Ask a local business owner where their next customer will come from and most will point at their website. In my experience, for anyone with a door that opens onto a street, it is usually the map.
Someone in your town picks up their phone, types “coffee shop near me” or “hardware shop open now”, and never scrolls past the handful of businesses Google shows in the map results. They pick one, tap directions, and walk in fifteen minutes later. Your website was never part of that decision. Your Google Business Profile was the whole of it.
That is the thing worth understanding about footfall. The profile is not a listing you set up once and forget about. It is your shopfront on the busiest street in the country, and most businesses are leaving it half-shuttered.
This is the part that surprises owners. BrightLocal’s analysis of more than 45,000 business profiles found that roughly 84% of the searches that surfaced a profile were discovery searches, meaning someone looking for a category, product or service rather than a specific business. Only about 16% typed the business name.
So your profile is not really there to serve the people who already know you. Those customers were coming anyway. It is there to catch the eight out of ten people who searched for what you sell and had no idea you existed until Google put you in front of them.
That is footfall you are not currently counting, and it is the footfall you have the most control over.
Think about how much work a website has to do. Someone lands on your homepage, works out whether you are the right sort of business, hunts for opening hours, finds the contact page, maybe writes down an address, maybe comes back later. Plenty of people fall out along the way.
Now think about a profile in the map results. Opening hours are already on screen. So is the rating. So is the phone number, the address, the photos and a directions button. The gap between “I might” and “I am walking there now” is one tap wide.
That is why direction requests and calls are the two numbers I would watch above all others in your profile’s performance data. They are the closest thing local search gives you to a footfall counter on the door.
Here is the encouraging part. In that same BrightLocal data, only around 5% of profile views turned into a call, a website click or a direction request. Most businesses are being seen far more often than they are being chosen. The room for improvement is not in getting seen. It is in what happens in the ten seconds after someone sees you.
People used to look through the window and decide whether a place felt right. They still do that, they just do it on their phone before they leave the house.
BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey puts numbers on how unforgiving this has become. 68% of consumers now say they will not use a business rated below four stars, up from 55% a year earlier. 31% will not consider anything below 4.5. And 92% say star ratings factor into which business they choose.
Recency matters just as much as the score. 74% of people want to see reviews written in the last three months. A 4.8 average built on reviews from three years ago reads as a business that used to be good. If the newest thing on your profile is from 2023, that is the impression you are giving.
The direct link to footfall is there in the same research: 31% of consumers said reading positive reviews led them to visit a business in person. Not to browse the website. To physically turn up.
None of this requires anything clever. It requires asking. A steady trickle of two or three fresh reviews a month will do more for your visitor numbers than almost anything else on this list, and it costs nothing but the habit of asking happy customers on their way out.
Most profiles have a logo and a stock photo. That is a missed opportunity, because photos are what people scroll before they decide.
For footfall specifically, the exterior shot is the one people underrate. Someone who has never been to your street needs to recognise your building when they get near it. A clear photo of the frontage, taken in daylight, from the pavement, genuinely reduces the number of people who give up and go elsewhere because they could not find you.
After that: the inside of the place, so people know what they are walking into. Your actual products, not catalogue images. The car park or the nearest place to leave a car. Your team, if you are a business where people matter. Real photographs of a real place beat polished ones that could be anywhere.
These are unglamorous and they matter more than most of the advice you will read elsewhere.
If you only have an hour, spend it in this order.
Come back in ninety days and look at those two numbers again. That is the only proof that matters.
The businesses winning footfall in their town are rarely the ones with the best website. They are the ones that are easiest to find, easiest to trust and easiest to walk into.
