Research · Auto repair
Good profile, forgotten website
A Google profile is the part of your online presence you can see and tidy in five minutes. The website is the part nobody looks at for years. Nearly a third of shops with a well-kept profile have a website missing half the basics.
Nearly a third with a well-kept Google profile miss four or more of eight website basics.
These are shops that did the work. Their Google profile has a photo, opening hours, and a link to their website. If you asked the owner whether they are set up online, they would reasonably say yes, and the part they can see would back them up.
The half you can see, and the half you cannot
A profile shows you its own gaps. Google prompts you to add a photo, tells you when hours are missing, and puts the result on a screen you already visit. Nothing does that for a website. Missing headings, no link preview, a page arriving slowly on a phone: none of it appears when you type in your own address on the laptop in the office.
That is the whole finding. The two halves of the same business are not kept to the same standard, because only one of them complains.
How we got these numbers
We took businesses categorized as auto repair that had both a Google profile marked as operating and a website we could score, counting each business once. That was 4,177 businesses.
A profile counts as well kept when it has a photo, opening hours, and a website link. We left the business description out of that test: almost every profile is missing one, so it separates nobody. The website side is the eight basics we scored separately, and the profile signals come from what Google profiles are missing.
An honest limitation: these are the businesses we chose to analyze, not a random sample of the industry. The two groups are very different sizes, because scoring a website at all requires having one, so we report the figure for the large group rather than a comparison between them. This is an association between two things we measured, not proof that one causes the other.
What to do about it
- Open your own site on your phone. Not the office laptop. Use mobile data, not the shop wifi.
- Try to call yourself from it. If the number is not tappable, that is the first fix.
- Send yourself the link. Whatever appears in the message is what a customer sees when someone recommends you.
- Give the website the same five minutes. It is the half that never asks for them.