We Scored Two Dozen Google Business Profiles. The Average Was a 5 Out of 10.
Over the past week we ran a structured audit on more than 24 local businesses' Google Business Profiles — contractors, remodelers, building-material suppliers, contractors, and a few others across the country. Same scorecard for every one: category, reviews, photos, posts, completeness, the works, graded 1 to 10.
The average score was about a 5 out of 10. Not broken — just mediocre. And "mediocre" is exactly the problem, because in the local map pack, mediocre is invisible. The businesses winning their markets weren't doing anything exotic. They'd simply fixed the same handful of things everyone else left undone.
The Same 5 Problems, Over and Over
Across two dozen profiles in completely different trades and regions, the gaps were remarkably consistent:
1. Reviews with no owner responses. This was the single most common miss — and it showed up even on the strong profiles. A kitchen remodeler in the Northeast had more reviews than anyone in its market and still sat at #2, because the competitor above it had a lower rating BUT actually replied to reviews. A remodeler in Southwest Florida had over four hundred reviews and not one visible owner response. Answering reviews is free, it's a ranking signal, and almost nobody does it.
2. The wrong — or too-broad — primary category. A remodeler listed as "Home builder." A building-material supplier buried under the generic "Home improvement store" while the specialty shops beating it used precise categories. A general contractor mis-categorized as a real estate agency, the single most powerful relevance lever, set incorrectly.
3. No photos, or photos from years ago. One established commercial contractor in the Southeast had zero owner-uploaded photos — just a Google Street View of the parking lot — despite decades of finished work they can display, ignored. To a homeowner and to Google, a profile that hasn't posted an image in two years reads as abandoned or closed.
4. Little to no Google Posts. Nearly universal. Weekly posts — a finished job, an offer, a seasonal reminder — keep a profile active and add keyword surface. The overwhelming majority of the profiles we scored had never published even one. Hello? Google thinks you are out of business.
5. Half-empty profiles and location problems. Missing services, no descriptions, And more than one profile had a real red flag: a general contractor in the northern US running multiple locations with duplicate and mis-categorized listings; an online business whose map pin was literally dropped in the ocean because no service area was ever set. These quietly suppress a listing no matter how good everything else is.
The Fixes Are Almost Always the Same
Here's the encouraging part: because the problems repeat, so do the solutions. The low-hanging fruit is nearly identical from one business to the next:
Set the most specific, accurate primary category — and add secondaries for the other services.
Respond to every review, especially negative ones.
Upload real, recent job-site photos on a weekly cadence.
Publish a Google Post every week, minimum.
Fill every field — services, description, hours, attributes, service area.
Clean up duplicates, wrong addresses, and anything that risks suppression.
None of that costs money. It costs attention and a system. A business that does these six things consistently pulls away from the pack that doesn't — and the gap compounds, because more calls lead to more reviews, which lead to higher rank, which lead to more calls.
The Pattern That Surprised Us Most
Several of the businesses we scored had the most reviews in their entire market and still weren't ranking first. Volume alone doesn't win. What beats it is a higher rating, fresh and recent reviews, owner responses, and an active profile. More than one owner was sitting on a genuine advantage — a huge review count — and leaving the top spot on the table for want of a few unglamorous habits.
How United Foundry Turns This Into Rank
At United Foundry, a Google Business Profile audit is one of the first things we run for the contractors and home-service businesses we work with — because for most clients, it was consistently the fastest, cheapest win available. We score your profile against the competitors currently outranking you, hand you the prioritized fix list, and — for the clients we manage — do the work: category, reviews, photos, posts, and the weekly upkeep that keeps you at the top of the map pack instead of buried below it.
If your profile is sitting at a 5 out of 10, that's not bad news. It means the easiest growth you'll find all year is just a few fixes away.
See how your Google Business Profile scores against your competitors →
