The first five things I check in a local SEO audit

A local SEO audit can absorb as much time as you are willing to give it. There is always another report to run. But in practice, most of what is holding a local business back shows up in the first hour, and it is rarely what the business expects.

These five come first because they are cheap to check and expensive to have wrong. Everything else in a full audit sits downstream of them.

1. Where you actually rank, across the area you serve

Local rankings move as the searcher moves, because distance from the searcher is one of the three things local results are ranked on, with relevance and prominence.¹ A business can sit first when you search from its own front door and be nowhere two miles away, which is where most of its customers are. Checking from a single point tells you almost nothing.

So the first thing I want is a picture of visibility across a grid covering the real catchment. It usually explains the gap between "we rank well" and "the phone is quiet" in about thirty seconds.

2. The primary category on the Business Profile

This one field does more work than almost anything else, and it is very often wrong. Usually it was set once at signup and never revisited, or set to something aspirational instead of accurate. The category is meant to describe what the business is as a whole, not every service it offers.²

The test is simple. Look at the businesses ranking above you for the searches you care about, and see what they are categorised as. If they are all one thing and you are another, you have found something worth fixing before lunch.

3. Whether the basics agree with each other

Name, address, phone number, opening hours. On the profile, on the website, in the footer, on the old directory listings nobody remembers creating. Any disagreement is a small vote against you, and they accumulate.

Special hours matter more than people think, too, and the profile has a separate setting for holidays and one-off closures.³ A profile that says you are open when you are shut generates exactly the kind of review you do not want.

4. Reviews, and specifically the replies

I look at three things: how many, how recent, and whether anybody responds. A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a large pile from four years ago. And unanswered negative reviews are the most visible signal there is of a business that has stopped paying attention. Google's local ranking help says more reviews and positive ratings can help a business's local ranking, and that helpful replies can help it stand out.¹

The reply is not for the person who left the review. It is for the next hundred people who read it.

5. Whether the site has a real page for what you do

A surprising number of local businesses have a homepage, a contact page, and nothing else, while competing against businesses with a proper page for each service in each area they cover.

The bar here is not high, but it is a bar. A real page means specifics: what the service involves, what it costs or what it starts at, how long it takes, which areas you cover, and what happens when someone gets in touch. Not the same three paragraphs with the place name changed, which is transparent to search engines and to customers alike, and which Google's spam policies treat as doorway abuse when the pages exist to funnel city searches to one place.⁴

What comes after

Plenty: technical checks, competitor analysis, content planning, links, tracking that actually attributes calls, and for a group, the question of whether head office can even see which branches are struggling. Those five come first because they are where the cheap wins live. It is a poor use of a budget to build a content programme on top of a business that is filed under the wrong category.