Google Business Profile and missing or wrong conversion tracking. The first is what decides whether you appear in the map pack at all. The second is what tells you whether anything else you do afterwards worked. Neither requires a content strategy, a budget increase, or a redesign, and both can be finished inside a week.

Key Steps

1. Open the Google Business Profile and read it as a stranger. Most were filled in once when the business opened and never touched again. You are looking for what was never finished, not what was done wrong.
2. Fix the primary category, then add every legitimate secondary category. This is the single highest-leverage field in local SEO and it is routinely left on whatever was picked on day one. Isaac names miscategorization as the most common finding across new clients.
3. Add the services list. Profiles frequently have zero services entered. Enter each service the business actually performs, using the words customers use rather than internal or clinical terminology.
4. Check the advertising and claims language against local rules before you publish any of it. Regulated industries vary by state and by province. Comparative claims are commonly prohibited, and words like “specialist” and “expert” are restricted in many healthcare jurisdictions. Verify before writing, not after.
5. Audit conversion tracking end to end. Confirm that form submissions, phone calls and booking actions each fire a distinct, correctly named conversion. Isaac’s position is that this is seldom set up correctly even where it appears to exist.
6. Add call tracking specifically. Form tracking is usually present in some form; call tracking usually is not. For a local business, the phone is the primary conversion path and the one nobody measures.
7. Measure the answer rate, not just the call volume. This is the step that surprises owners. Count how many inbound calls actually get picked up during business hours. (inferred: Isaac states the problem plainly and calls the missed revenue significant, but did not prescribe a specific measurement method.)
8. Re-baseline before you start anything else. With categories, services and tracking correct, take a fresh reading of map pack positions and conversions. Everything after this point is measured against that line, not against the broken data you inherited.

Cautionary Notes

• Do not write the profile copy before checking the rules. In regulated verticals the language restrictions differ by jurisdiction, and comparative statements or expertise claims can create a real compliance problem, not just a rejected edit.
• Conversion tracking that exists is not conversion tracking that works. Verify each conversion fires and is attributed to the right action. A tag that is installed but mismapped is worse than none, because it produces confident wrong decisions.
• Do not treat this as a one-time task. The profile drifts. Categories get added by Google, services change, and hours go stale. Put it on a recurring review.
• Do not skip straight to content or ads. Running paid traffic into a business you cannot measure is the fastest way to spend a small budget with nothing to show for it.
• Do not replace the front desk with an AI to fix the answer-rate problem. Isaac was explicit that the technology is not good enough yet and he does not recommend it to clients.

Tips for Efficiency

• Run the category and services fix in one sitting. It is roughly thirty minutes of work and it is the highest-value thirty minutes in the engagement.
• Screenshot the profile before you change anything. When rankings move you will want to know exactly what changed and when.
• Do the tracking audit second, not first, so the re-baseline in step eight captures the profile changes too.
• Keep a per-jurisdiction note of restricted language. If you serve more than one state or province you will need it repeatedly, and it compounds in value across clients.
• Where the business profile and the website disagree on services, hours or name, fix the profile first. It is the record more likely to be surfaced directly to a searcher.

Why this matters more each year

Isaac’s argument for prioritising the profile over the website is not sentimental. He points at a shift from curation to selection: classic search curated ten links and let the searcher choose, while AI-mediated search increasingly picks one answer and hands it over. As that continues, the structured record Google holds about a business carries more weight and the page a business wrote about itself carries slightly less.

“For local searches, Google Maps is still the best way for Google to serve up options. So I think the Google Business Profile is becoming even more important. More weight and more importance on the business profile, and perhaps a little bit less on the website.”

Sources & Relevant Episodes

• Isaac Justesen, PatientPartners — framed these as the first two things his agency audits on every new clinic, on the grounds that they are almost always incomplete and one of them determines whether you can measure anything else. Full interview: Why Your Google Business Profile Now Matters More Than Your Website.
• Small business angle on the same conversation: Stop Boosting Posts: What a Clinic Marketer Fixes First.
• Listen: Isaac Justesen on Local SEO for Healthcare Clinics · Watch: on YouTube.
• Related reading: Most Location Pages Suck. Fix Yours.