Diligence lead flow in 30 minutes, before the LOI

Before you sign an LOI on a local service business, you can learn a surprising amount about where its leads come from without asking the seller a single question. It takes about thirty minutes, costs nothing, and uses only what is public.

None of this replaces proper diligence. It is a screen. Its job is to tell you whether the business deserves the deeper look, and which questions to put to the seller when you get one.

1. Google Business Profile health (5 minutes)

Search the business name and open its profile. You are looking for the basics done properly.

• Is the primary category the one a customer would search for? A heating company listed as a general contractor is competing for the wrong searches
• Are the hours real, and do they match the website?
• Is the address shown, or is it a service area business with the address hidden? That setting often caps how well the profile can rank, and it can be changed
• Are there recent photos, or is the newest one three years old?

What it means for the deal: a neglected profile on an otherwise good business is cheap upside. A profile with odd flags, a changed name or a suspension history is a risk worth asking about.

2. Map pack position (5 minutes)

Search the two or three things the business earns its money from, with the city. For example “water heater repair” and the town name. Note whether the business appears in the map pack, and where.

Do not do this from the business’s own office. Google knows where you are and favors nearby profiles, so the result flatters the business. Check from a couple of other parts of the area it serves, or use a rank-grid tool that does it for you.

What it means for the deal: if a business with a good reputation is missing from the pack for its core searches, find out why. It may be the profile, the address setup or the website. Each of those has a different price to fix.

3. Review count and velocity (10 minutes)

This one takes the longest because it is the most revealing. Open the reviews and sort by newest. Scroll back and note roughly how many arrived in the last three months, the three before that, and the year before. Look at whether the owner replies.

What it means for the deal: the pace tells you something the P&L does not yet. A slowdown in reviews often shows up before a slowdown in revenue. A business with few reviews for its age usually just never asked, which is an opportunity. A business whose reviews were steady and then stopped deserves a question.

4. Branded against non-branded demand (5 minutes)

Some customers find the business by typing its name. Others find it by searching for the service. Those are very different companies to buy. Without Search Console access you cannot measure the split, but you can get a rough sense by checking whether the business shows up for the service searches at all, or only for its own name.

What it means for the deal: if you only find it by searching its name, your leads are probably referrals and repeat customers. That is a real asset, but it is not a marketing engine. How to measure the split properly is worth doing once you have access.

5. Presence in AI answers (5 minutes)

Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google’s AI Mode for the best business of this kind in its town. Note whether the target is named, and who is named instead.

What it means for the deal: more buyers will ask a chatbot first each year. A business absent from those answers is not in trouble today, but it is exposed. The fuller test is in the next piece on this.

Reading the result

You are not scoring the business out of five. You are sorting what you found into three piles.

• Strong and unforced: reputation and visibility are both good. Ask what the seller does that keeps it that way
• Good business, weak footprint: the reputation is the asset and the gaps are fixable. This is the pile that makes the screen worth running
• Weak on both: the business may be coasting on a past reputation. Slow down

Then take the questions this raised to the seller, and decide whether a full SEO diligence is worth commissioning before you commit.