The Google Business Profile reporting dashboard for local SEO agencies

The Keywords tab lists the search terms Google attributes to the listing, with the number of unique searchers in each month added over the months your dates cover. Google reports keywords by whole month, so the dates snap to months, and a person who searched in two months counts twice, which is why the column is named Searchers (monthly uniques, summed). Where Google withholds an exact count for a location it gives only “fewer than 15”: the report shows that as an upper limit, lists those keywords last and never adds them into a total. A flag marks the searches that contain the business's full name; it is a labelled rule of thumb that misses a misspelling.

Google does not split searches into branded and discovery, so the report does not pretend to. What it can show is the question behind that split: how much of the demand comes from people who typed the name and how much from people who did not. Read the flagged keywords beside the rest and a local retainer can see whether the listing is found by people who already knew the business or by people searching a category or a place. A note says why the figures do not match the impressions: Google never attributes every impression to a named search.

Impressions are a means; actions are the point. The Actions tab breaks the window into the seven things Google records for a Business Profile — calls, direction requests, website clicks, messages, bookings, food menu clicks and food orders, a measure Google is retiring — as a row each. Every row carries the raw total, the change against the previous period, a rate per thousand impressions and a pace per day. Seeing the mix stops a report from treating every listing the same way.

Because the rate is derived from the counters rather than stored beside them, it stays true when the date range changes; the headline rate counts calls, directions and website clicks per thousand impressions. A quiet month with a better action rate is a different conversation from a busy month with a worse one, and the report lets you have both. The Weekday pattern tab averages profile impressions, customer actions and call clicks by weekday, so the day calls peak can be set beside the day impressions peak — useful evidence when a client is deciding when to staff the counter or when to run a promotion.

The Reviews tab starts with the rating card: Google's all-time average, weighted by each location's review count when several are in scope, beside five bars from one star to five that count the newest reviews we read. Tiles carry how many of the newest reviews were read, how many were replied to and how many are waiting, and the list below shows each review with a star pill, its reply state and how long the reply took, with the reviewer reduced to a first name and an initial. Google lets the report read only the newest reviews of each location, so every count describes those; the average and the total number of reviews are Google's all-time figures. The rating has no change figure, because Google keeps no rating history, and the report does not invent one.

You cannot make a client's customers leave five stars, but you can answer every review and answer it quickly, and that is a deliverable an agency can be held to. The Responses tab states it as three tiles: the response rate over the newest reviews we read, the median time from a review to its reply's last update, and the number still waiting for a reply. Beneath the tiles sits the working queue, every review still without an owner reply, oldest first, with the days it has been waiting and a pill that escalates as that wait grows. A rating is a level rather than a total, so it never multiplies when the date range widens.

Local clients rarely have one listing. The Locations tab opens with a bar chart of impressions by location and a comparison table beneath it: impressions, the change against the previous period, customer actions, the action rate, calls, directions, website clicks and the all-time rating, side by side. Clicking a row re-bases the entire report on that location — the KPI band, the trend, the platforms split, the keyword table, the reviews and the response queue all narrow to it, and the location chips in the toolbar do the same job from anywhere in the report. Clearing the filter returns the rollup.

The rollup does the arithmetic properly. A combined average rating is weighted by review volume rather than averaging the location averages, so a branch with forty reviews cannot outvote one with six hundred. Impressions and actions add; the rating and the review count are all-time levels that stay put when the date range changes. And because a real portfolio is uneven, the comparison is built to surface the weak location rather than smooth it away: a falling trend and a low action rate are exactly what the table is for.

A local retainer is judged on three questions in order: is the listing being seen, is being seen producing calls and directions, and are the reviews being answered while that happens. The tabs are ordered to answer them in that sequence, the KPI band summarizes the impressions, the actions and the rating, and the export names the locations, dates and comparison it was taken under so a deck slide can be traced back. Agencies still ask for a Google My Business report by name years after the rename, and this is that report under the product's current name.

It is as important to say what is not here. There are no photo view metrics, because Google retired the legacy Insights API along with them and any dashboard still showing photo views is showing a figure nobody can source. There are no post or Q&A counts and no branded-versus-discovery split: the report shows only what Google gives it for the daily measures, the search keywords and the reviews. There are no third-party benchmarks either — the report compares a client with its own previous period, never against a made-up sector figure. Until a client's profile is connected, the report renders a deterministic illustrative profile for the selected client, so you can see the structure before you build the client's review around it.