Marketing & GrowthFree
Local Business Health Check Report
River checks your Google listing, your reviews, where you rank, and what 20 nearby competitors are doing — then hands you a prioritized fix list and a competitor spreadsheet you can keep.
Most local businesses have never seen what a customer sees. You know your work is good, but you do not know that your Google listing is missing the hours you actually keep, that the shop across town has four times your reviews, or that you do not appear at all for the exact phrase people type when they need you at 9pm on a Sunday. This tool goes and looks.
River checks the things that actually decide whether a local customer finds you and calls you: your Google Business Profile and whether it is complete, how many reviews you have and what people say in them, where you rank for the searches that matter in your city, whether your website answers the questions a buyer has, and what the 20 businesses competing with you for the same customers look like side by side. It comes back with a scored report and a competitor spreadsheet, not a sales call.
Everything in the report comes from live data pulled while it runs — real listings, real reviews, real search results. Nothing is estimated. If something cannot be found, the report says so, because for a local business a listing that cannot be found is the finding.
What actually moves the needle for a local business
Reviews are usually the largest gap and the cheapest to close. Most local buyers compare two or three businesses in the map pack and pick on a combination of star rating and review count, and recency matters more than people expect — a 4.9 with the last review eight months ago reads as a business that might not be operating. The number that matters is not your rating in isolation; it is your review count next to the three businesses that appear above you. That comparison is the first thing this report shows you.
The second gap is usually the gap between what you sell and what your website says. Local search rewards specificity: a business with a real page for each service, with the city named naturally in the title and the first heading, will out-rank a business with one 'Services' page listing twelve things. This is unglamorous work, and it is the work that moves rankings for a small business more reliably than anything else you can pay for.
The third is the one almost nobody checks: what your competitors' reviews complain about. Every local market has a recurring complaint — nobody calls back, they showed up late, the quote changed. If three of your competitors get hammered for the same thing and you are good at that thing, that is your entire marketing message, and it is sitting in public review text. This report reads competitor reviews specifically to find it.
How it works
Tell us where to look
Your website, your city, and what customers hire you for. That is enough.
River goes and checks
It reads your site, finds your Google listing, pulls reviews, runs real local searches, and maps your competitors.
You get a report and a spreadsheet
A scored report with a prioritized fix list, plus a competitor grid you can sort and keep.
Start fixing, with help
Ask River to draft the review responses, write the missing service page, or rewrite your titles — it already has the context.
What you get
- A scored health check across seven areas, with the evidence behind every score
- A spreadsheet of up to 20 local competitors with ratings, review counts, and websites
- Where you actually rank for the searches customers use in your city, and who beats you
- Recurring themes from your reviews and your competitors' reviews
- A fix list ordered by impact, marked for what you can do yourself this week
- A workspace that keeps everything, so you can re-run the check and compare later
Common questions
Do I need to connect my Google account?
No. Everything checked here is public — the same things a customer sees when they search for you. That means you can also run this on a competitor, and it means there is nothing to connect and no permissions to grant. If you do want data only you can see, such as the exact search terms bringing people to your site, that requires connecting Google Search Console separately.
How is this different from the free audit tools that email me a PDF?
Two ways. First, the report is built from live data pulled while it runs rather than a generic checklist, so the competitor names, review counts, and ranking positions in it are real and current. Second, you end up in a workspace rather than with a PDF. The report and the competitor spreadsheet stay in your account, and River can immediately start doing the work it just recommended — drafting review replies, writing the service page you are missing, rewriting page titles.
What if my business does not show up on Google Maps at all?
The report will lead with that, because it is the most expensive problem a local business can have and it is usually fixable in an afternoon. Most often the listing exists but is unverified, is filed under the wrong category, or is under an old business name or address. The report tells you which of those it looks like based on what was and was not found.
Does this work for a business without a website?
Partly. The Google listing, reviews, competitor, and search-ranking sections all work without a website, and for many local trades those matter more than a site does. The website and on-page sections will come back empty, and the report will treat not having a site as a finding rather than skipping past it.
How current is the data?
It is pulled live at the moment you run the check. Ratings, review counts, and search positions are as of that run. Local rankings shift and vary somewhat by the searcher's exact location, so treat a position as a strong signal rather than a fixed number — the comparison against competitors is more stable and more useful than any single ranking.
Can I run it again later to see if things improved?
Yes, and that is the intended use. Because the report and competitor grid live in a workspace rather than an inbox, running it again a month or a quarter later gives you a real before-and-after on review counts and rankings instead of a vague sense that things are better.
Local Business Health Check Report
Fill in the form and your workspace opens with the work already underway.