The local SEO audit template
A local SEO audit checks whether people in your service area can actually find you: your Google Business Profile, your name and address consistency, your reviews, and whether you have a real page for each service in each place you serve. Here is the whole checklist. Nothing to fill in first.
Most SEO checklists are written for someone else's business
The checklists you find are built for national brands and e-commerce. They spend twenty items on things that will never move the needle for a business serving customers within an hour's drive. This one only covers what actually decides local rankings.
When someone three towns over searches for what you do, Google is answering a different question than it does for a national query. It is deciding which nearby business to show in the map pack, and that leans on signals most general SEO advice barely mentions: proximity, profile completeness, review volume and recency, and whether your business details agree with themselves everywhere they appear.
You can have a technically flawless website and still be invisible locally because your Google Business Profile is half filled in. That is the most common finding I have on audits, and it is free to fix. So work in this order. The items below are roughly ranked by how much they move local results.
Seven areas, in the order that matters
Google Business Profile
The single biggest local lever, and the one most businesses leave half done.
- Claimed and verified
- Primary category is the most specific accurate option
- Secondary categories added where they genuinely apply
- Service area or address matches how you actually operate
- Hours correct, including holidays
- Services listed individually, not buried in the description
- Ten or more real photos, something added in the last 90 days
- Q&A seeded with the questions you actually get
- Posts published at least monthly
If you only do one thing on this list, do this one. More on Google Business Profile optimization.
Name, address, phone consistency
Pick the exact format you want to be known by, down to Street or St. Then make everything match it.
- Website footer matches your Google Business Profile exactly
- Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, and industry directories match
- Old listings from a previous address or number found and corrected
- Only one Google Business Profile exists (duplicates split your signal)
Search engines are trying to confirm you are one real business. Conflicting records make that harder.
Reviews
Volume, recency, and whether you reply. All three matter.
- A repeatable way to ask after every completed job
- New reviews arriving steadily, not one old cluster
- Every review replied to, especially the bad ones
- More than one platform where your industry warrants it
At Bergeron Contracting a deliberate review process built past 50 five-star reviews and contributed to two Best of Worcester wins. Nothing clever, just asking every time.
A real page per service, per place
This is where most local sites are thinnest.
- One page per core service, not a single list-everything page
- Pages for the places you serve, with real content about serving there
- No doorway pages that swap a city name and change nothing else
- Each page links up to its service and out to a clear next step
We do this across Worcester and Worcester County. A page that only exists to hold a city name will not rank, and may hurt you.
On-page basics
- Title tag names what you do and, where it fits naturally, where you do it
- Meta description reads like a sentence a human would say
- One H1 per page, matching what the page is actually about
- Images have alt text describing the image
- Internal links use words that describe the destination
Technical foundations
Enough to not be held back. This is where general SEO advice over-invests for local businesses.
- Loads in under three seconds on a phone on cell data, not office wifi
- Readable and tappable on a small screen without pinching
- Indexed (search site:yourdomain.com and confirm your pages are there)
- No broken links, no orphan pages
- HTTPS working, no mixed-content warnings
- LocalBusiness schema with name, address, phone, hours
Whether an AI names you
One check, because this is now part of the answer. Ask ChatGPT and Perplexity the question a customer would ask, phrased with your town in it, and see whether you come up. If you do not, that is a content problem more than a technical one. More on that in generative engine optimization.
Three piles, then work in order
Do not try to fix everything. Sort the findings into free and fast, worth paying for, and not worth it yet. The Google Business Profile items are almost all in the first pile, which is why they come first. Then give it a quarter. Local movement is slower than people expect and faster than national.
Improvement in average organic rank for a wire manufacturer, moving from pages three and four up to pages one and two. It took a full quarter to become obvious, and it came from working a list like this in order.
Five-star reviews built at an electrical contractor through a repeatable ask after every job, alongside two Best of Worcester wins. The review section of this list is not filler.
The whole checklist is above. I'll send the version you can tick off.
Before you start ticking boxes
What is included in a local SEO audit?
Seven areas: your Google Business Profile, name and address consistency across the web, reviews, service and location pages, on-page basics like titles and headings, technical foundations like speed and indexing, and whether AI answers name you. A local audit weights the profile and consistency items far more heavily than a general SEO audit does.
How often should I run one?
Twice a year is enough for most owner-led businesses. Run one immediately if you have moved, changed your phone number, rebranded, or noticed calls dropping off without an obvious reason.
Can I do this myself, or do I need a tool?
You can do the whole checklist by hand. The Google Business Profile section, the consistency check, and the reviews section need no tools at all, and they are the ones that move local rankings most. Google Search Console is free and covers most of the rest.
Does this work for manufacturers, or only home services?
Both, with different weighting. Home services businesses live and die by the map pack and reviews. Manufacturers get more from service and capability pages, because their buyers search for what a part does rather than for someone nearby. Work the same list, expect different items to matter.
How long before I see results?
Google Business Profile fixes can show within days. Content and page-structure work takes a quarter. If someone promises local rankings in two weeks, that is a sales pitch, not a timeline.
Local SEO is less mysterious than national SEO.
The list of things that matter is short, most of it is free, and almost nobody works through it completely. That is the whole opportunity. If you would rather not run it yourself, the $499 marketing audit covers everything here plus the parts a checklist cannot see: whether your site converts the traffic, whether your CRM is losing leads after they arrive, and whether your messaging matches what buyers search for. The fee is credited toward your first engagement.