toolkit

Scenario · Content and search

Google Business Profile needs updating

“Our hours changed.” Or: “We've moved — the address is wrong on Google.”

A request to update hours or an address on Google gets done in Google and stops there — but a business listing is judged partly by whether the practice's own website agrees with it, and the website half is the half that routinely gets forgotten. This checks whether the site's name, address, phone and hours actually match what just got updated on the listing, across every place those details live on the page, so the update isn't half a job that reads as a whole one.

What to ask for

Local SEO (NAP)Local SEO / NAP audit — reads a page's delivered HTML and checks the local-search signals a business page lives or dies by: LocalBusiness structured data with a complete Name-Address-Phone, a phone and street address on the page, NAP consistency between the schema and the visible page (a mismatched phone fails the page), and Google Business Profile readiness — opening hours, geo coordinates, an embedded map.Structured data (schema)Structured-data audit — checks a page's JSON-LD against a per-type rubric: valid JSON, a schema.org context, and the required and recommended properties that gate rich results for Organization, WebSite, Article, Product, LocalBusiness, BreadcrumbList, FAQPage, Event, Recipe and more.

See it work

A real run of Local SEO (NAP):

FAIL — 1 page(s)
      [error] schema phone +1-555-0100 ≠ page phone +15559999 — inconsistent NAP confuses local ranking
      [info] LocalBusiness schema has no openingHours / openingHoursSpecification — add hours for Google Business Profile parity
      [info] LocalBusiness schema has no geo (latitude/longitude) — helps map placement
      [info] no Google Maps embed on the page — an embedded map reinforces the location signal

  report: ./out/local-seo-nap-local-seo-nap.html
  json:   ./out/local-seo-nap.json
  text:   ./out/local-seo-nap-local-seo-nap.txt

The captured report, exactly as a run hands it to a client —open the full report ↗

The request is about Google, so the work gets done in Google and stops there. But a listing is corroborated by the practice’s own site: an address or phone number that disagrees with the website undermines both, and the website half is the half nobody updates.

  1. Establish the correct details, in one place. Name, address, phone, hours. Get them confirmed by the practice rather than inferred from the request — a partial hours change described in an email is the usual source of a wrong listing.
  2. Audit what the website currently says. The local SEO check finds the practice’s name, address and phone across the site and reports where they disagree with each other. Most sites carry them in three or four places — footer, contact page, location pages, schema — and they drift independently.
  3. [manual] Update the Business Profile in Google’s console. Hours, address, phone, and the categories if the services changed. Changes to an address frequently trigger re-verification, which takes days and is worth telling the client about at this point rather than when they ask.
  4. [manual] Update every place on the site that carries the same detail. Footer, contact page, location pages, and the structured data. Publish and purge.
  5. Re-run the consistency check. It should now find one set of details agreeing everywhere. This is the deliverable — a listing update where the site still says the old hours is half a job that reads as a whole one.
  6. Check the structured data. The schema audit confirms the machine-readable version — the LocalBusiness block carrying address, phone and opening hours — matches the visible page. Search engines read that block, and it is the copy most likely to be left behind.

The site is the corroboration

Google treats consistency between a listing and the business’s own website as a signal, so an updated listing paired with a stale site is worse than either alone: the practice now publishes two different answers. Steps 2 and 5 exist to make the website side auditable, since that is the side this toolkit can actually see.

What this does not cover

The profile itself. There is no Business Profile client here: nothing reads, edits or verifies the listing, so every change to it is made by hand in Google's own console and confirmed there. What this procedure does is the half that is routinely forgotten — making the website agree with the listing, which is what the listing is judged against.

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