Local SEO checklist

1 The Google Business Profile, which is most of it

For a local business the profile does more work than the website. It is also the part almost nobody finishes, because the fields that matter are not the ones the setup wizard asks for.

• Claim the profile and verify it. An unverified listing can be edited by anybody.
• Set the primary category to the single thing you most want to be found for, not the broadest one on the list. It decides which map results you appear in at all.
• Add every other relevant category as a secondary. They widen the pool you are drawn from without diluting the primary.
• Fill in the services list completely, in the words customers use. It is matched against what people type and it is almost always left blank.
• Write the business description as a description of the business, not a keyword list. It does not affect ranking and it does affect whether somebody calls.
• Set opening hours, including the days you are closed, and set holiday hours before the holiday.
• Decide the address question deliberately: visible if customers come to you, hidden with a service area if you go to them. Getting this wrong suppresses you or risks suspension.
• Set the service area to the places you genuinely travel to. A radius covering three counties you have never worked in is worse than a tight one you can justify.
• Point the website link at the relevant page rather than the home page. For a multi-location business this is per branch.
• Add the appointment or booking link if you have one, pointing at the booking system rather than the contact page.
• Upload real photographs of the premises, the team and the work. Stock photography signals nothing and reads as a business with nothing to show.
• Add products or services with descriptions where the category supports it. Most profiles leave this empty.
• Turn on messaging only if somebody will actually answer it. An unanswered message is worse than no messaging.
• Check the profile for user-suggested edits that have been accepted without your knowing. Hours and categories get changed by strangers more often than anyone expects.

2 Reviews

Volume, recency and what they say, in that order of how often they are neglected and the reverse order of how much they matter to the person reading.

• Have a repeatable way of asking, at the moment the customer is happiest, which is almost always at handover rather than a week later by email.
• Aim for a steady trickle rather than a burst. Twenty in one week and none for six months reads badly to Google and worse to a human reading the dates.
• Reply to every review, including the good ones. An unanswered wall of five stars looks automated.
• Reply to negative reviews calmly, publicly, with a route to resolve it privately. The reply is read by everyone who comes after, not by the person who wrote it.
• Never disclose anything confidential in a reply. In several trades this is a regulatory problem before it is a marketing one.
• Check whether reviews mention the service and the place. Those are worth more than generic praise, and asking a slightly more specific question produces them.
• Do not incentivise reviews. It is against Google’s policy and the pattern is detectable.
• Watch for reviews disappearing. Google filters aggressively and a sudden drop usually means something in the asking process looks automated.

3 Name, address and phone, everywhere they appear

The least interesting section and the one that quietly caps everything else. Every inconsistency is a small vote against the business being real.

• Write down the canonical version of the business name, address and phone number. One version, in one place, that everything else is checked against.
• Check the profile matches it exactly, including abbreviations. "Street" against "St" is a difference.
• Check the website footer and contact page match it.
• Check the structured data on the site carries the same values.
• Search the business name and phone number and list every directory that holds a listing. Most businesses have listings they have never seen.
• Correct the listings that are wrong, starting with the ones that rank for the business name.
• Claim the important ones so they cannot drift again: Apple Maps, Bing Places, and the main directories for the trade.
• Deal with duplicate listings properly. Merge or close them rather than leaving two profiles competing.
• Check old addresses and old phone numbers are gone everywhere, including from the listings you never claimed.

4 Citations, which is the same job done deliberately

A citation is any mention of the business name, address and phone number anywhere on the web, linked or not. The useful ones are fewer than the industry implies and the harmful ones are cheaper than they look.

• Get listed on the handful of aggregators and directories that actually feed local search in your country. There are not fifty of them.
• Get listed on the directories specific to the trade, which carry more weight than general ones and are usually free.
• Use the canonical name, address and phone on every one, without exception.
• Do not buy bulk citation packages. They produce hundreds of listings on dead directories, none of which help and all of which drift out of date.
• Check chamber of commerce, trade association and supplier directories you already qualify for. They are free, relevant and almost always missed.
• Add the business to the local press or community sites where it genuinely belongs, which counts as a citation and reads as real.
• Audit the citations once a year. They rot.

5 The website

The site cannot do the profile’s job, but it can lose what the profile earns. These are the on-site signals that feed local rankings.

• Put the address and phone number in the footer of every page, as text rather than inside an image.
• Make the phone number a tel: link. Most local traffic is mobile and most local sites still make people copy the number.
• Add LocalBusiness structured data with the same address, hours and phone as everywhere else.
• Give each location its own page if there is more than one, with something on it only that location could say.
• Write a page for each service you want to be found for, rather than one services page listing them all.
• Write about the area in a way that is true: the neighbourhoods you cover, jobs you have done there, what is specific about working in them.
• Embed a map on the contact page, and make sure the pin is on the right building.
• Check the site loads quickly on a phone on a mobile connection, which is how local searches actually arrive.

6 Measurement

Local SEO is unusually measurable, and almost nobody sets it up before starting, which means there is nothing to compare against later.

• Record today’s profile calls, direction requests and website clicks before changing anything.
• Verify Search Console and record impressions for the terms that matter now, not after the work.
• Track calls and form submissions as conversions, separated from general traffic.
• Check rankings from the location the customers are in rather than from wherever you happen to be sitting. Local results differ street by street.
• Ask new customers how they found you, and write the answer down. It is the only number that reconciles everything above.
• Review the profile insights monthly. The shape of the trend matters more than any single month.

Protecting what you build

Getting the visibility is the half everybody sells. Keeping it is the half that decides whether local businesses still have customers arriving from Google in three years, and almost nobody writes it down, so here it is.

What actually breaks a business in search

Not usually an algorithm update, whatever the industry press implies. Core updates move positions; these remove you.

What to refuse, however it is sold to you

Every one of these still gets sold, usually by email, usually cheaply, and usually to somebody who does not know it is being done in their name. All of them work for a while.

• Bought links, in any packaging

  Guest post networks, paid directories that exist only to sell links, anything offered by email with a price per link. These are the clearest thing Google acts on manually, the action can arrive years later, and recovery means removing what you paid for and then waiting.

• Reviews you did not earn

  Bought, incentivised, written by staff, or traded with another business. Google removes them, and where the pattern is obvious it suspends the listing rather than the reviews. It is also the one that damages you with customers if it is ever visible.

• Keywords stuffed into the business name

  It moves the map pack for a while, which is exactly why it keeps being sold. It is also the single most common cause of a suspension, and the suspension takes the whole listing rather than the extra words.

• Pages written to have pages

  A page per town you have never worked in, a page per service you do not offer, content generated to fill a content calendar. It does not rank and it drags down what would have.

• Anybody who guarantees a position

  Nobody controls Google’s results. A guarantee means either the terms are meaningless or the method is one of the four above.

The monthly discipline

Twenty minutes a month, and it is the difference between noticing a problem in week one and noticing it in month six.

• Check Search Console coverage once a month and look at the Excluded reasons, not just the errors.
• Watch impressions rather than clicks. Impressions fall first, usually weeks before anybody notices the phone is quieter.
• Open the Business Profile and look for edits the public has suggested and Google has accepted without telling you.
• Reply to every review that arrived since last month, and keep asking, steadily rather than in bursts.
• Before any site change, write down what the URLs are now. After it, check they still resolve.
• Keep one note of what changed and when. Almost every traffic mystery is solved by a change nobody wrote down.
• Re-run the audit checklist once a year, and the first two sections after any redesign, host move or new plugin.

Own your own accounts

The domain, the hosting, the Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics should all be registered in the business’s name with the business’s own email, and anybody working on them should have access granted rather than ownership transferred. It costs nothing to set up that way and it is close to impossible to unwind afterwards. If any of those are currently in somebody else’s name, that is worth fixing this week whether or not anything is wrong.

The audit template

The same 52 checks as a spreadsheet, one tab per section, generated from this page so the two cannot drift. Beside every check: why it matters in the words above, where to look, and three columns for you, the result, the evidence and the priority. The Summary tab counts the passes and fails per section and has a line for the one thing to do first. No score, no traffic light, nothing to sign up for.

Download the local SEO audit template (Excel)

It opens in Google Sheets as well. Record the Measurement tab before changing anything, because without today's figures there is nothing to compare against later; then work the Business Profile tab first, which is most of the result for a local business. The wider audit, indexing and crawling before anything local, is the SEO audit checklist and its own template.

The version for your trade

This list is the part that is the same for everybody. The part that is not is written out one trade at a time, because a plumber is fighting a search made at two in the morning and a dentist is fighting for an appointment booked three weeks ahead.

• Local SEO for dentists
• Local SEO for law firms
• Local SEO for personal injury lawyers
• Local SEO for contractors
• Local SEO for plumbers
• Local SEO for roofing companies
• Local SEO for HVAC contractors
• Local SEO for home services
• Every guide

If you would rather we did it

Same list, done for you and reported monthly from your own Google accounts rather than from a dashboard you have to take on trust.

Everything above also decides what Google’s AI Mode says about a local business, and AI Mode adds one item of its own: the automated call settings in the profile. Both are in the Google AI Mode guide.

• Local SEO services
• The Business Profile audit
• Local citation sites, by country: the short list
• SEO audit checklist
• SEO audit service
• Our service areas