If you have recently accessed your Google business profile to make edits, you might have noticed a new feature called “profile strength” that displays a donut-like icon. This feature shows how “complete” your profile is, with a green color indicating that it is 100% complete, while other colors indicate that there is more work to be done. However, I find the term “profile strength” to be misleading and Google’s choice of words to be inadequate. This can lead business owners to believe that their listing will not rank as high on Google Maps unless they achieve a green status, which is not true.
While Google recommends a series of steps to complete your profile and improve customer engagement and visibility on Google Search and Maps, some of these steps require payable services like setting up a Google Ads account and adding a custom domain to your free Google website. Although you can skip these steps, it’s interesting to see that Google has added them as part of the profile strength completion process.
It’s important to note that the profile strength feature does not highlight crucial aspects of customer interaction, such as a phone number or secondary categories that actually can affect your ranking on Google Maps. This raises questions about whether this feature is a strategy from Google to encourage more people to enroll in their paid services.
Therefore, I suggest not paying too much attention to this new feature unless it identifies something you are missing other than ads.