Beat Competitors at the Profile Level with GBP Optimization

The GBP Optimization Skill: Beat Competitors at the Profile Level

You’re looking at a GBP profile for a client stuck at position 5–7 for eight months. The profile looks fine to you. Hours are right. Photos are there. Description reads okay.

But you’re comparing it against your memory of what a good profile looks like — not against the profiles of the three businesses currently outranking your client.

And categories 2 through 7 are empty because you weren’t sure which ones to add, and you didn’t want to guess wrong.

The gap isn’t knowledge. You know GBP matters. The gap is visibility: you can’t see the specific signals your competitors have that your client doesn’t, ranked by which ones are easiest to close.

What Changes With the GBP Optimization Skill

Claude pulls your client’s profile. Pulls the live local pack for the target keyword. Pulls each competitor’s full profile data. Runs completeness scoring. Identifies every category your client is missing that competitors have. Flags every high-value attribute that isn’t claimed.

Then tells you what to fix in priority order — benchmarked against who is actually ranking, not against a generic checklist from 2019.

The output is specific: “You’re missing 5 secondary categories. All 3 businesses currently in the top 3 have these categories. Adding them takes 10 minutes and immediately expands the queries your profile is eligible to appear for.”

That’s different from “consider adding secondary categories.”

See It Work: Category Gap, Attribute Gap, Photo Gap

Prompt: "Audit the GBP for Smile Dental Care at 1847 Park Avenue Phoenix AZ.
Targeting 'dentist near me' in Phoenix, stuck at position 5.
What do their top 3 competitors have that they don't?"

Skills that fire: dispatch → gbp-optimization + localseodata-tool
Data pulled: business_profile, profile_health, local_pack, business_profile ×3

GBP AUDIT: Smile Dental Care — Phoenix Dentist
Completeness Score: 67/100

CATEGORY GAP
Primary: General Dentist ✓
Missing secondary categories vs. competitors:
  → "Cosmetic Dentist" — all 3 competitors claim this
  → "Pediatric Dentist" — 2 of 3 competitors
  → "Teeth Whitening Service" — 2 of 3 competitors
  → "Dental Implants Provider" — 2 of 3 competitors
  → "Emergency Dental Service" — 2 of 3 competitors
These categories represent ~680 additional monthly searches
your listing is currently ineligible to appear for.

ATTRIBUTE GAP (27 available, 4 claimed)
High-value missing: "Accepts new patients", "Online booking",
"Weekend hours", "Insurance accepted", "X-ray services"
Competitor average: 14 attributes claimed.

PHOTO GAP
Current: 11 | Competitor average: 43
Missing: operatory/treatment rooms, team, technology/equipment

PRIORITY ORDER
1. Add 5 secondary categories — 10 min, query eligibility expansion
2. Claim 8 priority attributes — 5 min, relevance and trust signals
3. Expand description to 600+ characters — 20 min
4. Upload 30+ photos across missing categories — 90 min

One prompt. Specific gaps. Specific competitors. Specific time estimates.

What the Skill Analyzes

Profile Completeness Scoring

The skill calculates a completeness percentage based on filled vs. available fields, weighted by impact. A missing primary category affects the score more than missing a single attribute. Missing photos affect the score more than a short description.

Score thresholds:

Below 60%: Missing basic signals. Unlikely to appear in competitive map packs.
60-79%: Present but incomplete. Losing to more complete profiles.
80-89%: Competitive baseline. Can rank if other signals are strong.
90%+: Fully optimized. Completeness isn’t the limiting factor.

Category Gap Analysis

The most actionable part of the audit. The skill pulls the current top 3 in the local pack for your target keyword, retrieves their category configurations, and shows you exactly which categories they claim that your client doesn’t.

This matters because secondary categories determine query eligibility. If a dentist doesn’t claim “Emergency Dental Service,” they won’t appear for “emergency dentist Phoenix” even if they offer the service.

The gap is precise: “Competitor A has [these 6 categories]. Competitor B has [these 7 categories]. You have [these 2 categories]. Missing vs. all competitors: [this list].”

Attribute Coverage

GBP offers dozens of attributes depending on category — “Wheelchair accessible,” “Online booking,” “Free Wi-Fi,” “Women-owned,” etc. Each attribute is a signal and some appear as filters in Maps searches.

The skill shows:

How many attributes are available for this category
How many the client has claimed
How many competitors have claimed (average and per-competitor)
Which high-value attributes are unclaimed

Photo Gap Analysis

Photos affect both ranking signals and conversion behavior. The skill compares:

Total photo count (client vs. competitor average)
Photo types present vs. expected (exterior, interior, team, product/service)
Photo recency (stale profiles with 3-year-old photos vs. active profiles with recent uploads)

Description Optimization

Character count, keyword presence, service mention, and differentiation analysis. Not just “add more words” — specific recommendations about what the description should cover based on what’s ranking.

Q&A and Services Audit

Are common questions seeded with helpful answers? Is the service catalog complete? These are lower-weight signals but they contribute to completeness and appear prominently on the profile.

Who Uses This and When

Every new client onboarding. Before any other work begins, understand the GBP foundation. A client with 52% completeness needs profile work before anything else matters.

Every ranking investigation. When a client asks “why aren’t we in the top 3,” the GBP audit is the first answer. Often it’s the entire answer — the gap is at the profile level.

Every quarterly GBP review. Markets change. Competitors optimize. New attributes become available. Quarterly audits catch drift and identify new opportunities.

After any GBP policy or feature change. When Google adds new attributes or changes category options, the audit shows whether the client needs to update.

When a client’s competitors change. New entrants to the market, existing competitors who optimize — the competitive benchmark needs to be re-run against current reality.

What You Don’t Get Without This Skill

Without the gbp-optimization skill, you audit from memory against a generic checklist. You can look at a profile and think “seems complete” without knowing that the three businesses ranking above your client have 14 attributes claimed while your client has 4.

Without the skill:

You don’t know which categories competitors have
You don’t know the exact completeness percentage
You don’t see the attribute gap quantified
You’re guessing at what “optimized” looks like
You can’t prioritize because you don’t have the comparative data

With the skill:

Categories listed: yours vs. each competitor
Attributes quantified: X of Y claimed, competitor average Z
Photos counted: yours vs. competitor average
Priority order based on impact and effort
Time estimates for each action

The difference is the data. The skill pulls live data from the profiles that are actually ranking for your target keyword right now. That’s not available from memory or a checklist.

The Data Behind the Audit

The gbp-optimization skill calls these LocalSEOData endpoints:

business_profile — full GBP profile data for the target business
profile_health — completeness scoring, dimension-by-dimension gaps
local_pack — current map pack composition to identify who to benchmark against

For the competitive comparison, business_profile is called for each top-3 competitor. The skill then synthesizes: what do they all have that the client doesn’t?

Why GBP Optimization Has the Highest ROI

Among all local SEO activities, GBP optimization produces the fastest results with the least investment because:

Changes are immediate. Update a category, it’s live within hours. No waiting for crawling or indexing.
The profile is the conversion point. Zero-click conversions happen on GBP. Calls, directions, bookings — they happen before users reach your website.
Completeness correlates with visibility. Google shows complete profiles more often. The correlation is measurable.
Quick wins compound. Adding 5 categories and 8 attributes in 15 minutes expands query eligibility immediately.

A client stuck at position 5-7 with 67% completeness competing against profiles at 90%+ completeness has a clear path: close the gap. The skill shows exactly what that gap is.

Get This Skill — It’s Free and Open Source

The gbp-optimization skill is part of the LocalSEOSkills library. MIT licensed.

Installation:

Download LocalSEOSkills from GitHub
Upload to Claude.ai or configure in Claude Code
Connect LocalSEOData for live profile data
The skill is active immediately

First prompt:

"Audit the GBP for [Business Name] at [Address].
Target keyword: [keyword] in [city].
Show me what competitors have that we don't."

The category gaps, attribute gaps, and photo gaps will be specific to your client and benchmarked against their actual competitors. That specificity is what makes the audit actionable.

Skill Documentation

For technical details on how this skill works, what data it pulls, and complete prompt reference, see the full skill documentation.