What your free Marketing Score Card checks, and how to fix the 5 most common issues

The free Marketing Score Card gives your business a score out of 100. A number on its own is not much use, though. What matters is knowing what was checked, why it matters to a customer, and what to do about it.

This guide walks through every check the Score Card runs on your Google listing and your website, then goes deeper on five issues that come up again and again, and are among the easiest to fix.

How the score works

You enter your business name and city, and your website if you have one. The Score Card then:

1. looks up your public Google Business Profile listing through Google's official Places service
2. loads your website's home page once, the way a browser would, and reads what is actually in it
3. awards marks for each check and adds them up

Your overall score is the marks you earned divided by the marks available, across everything that could be checked. If something could not be checked (say, you have no website yet), it is shown as not checked, rather than quietly counted as a zero or a free pass.

You also get a grade (A+ from 90, A from 80, B from 70, C from 60, D from 45, and F below that), the three fixes worth the most marks, and the score you would have after making them. When Google has enough data, you also see how similar businesses near you compare on rating, reviews and photos.

Nothing is guessed. Every mark comes from data measured during your scan.

The 10 Google listing checks

Some parts of a listing, such as verification status, posts and offers, are only visible to the owner. The Score Card does not pretend to know them.

The 12 website checks

The five most common gaps, and how to fix them

These five matter to customers, show up on a lot of small-business scans, and none of them needs a big budget.

1. Too few recent Google reviews

Reviews carry more marks than any other single check, and they are what customers read first. If you have only a handful, this is usually where your biggest gain is.

Fix it: get your review link from your Business Profile, ask every customer at the moment they are happiest, and make it effortless with a WhatsApp message or a QR code at the counter. Reply to every review, good or bad. Our Google reviews playbook walks through it step by step.

2. A thin Google listing

Opening hours, photos and a linked website are quick wins that many listings skip. Without hours, Google cannot tell customers whether you are open right now. Without photos, people have nothing to judge you by.

Fix it: in your Business Profile, add your regular hours (plus special hours for festivals and holidays), upload at least 10 recent photos of your storefront, interior, team, products or work, check that your primary category describes what you mainly do, and link your website.

3. A missing or weak title and meta description

Your page title and meta description are often what people see in Google's results before they ever visit. With no description, Google picks some text from your page, which may not sell you at all.

Fix it: write a title of roughly 30 to 60 characters that says what you do and where, for example Leaf Dental Care | Dentist in Banjara Hills, Hyderabad. Then write a 70 to 160 character description that gives people a reason to click: your speciality, your timings, or what makes you different.

4. No business schema

Schema is a small block of structured data in your page's code. It tells Google, in a format it reads reliably, who you are, where you are and how to reach you. Many small-business websites have none.

Fix it: ask whoever manages your website to add LocalBusiness structured data (JSON-LD) to the home page. A minimal example looks like this:

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Leaf Dental Care",
  "telephone": "+91 98765 43210",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "Road No. 12, Banjara Hills",
    "addressLocality": "Hyderabad",
    "postalCode": "500034",
    "addressCountry": "IN"
  },
  "openingHours": "Mo-Sa 10:00-20:00"
}

It goes inside a <script type="application/ld+json"> tag. Use a more specific type if one fits, such as Dentist, Restaurant or Store, and make sure the details match your Google listing exactly. Google's free Rich Results Test will tell you whether it reads correctly.

5. Contact details that are hard to find

Visitors on a phone want to call or message you in one tap. If the home page has no phone number, or the email address is only an image, many of them will simply go back to the search results.

Fix it: put your phone number on the home page as a tap-to-call link (tel:), add a clickable email address (mailto:), and consider a WhatsApp chat link too. Showing your address and opening hours near the bottom of the page helps as well.

Quick fixes for the other website checks

• HTTPS: most hosts offer a free SSL certificate. Switch it on and redirect every http address to https.
• Mobile friendly: the page needs <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width, initial-scale=1"> in its head. Any modern theme includes it.
• One H1: make the main headline on your home page the only H1, and say what you do in it.
• Alt text: describe each image in a few words, such as "Dental check-up room at Leaf Dental Care". It helps Google Images and people using screen readers.
• Social links: link the profiles you actually keep up to date, usually from the footer.
• Page weight and speed: keep the home page lean, remove plugins and scripts you no longer use, and choose hosting that answers quickly for visitors in India.

Run your free scan

The quickest way to know which of these apply to you is to check. The free Score Card takes about a minute, needs no signup and never asks for your passwords. You will see your score, your grade, your top three fixes and the score you would have after making them.

Fix those three first, run the scan again, and watch the number move.