A roofer in Dundee has spent a season on her Business Profile, her service pages and her reviews. The phone feels busier, but when her accountant asks what the work produced she has a feeling and no number. Local search pays out in three actions before any sale: a call, a request for directions and a click to the website. Count those three in the reports that already record them and you can say what search is producing.
Most local customers never reach your website
A searcher who types "roofer near me" on a phone sees the map pack and acts from it: a tap on the call button, on directions, or on the website link, and two of those three never load a page of yours, so website analytics alone misses most of what local search does.
So you read three places: the profile's own report for actions taken there, your analytics for what happens after a website click, and a rank snapshot for why the numbers moved.
Read the profile's performance report first
Google's Business Profile help describes a Performance report built into the profile. Its sections use Google's own names: Interactions (the total), Searches (the search terms people used to find your business), Views (how many people viewed your profile on Search and Maps), Directions, Calls (the number of times a customer clicked the call button) and Website clicks, plus Messages and Bookings if you use them.
Two details from the same help page matter when you compare months: Views count unique visitors, one per person per day, and the Searches metric is updated at the start of each month and can take up to five days to appear, so don't read it mid-month.
Three questions:
- Are we being found for the right things? In Searches, separate terms containing your business name from the rest. Branded terms are demand you created elsewhere; unbranded ones ("emergency roofer", "roof repair dundee") are what local SEO earns, and growth there is the clearest sign it's working.
- Are we being chosen? Views rising while calls and directions stay flat means you're shown and passed over, which points at photos, rating, hours or category rather than ranking.
- Are the actions the ones that make money? A trade wants calls, a restaurant wants directions, a clinic wants bookings; decide which is yours and lead your monthly note with it.
Treat every count as a floor: Calls counts taps on the button, not conversations, and someone who reads the number and dials by hand is invisible.
Make website clicks visible in your analytics
A click on your profile's website link reaches your analytics as a visit from Google, filed with every other organic search visit, so you can't tell whether the map pack or your pages did the work.
The fix is to tag the link. UTM parameters are the small labels on the end of a URL that tell Google Analytics where a visit came from; Google Analytics help documents them and Google publishes a free Campaign URL Builder that assembles them. Set the profile's website link to your homepage plus a source of "google", a medium of "organic" and a campaign such as "business-profile", and GA4 can then show those sessions on their own; confirm first that the homepage's canonical tag names the clean address.
Then make the site's own revenue actions countable: in GA4, taps on your phone number link, form submissions and booking clicks can be recorded as events and marked as key events, Google Analytics' name for conversions. Filter those to the business-profile campaign and you have the chain from profile click to enquiry.
Count calls without breaking your listing
Call-tracking services swap in a number that records every call, the only way to count connected calls rather than taps. Before you put one on your profile, read the phone section of Google's guidelines for representing your business: the number must be under the business's direct control, local rather than a central helpline where possible, and must not redirect or refer users to a number other than the business's own. Call tracking isn't mentioned by name, so use one only where the number is yours, local and permanent.
The quieter cost is consistency: a number that appears only on the profile disagrees with every other listing, which the citations lesson explains is worth keeping clean. For most small businesses a simpler method works: ask every caller how they found you and write it down.
Put the numbers on one page, once a month
Rankings explain the movement in the counts, so record them alongside. A single rank check is a snapshot from one place, and local results change with where the searcher stands; a grid of checks across your service area shows the shape instead. Keep one row per month: views, top unbranded terms, calls, directions, website clicks, tagged sessions, key events, review count and the grid pattern.
Then resist reading it weekly: seasonal trades compare a month with the same month last year, everyone else compares quarter with quarter, and month-to-month noise in a small business is large enough to tell any story you like.
What to take away
- Most local customers act from the map pack without visiting your site, so count calls, directions and website clicks in the profile's Performance report first.
- Unbranded terms growing in the Searches section is the clearest sign local SEO is working; views rising while actions stay flat is a conversion problem, not a ranking one.
- Tag the website link on your profile with UTM parameters so GA4 can separate profile traffic and tie it to phone taps and enquiries.
- Record one row a month, rankings included, and compare quarters or the same month a year apart rather than week to week.
Next
With a baseline written down, find the fastest things to move it in The 30-minute local quick-wins audit.