How to check your own listings in twenty minutes

Before you start

Do this on your phone, not the office computer, because that is what your customers are using. Sign out of Google first, or use a private window. Signed in, Google shows you a version of your own business that nobody else sees.

Write the answers down. The value is not in any single check, it is in looking at nine of them together and seeing which one is obviously the worst.

The nine checks

1. Search your business name and see what comes up first

Not your website. The listing panel. Is it there, does it have your photos, and does the phone number match the one on your door. If a listing appears that you have never claimed, that is the first job and everything else waits.

2. Search what you sell, not who you are

Type what a stranger would type. "Wings Thunder Bay". "Brunch near me". "Patio Thunder Bay". You are not looking for your position, which moves with where the person is standing. You are looking for whether you appear at all, and who does appear.

3. Check the primary category

In the profile, under the business name. One primary, several secondary. Specific beats broad. If yours says "Restaurant" and you are a pizza place, that is a twenty second fix with real weight behind it.

4. Check the hours, then check the holidays

The regular week first. Then look for the special hours section and see whether the next statutory holiday is set. A listing that says "hours might differ" on a long weekend is a listing people scroll past.

5. Find the date of the newest photo

Open the photos, sort by newest, look at the top one. If it is more than a month or two old, that is the check most listings in this city fail. A logo does not count.

6. Count your reviews and compare them to two places like yours

Not the chains. Two independent places of roughly your size and age. If they have 140 and you have 18, that gap is doing more damage than anything on your website. BrightLocal’s 2026 survey, n=1,002, found 47% will not use a business with fewer than 20 reviews and 68% require four stars or better.

7. Count how many reviews have a reply

Scroll the last twenty. How many carry an owner response, and do the responses read like a person or like a template. Then find the oldest one with no reply at all. If the answer is "last spring", that is what a reader sees too.

8. Check Apple, Bing and Yelp

Open Apple Maps on an iPhone and search yourself. 68.47% of Canadian phones are iPhones as of August 2026, and Apple Maps does not read your Google listing. Then bing.com/maps, then yelp.ca. You are checking one thing on each: is the name, phone number and web address identical to what is on Google, character for character. They usually are not, because nobody has looked in years.

9. Open your own website on your phone, on data

Not on the restaurant wifi. Count how long before you can read something. Then try to tap the phone number. If it is an image, or plain text you cannot tap, you are losing the people who were ready to call.

What to fix first

Almost always in this order, whatever the list looks like:

• Anything factually wrong. A wrong phone number or wrong hours costs you a customer today, not in three months.
• An unclaimed or duplicate listing. Everything else is built on this one.
• The primary category. Twenty seconds, and it decides which searches you are eligible for.
• Unanswered reviews. Start with the oldest one that has been sitting, then work forward.
• Photographs. The slow one, and the one that keeps needing doing.

Notice that none of the first four cost money and none of them need an agency. That is not us being modest. We have not found a credible study showing an agency beats an owner doing this themselves, and we say so on the rest of the site too.

What this pass does not cover

Our own audit runs twenty-two checks, and the nine here are the ones you can do without tools or access. The rest are things like whether a chat assistant names you when somebody asks for a place to eat, how your review count sits against the median for your category nearby rather than against two places you picked, and what your site actually scores on mobile against Google’s own thresholds.

If you want the other thirteen, that is what the free audit is, and it costs nothing whether you hire us afterwards or not. If you would rather just fix the nine above yourself, that is a completely reasonable outcome and this page was written for it.