The Words on Your Google Profile Aren't the Words Your Customers Type
Google records the exact terms people search before they find you. Most owners never look. Our new Performance Insights compares those real searches against what's actually on your profile.
You wrote your Google Business Profile once. Probably from memory, sitting at a desk, describing what you do in the words you’d use to describe it to a friend. “HVAC contractor.” “Family dentistry.” “Auto repair.” Done. You never looked at it again.
Your customers describe you differently. They don’t type “HVAC contractor” at 9pm when the house is 84 degrees. They type “AC not blowing cold” and “air conditioning repair near me.” Different words. Same business. And Google has been quietly writing all of those searches down.
That gap is the thing almost nobody checks. So we built something that checks it for you. It’s called Performance Insights, and it’s live now inside Presence Optimize.
Google already knows what people searched to find you
Here’s a fact most owners don’t know: inside your Google Business Profile, Google logs the exact search terms people typed right before they landed on your listing. Not estimates. Not a third-party tool’s guess at keyword volume. The actual queries, with real counts.
You can find it yourself if you dig. Open your profile, go to the performance section, scroll to searches. It’s there. It has always been there.
Almost nobody looks. I’ve asked a lot of owners whether they’ve ever opened that screen, and the answer is nearly always no. They didn’t know it existed, or they opened it once, saw a list, and closed it because they weren’t sure what to do with it.
That’s fair. A list of search terms isn’t an answer. It’s homework.
What Performance Insights actually does
Performance Insights pulls that real search data straight from Google and does the part you were never going to do by hand: it compares what people are searching against what’s actually written on your profile.
Your description. Your services list. Your primary category. All of it.
When a term shows up a lot in real searches but doesn’t appear anywhere on your profile, we flag it. When your category is too generic for what people actually type, we flag that too. If your listing says “HVAC Contractor” but the searches driving people to you are “Air Conditioning Repair Service,” that’s a mismatch worth knowing about. Google lets you pick a more specific category. Most owners never realize they should.
Every one of these shows up with its own badge, so you know at a glance it’s backed by real Google search data, not a hunch. That distinction matters to me. There are plenty of tools that will hand you a keyword suggestion pulled from an industry average. This is your searches, from your listing, counted by Google.
One honest note on the data. When a search term draws fewer than some minimum number of people, Google won’t give you an exact count. It shows a threshold instead. So a few of these will read as “at least this many” rather than a precise number. We show it the way Google gives it to us. I’d rather you see the real shape of the data than a made-up precision.
Why the primary category is the one to fix first
If you only act on one thing Performance Insights surfaces, make it the category.
In local search ranking surveys, the Google Business Profile primary category is consistently ranked the single biggest factor in whether you show up in local results (Whitespark Local Search Ranking Factors). It’s not close. A generic category leaves ranking on the table against the competitor down the road who picked the specific one.
And it’s a two-minute fix once you know it’s wrong. The hard part was never changing the category. The hard part was knowing your category didn’t match how people search. That’s the part we now do for you.
What this is, and what it isn’t yet
I want to be straight about where this stands, because I’d rather undersell it than have you expect something it doesn’t do.
Right now, Performance Insights shows you the gaps. It doesn’t close them for you. Every insight is a suggestion you review and act on yourself inside your Google Business Profile. We’re finishing quality checks on the part that writes changes back to Google directly, and until that’s solid, it stays off. I’m not shipping a button that edits your live listing before I trust it completely.
So today this is visibility, not one-click fixing. That’s a deliberate order of operations. The first job is showing you a truth you couldn’t see before: the words your customers actually use versus the words sitting on your profile. Once you can see that, most of the fixes are obvious and fast.
If you want the fuller picture of what a strong profile looks like beyond search terms, we wrote a Google Business Profile optimization checklist that pairs well with this, and a breakdown of how the local 3-pack actually picks who shows up.
Why we built this now
Respondyr started as one thing: answering the reviews you don’t have time to answer. That’s still the core of what we do, and it’s still where most businesses get the fastest win.
But reviews are only part of how Google decides whether to show you to the person searching. Your profile is the other part, and it’s the part that quietly rots because you wrote it once and moved on. Nobody sends you a reminder that the world started searching for you in words you never put on the page.
Performance Insights is us reading that page for you and pointing at the gaps. Same idea as the reviews product, really. You don’t have time to check this every week. So we check it, and we only speak up when there’s something worth your two minutes.
If your reviews are going unanswered and your profile hasn’t been touched since the day you set it up, Respondyr handles it month to month, no contract. We’ll show you both.