Google LSA audit: what contractors should check before spending more.

Zone 1: Ranking + Visibility

• Check your LSA bid setting — is it set to "maximize leads" or a manual bid? Confirm it matches your volume goal.
• Review your active service categories and remove any you don't want to book.
• Confirm your business hours in LSA match your actual availability — off-hours showing as available will hurt your response rate score.
• Check that your service-area radius matches your actual dispatch range; overbroad areas dilute relevance.

Zone 2: Lead Quality + Dispute Health

• Pull your dispute rate for the last 90 days — what percentage of leads were disputed as invalid?
• Check your dispute approval rate — if Google is rejecting most of your disputes, review their criteria; your definition of "bad lead" may not match theirs.
• Calculate how much you recovered via approved disputes — this number typically represents 5–15% of spend and most contractors never claim it.
• Flag any recurring dispute patterns (wrong service type, out-of-area) — these indicate a profile or targeting issue, not a dispute problem.

Zone 3: Response Time

• Pull your average response time from the LSA dashboard — your target is under five minutes for calls and under two hours for messages.
• Test your phone-rings-to-first-human-voice pipeline: call your own LSA number during business hours and count the rings and transfers.
• Check after-hours handling — is there a live answering service, or does it roll to voicemail? Voicemail during high-volume periods costs you both leads and ranking.
• Review your missed call rate — every missed LSA call is a lead you paid for and didn't answer.

Zone 4: Review Velocity + Recency

• Count your total reviews and your most recent review date — is there any gap longer than three weeks?
• Calculate your monthly review average for the last six months — are you gaining, flat, or losing ground?
• Confirm your review request process is automated post-job — manual asks are inconsistent.
• Check your response rate: 100% is the target, within 48 hours.

Zone 5: Booking Conversion (Post-Call)

• Pull your booked-job rate from LSA leads specifically — what percentage of LSA calls become scheduled appointments?
• Listen to 10 recent LSA-sourced call recordings and score for: greeting, qualification, close attempt, and call disposition in CRM.
• Identify whether booking failures are happening at price, scheduling, or urgency — each has a different fix.
• Compare your LSA booking rate to your Google Ads booking rate — a significant gap signals a lead quality difference, not a CSR problem.

Zone 6: Tracking + Source Separation

• Open your CRM and search for jobs sourced to LSA in the last 90 days — is the count roughly matching LSA's reported lead volume?
• Confirm your CRM has a distinct source value for LSA that doesn't blend with GBP organic or Google Ads.
• Calculate cost-per-booked-job for LSA specifically, using only LSA-sourced jobs and LSA spend.
• Verify your LSA phone number is different from your Google Ads number and your GBP number — without separation, attribution is unworkable.