Mirascore: A digital inspection for a high-performing Google Business Profile

Managing your business's Google Business Profile (GBP) is a lot like owning a car. Both require regular use and maintenance, and their issues are costly and time-consuming to fix. Just as your car needs regular check-ups to stay roadworthy, your GBP demands consistent monitoring and management to keep your business competitive.

When your car shows signs of wear, a mechanic identifies the issues during an inspection, allowing you to address them before they become more significant problems. The same goes for your GBP — catching and resolving issues early is crucial. 

But how do you manage this when overseeing 600 locations with just a two-person marketing team? How do you spot and fix problems without a significant time investment?

Mirascore is the answer.

What is Mirascore?

‍

Mirascore is a groundbreaking new feature of Mirador Local, which acts as your digital MOT and provides a comprehensive Google Business Profile audit of your locations. 

Maintaining a flawless online presence is crucial for attracting customers and building your online reputation. Mirascore evaluates your profile's completeness, identifies unresolved issues like unaddressed reviews, and offers actionable insights to improve your business's visibility and reputation.

Let’s explore how Mirascore empowers you to take the wheel of your GBP profile, boost your online reputation, and drive more customers to your business. Why Mirascore Matters

Mirascore is an essential tool in GBP management, and offers unparalleled capabilities that traditional metrics can't match. By comprehensively assessing the completeness and quality of GBP locations, Mirascore stands out from basic analytics and generic performance indicators. This unique metric translates complex data into actionable insights, directly improving your business's online visibility and customer engagement.

The significance of Mirascore lies in its ability to quantify the health of each GBP location with a clear score, reflecting its completeness and the quality of its content. This metric isn't just a number — it's a roadmap to improving your digital presence. You can strategically improve your GBP's performance by systematically addressing areas flagged by Mirascore whether it's unclaimed profiles, unanswered reviews, or incomplete business information.

What sets Mirascore apart is its tangible impact. Unlike vague analytics that merely report data, Mirascore empowers businesses to enhance their online profiles and actively witness real-world results. Each incremental improvement in Mirascore correlates with increased discoverability, customer trust, and, ultimately, business growth. It's a dynamic metric that evolves with your efforts, providing a clear path to optimising GBP locations across various industries and business sizes.

In essence, Mirascore isn't just a metric — it's a catalyst for continuous improvement in GBP management. By leveraging its insights and benchmarks, businesses can stay ahead of competitors, capture more online traffic, and convert visitors into loyal customers. 

Let’s take a look at the problem that Mirascore initially solved for us.

The challenge we faced

After Mirador Local became stable and consistently delivered outstanding customer results, the next logical step was to expand our reach and seek out potential new customers who could benefit from our platform.

Manually performing this process would be time-consuming and impractical when dealing with hundreds, let alone thousands, of locations. We needed a method to quickly grade groups of locations to determine where issues could be fixed with Mirador Local.

There was no metric out there that indicates the quality of  Google Business Profile locations, apart from reviews, but that just doesn't quite cut it. There's so much more to it, and there was a real need to dive deeply into the data to see what treasure lay beneath.

Our solution

To tackle this challenge, we developed a comprehensive evaluation framework to assess the quality of a GBP profile. This framework consists of specific criteria, each with a measured associated score, which allows us to assign a quantifiable score to each location and benchmark it against others.

Here is a selection of example criteria from our evaluation framework:

• Is the location verified?
• Does the location have a description?
• Does the location have fewer than three photos?
• Are additional categories set?
• Does the location have a valid URL?
• Does the location have a logo?
• Are regular hours set?
• Does the location have a minimum number of reviews?

This framework helps us determine each location's strengths and weaknesses and the GBP’s overall trends. 

Some criteria are more critical than others, and we assign higher scores to those significantly impacting the profile's effectiveness, for example a location being verified is more important than having additional business categories set. By calculating the total score and converting it into a percentage, we can gauge the "profile completeness" on a per-location and overall basis.

Leveraging Mirascore data for actionable business insights

Once we had processed the data for thousands of locations using the checklist, we gained valuable insights into the common issues across different locations. This enabled us to identify the worst-performing locations and understand the areas needing improvement. These compelling Google Business Profile insights allow us to translate the data into actionable recommendations for potential customers.

For example, we discovered that many locations were missing additional categories, which are essential for helping customers find businesses when searching for specific products or services. Let’s say for example that a business is a Pizza restaurant franchise, it makes sense that the primary category would be “Pizza Restaurant”, but adding additional categories such as “Family restaurant”, “Pizza Takeaway”,”Restaurant” and “Vegan restaurant” might be a really good idea. By adding these additional categories and fixing common problems, these businesses could significantly improve their GBP profiles and attract more customers.

Since implementing this method, Mirador Local has processed data for 1,778 companies and 263,928 individual locations. We’ve segmented this data by industry, including:

• Retail
• Restaurants
• Supermarkets
• Services
• Real estate,

By doing this, we benchmarked GBP profiles against industry standards. This benchmarking revealed exciting patterns and common issues within each industry.

For example, in the Supermarket industry, we processed data for 23,142 locations in the UK. Of those locations, we identified 364,769 issues.

Most (90%) of the locations we checked presented with fewer than two significant issues. The most common issue (which occurred 11,053 times) was locations with no additional categories, followed by the use of non-location-specific URLs and Streetview main images.

One of the biggest factors at play here is that supermarkets tend to be quite large businesses that generate huge amounts of revenue. Therefore, they have allocated lots of resources to improving their GBP and online presence.

In contrast, the real estate industry’s performance was more mixed. We checked 4,370 locations and found 20,548 issues (of a possible 61,180), but  66% of the locations had fewer than two issues. The main problems were missing additional categories, missing descriptions and locations with Streetview main images.

Real estate also had the narrowest range of issues (meaning that there was a higher likelihood that the same issues would crop up from location to location). Supermarkets had the broadest range of performance, with some locations having minimal issues and others having numerous problems.

‍

When we zoom out from an industry scale and instead view it as a whole, the most prolific issues are a lack of additional categories (87,198 issues detected) and locations without a unique URL (71,159 issues detected). After that, there is a fall-off in terms of occurrence until we get to missing descriptions (38,755 issues detected).

The quality and sheer volume of data we collected allow us to pick out all these interesting top-level insights and zoom in and draw comparisons between specific businesses. For example, if we’re looking within the shopping sector, we might want to be hyper-specific to compare how high-street card shops stack up against each other. We can dig into the Google categories and use data from those specific businesses.

For example, Cardzone has 60 locations. Not one of those locations has a description, only four of them don’t use a location-specific URL, and 32 don’t have additional categories. Their worst-performing location is on Old Edinburgh Road, Tannochside, Glasgow. In fact, every single location has two or more issues.

Cardfactory has 453 locations, only 33% of which have two or more issues. Their most common issues are not using location-specific URLs, very few photos, and a lack of additional categories. The worst-performing location for Cardfactory is William St, Cookstown.

Overall, Cardfactory scores much higher because it has fewer locations with multiple issues, even though it has more overall issues.

The impact of improving your GBP

After analysing the data, we found a clear correlation between fewer issues and more significant business success. 

Companies with better-managed GBP profiles tend to be larger and more successful. Typically handling massive quantities of location data suggests the use of solutions such as Mirador Local as the time and effort required to do so manually would be significant. Businesses that rely on organic traffic understand the importance of a complete GBP profile in driving users to their website and footfall to their physical locations.

By investing the time to enhance your GBP’s completeness, you are effectively opening up more avenues for your customers to find what they are looking for. If a potential customer faces any barriers in the buying process whatsoever, they are likely to simply look elsewhere. Your ultimate goal is to make the experience of dealing with your business as easy, quick,and effortless as possible.

Not having a phone number, a website or opening hours for bank holidays is simply putting the onus on the customer to do the work. According to the Salesforce: Fifth edition state of the connected customer report, there is a growing trend of customers who value the experience of buying from a company over the product or service itself. When you rely on the customer to fill in the gaps themselves, you run the risk of simply turning them away.

Small businesses could benefit even more than household name brands by maximising the use of their GBP. For instance, adding proper descriptions, non-location specific URLs, and actively managing reviews/questions can demonstrate activity, trustworthiness and positively reinforce to potential customers that you are a legitimate business.

Ensuring your GBP profile is as complete as possible puts your business right under the nose of your customers, increasing visibility and attracting more potential clients.

From data analysis to the birth of Mirascore

Understanding the impact of a complete GBP profile allowed us to create a clear picture of what “good” does and doesn’t look like.

We define a Mirascore as a ranking between 0 and 100. There are many different criteria to satisfy when generating the total score and the idea isn’t to achieve a perfect score, but rather generally raise the average. 

Mirascore can be calculated on a per location basis, but is more powerful when taken as an average across all locations within a GBP.

Knowing how the score has been calculated allows us to demonstrate to a user which areas to focus on in order to take them from a Mirascore of 30 to a 50 and beyond, which would effectively be a byproduct of a significantly better profile.

However, Mirascore isn’t just an “always up” metric, in fact the potential for Miracore to fall as new issues arise over time is one of its most powerful assets. The positive and negative balance that emerges helps us to identify any sudden drops and highlight what might be the cause to the user.

What you see as a user is a precise, quantifiable measure of your profile's health, allowing you to identify and address issues quickly, where before they might have gone unnoticed for months or even years otherwise.

We offer these valuable insights and track your Mirascore over time, enabling you to visualise the impact of these insights on your locations.

Setting a new industry standard

Mirascore sets a new standard in the industry, allowing users to demonstrate the impact of their local SEO efforts. By tracking and improving your Mirascore on a line graph over time (on a week by week basis), you can showcase the value of your investments in GBP management to stakeholders in the most digestible way possible, clearly illustrating upwards and downwards momentum.

Mirascore acts as the only measure of quality and completeness available for GBP. With it, you can follow the journey your brand takes as its Mirascore increases and witness the benefits across a wide range of traditional metrics (total sales, customers through the door, sessions etc). For example, according to Think Google, 72% of people who conduct a local search on their smartphone visit a physical place within 24 hours; 28% of those searches result in a purchase. By improving how many customers can find your products and services on Google, you should see an increase in footfall in stores.

Mirascore is inherently connected as a measure of how effectively you target the customer base, coming directly from a gigantic platform like Google without being directly connected to the metrics your business deems important.

In the future, Mirascore will grow and can begin to incorporate additional insights such as anonymous comparison across industries and sectors to allow users to understand how they stack up to their competitors, areas often neglected and common questions/issues that buyers are facing.

How to Get Access to Mirascore for Free

To get started with Mirascore, follow these simple steps:

• Go to Mirador Local and sign up for an account.
• Connect your Google account (Manage Google connections).
• Return to the Dashboard and watch Mirascore work its magic.

Connecting your Google account allows us to retrieve your GBP location data to process it. We don't use this connection for any other purpose, and you maintain complete control over its status in accordance with Google's policies.

‍