You can see three competitors sitting above you in the map pack and you can’t work out whose fault it is. Yours, your website’s, or the agency you have been paying for eight months.
This local SEO audit checklist is nine checks, 57 minutes of work, no paid tools and nothing to download. The whole checklist is on this page.
Google is unusually straight about what drives local ranking: relevance, distance and prominence. How well your profile matches the search, how close you are to the searcher, and how well known your business is. Every check below hangs off one of those three.
One rule for the next hour. You are diagnosing, not fixing. Open a notes app and write down each failure as you go, just the step number and what was wrong.
Step 9 turns that list into a priority order. Start fixing things at step 1 and you will never reach step 9.
Step 1: Check your Google Business Profile is actually finished (7 minutes)
Seven minutes here buys more movement than anything else in the hour, and it costs nothing.
Search your business name while logged in, or go to business.google.com, then run down this list:
- The business name matches the name on your shopfront, van and invoices
- Opening hours are current, bank holidays included
- The phone number is the one you actually answer
- The description uses a real share of the 750 characters Google allows, not two sentences
- 30 to 50 photos or more, not the four you uploaded at setup
- Every service listed individually with descriptive text, roughly 350 characters each
- Products where they apply, about 1,000 characters each, linked to the matching page on your site
- The booking link filled in even if you have no booking software. Point it at your contact page.
The map pack is the box of three businesses and a map above the normal blue links.
Hours matter beyond politeness: practitioners report Google favours businesses that look currently open, though its documentation doesn’t say so.
What good looks like: no more than two fields empty or stale. Nothing here needs a developer or a login you don’t have.
The verdict. If you do one thing this hour, finish the profile. Google Business Profile optimisation is the cheapest ranking work available, and most competitors have not bothered.
Step 2: Check your primary category matches what people search for (5 minutes)
Sterling Sky have audited more than 500 Google Business Profiles. Joy Hawkins and Colan Nielsen report missing categories as the single most common problem they find, including at big brands with real budgets.
The test is one line: your primary category should be the phrase a customer would type to find a business like yours. If it isn’t, that’s a fail.
You get one primary category plus up to nine additional. Open three competitor profiles in Google Maps to see what they run, or install the free GMB Everywhere Chrome extension, which shows categories on the map view.
Relevant extra categories don’t dilute your primary one. Sterling Sky’s testing found the opposite, because more categories give Google more context. Accuracy is the counterweight: a photographer who never shoots in a studio shouldn’t carry a “photography studio” category, and taking it off helps.
What good looks like: a primary category matching the search phrase, three to six accurate supporting categories, and nothing you’d struggle to defend to a customer.
Changing the primary category is the one profile edit with real downside risk. Note the date you do it.
Direct recommendation. If your primary category is an umbrella term like “contractor” or “shop”, switch it to the specific service you want the phone to ring for, and leave it a month.
Step 3: Hunt for duplicate and forgotten listings (5 minutes)
There may be a second version of your business on Google that you have never seen, quietly holding some of your reviews.
Three searches, in this order: your business name, your full address, then your phone number. Run each on Google Search and again on Google Maps. Then open your dashboard and look for anything flagged “Duplicate”, plus any suspended, unverified or old draft profiles in your account.
Duplicates usually carry a slightly different spelling, an old mobile number or a different category, so Google’s automatic matching doesn’t always recognise them as the same business. Hence the manual search.
They come from a previous owner, an old agency, a data aggregator, or a listing that predates the one you claimed.
What good looks like: one live, verified, correct profile. Anything else is a fail, including a duplicate with zero reviews. Finding one takes five minutes; removing it runs through Google’s resolution flow and can take weeks, so start today and move on.
Quick comparison. Find nothing and you’ve spent five minutes closing off an unknown. Find a duplicate and you’ve probably just explained your missing reviews and inconsistent rankings in one search.
Step 4: Check your name, address and phone match everywhere online (10 minutes)
Somewhere there is a listing you made in 2019 with your old mobile number on it, and no idea which directory it’s on.
NAP means name, address, phone, and consistency means identical everywhere, not roughly the same. “Ltd” against “Limited” is a mismatch, and so is “Street” against “St”, a mobile against a landline, or a suite number you dropped when you moved.
Write your master record once, exactly as it appears on your Google Business Profile, then check every listing against it. Work the UK directories in two tiers.
Tier one, fix these today: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, your Facebook business page and Yell.com.
Tier two, supporting: Thomson Local, FreeIndex, Scoot, 192.com, Yelp UK, Trustpilot and Foursquare. Trades should add Checkatrade and MyBuilder.
Free no-signup checkers including Onlinetoolix, GBPPromote and SEOmatic compare every listing against one master record in a single pass. Coverage varies, so check the UK names above by hand as well.
One check most owners miss: every profile should link to the same version of your site, www or non-www, whichever is the real one.
Tier one must match perfectly. Tier two, correct within the month. Budget the ten minutes for checking only and put the fixes on a separate list.
Best for / skip if. Worth the full ten minutes if you have moved premises, changed number, rebranded or traded over three years. Under a year old and you set every listing up yourself? Spot-check the tier-one five.
Step 5: Check your reviews for recency, not just the total (5 minutes)
Eighty reviews from 2022 read very differently, to Google and to a customer, than eight from the last two months.
Write down three numbers for your listing and for the competitor directly above you: total reviews, date of the most recent, and how many carry an owner response. Frequency signals more than a large static pile.
Unanswered reviews are the clearest sign nobody is working the profile, which makes this an agency tell too.
The check almost nobody runs: compare your Google review count against how many appear on your own website. In one live audit of a cleaning company, the profile showed 136 reviews while the site’s widget rendered only 10. Many widgets build their content with JavaScript, which Google doesn’t always run when it crawls.
What good looks like: a review inside the last 30 days, responses on most, and a total in the same order of magnitude as the competitor above you. Anything older than three months at the top is a fail.
Asking for reviews is a habit, not an audit task. A broken widget is a developer job: note it and move on.
Direct recommendation. If your last review is older than your last invoice, stop auditing for two minutes and text your three most recent customers.
Step 6: See where you actually rank, not where you think you do (6 minutes)
Searching your own business from your own phone in your own building tells you almost nothing. It’s also how most owners judge their rankings.
Pick five specific terms, not one broad one. Not “plumber” but “emergency plumber Sheffield”, “boiler repair near me”, “plumber S10”. Run each in an incognito window and note your map pack and blue-link position. That’s ten numbers, and step 9 uses them.
Signed in, on your own wifi, at your own address, Google answers a different question to the one your customer asks. Incognito strips the personalisation, not your location.
Sterling Sky’s point about proximity is the one that saves money. Searches naming a town favour businesses inside it and near its centre. Searches without a place name, including “near me”, weight the searcher’s own position. There is a real limit to how far one location can rank, and past it the answer is a second premises, not more SEO.
What good looks like: top three in the map pack for your core service in your own town, page one for the same term. Poor rankings 15 miles away with no premises there is distance, not failure.
Quick comparison. The free incognito check tells you whether you have a problem. A paid grid tracker tells you its exact shape, at a subscription a single-location business rarely needs.
Step 7: Check your website has a real page for every service and area (7 minutes)
Google ranks pages, not whole websites. John Mueller has said so repeatedly and Sterling Sky’s audit work backs it up. Your homepage does not pass authority down to your services, so each one you want to rank for needs a page of its own.
Open your website menu and check three things. One page per service you sell. One page per town you genuinely serve, with real content rather than a swapped-in name. For competitive trades, combined service-plus-area pages.
Check too that a services hub and a locations hub link to every one, so no page is orphaned with nothing linking to it.
The best item here: open your Google Business Profile dashboard and look at the exact URL it links to. Sterling Sky find profiles often rank well for one service while the linked page never mentions the others, leaving Google no text connecting the profile to those searches. Does it name the services you want the phone to ring for?
It is far easier to build authority for one town or county than a broad region. A Bedfordshire photographer targeting all of London is competing in the wrong market.
Auditing this is DIY. The fix usually isn’t. Writing and building a dozen service and location pages is where most owners run out of time.
The verdict. If your site is one page pretending to be eight, this is your biggest opportunity and your biggest project. Everything else this hour is maintenance by comparison.
Step 8: Check your site loads fast on a phone and Google can read it (5 minutes)
Two free Google tools, five minutes, and a number that ends the argument about whether your site is “a bit slow”.
Run your homepage and your main service page through PageSpeed Insights, reading the mobile tab rather than desktop, and trust the field data from real visitors over the lab score. Core Web Vitals measure how fast the page appears, how fast it reacts and how much it shifts.
Paste the same two URLs into Google’s Rich Results Test. Schema is background code telling Google what your business is and what it sells. It only validates markup that qualifies for rich results, so a clean pass isn’t proof of health.
What good looks like: usable on a mid-range phone on 4G in a few seconds, mobile field data out of the red, and valid LocalBusiness markup. Neither result is a diagnosis, just evidence.
This is the line. Everything above it you can fix yourself for free. Core Web Vitals and structured data mean editing your site’s code, so if that made you uneasy, hand this step over. Screenshot both results; that beats describing the problem.
Best for / skip if. Worth five minutes for every business: it’s the only step producing evidence you can hand someone else. Skip the Rich Results Test if you know you have none.
Step 9: Turn your findings into a fix list in priority order (7 minutes)
You have a page of failures and seven minutes to turn it into something you’ll work through.
Fix in this order: Google Business Profile work first (steps 1 to 3), then NAP and reviews (4 and 5), then website pages (7), then technical (8). As a rule of thumb rather than a measured statistic, profile work, consistent NAP and a few genuine local links account for most of the movement.
Before any fix goes live, record three things with today’s date: your ten ranking positions from step 6, your Google Business Profile Insights for calls, website clicks and direction requests, and your Search Console average position (free, 15 minutes to set up). Without a dated baseline you cannot tell in three months whether it worked.
Expect months 0 to 3 to be tracking and basics, 3 to 6 impressions rising and long-tail terms appearing, 6 to 12 top-ten rankings. No movement after six months is a trigger to investigate, not to quit. High impressions with low clicks is a title and description problem, not a ranking problem.
If you pay someone for this, five findings are theirs: an unfinished profile, an unresolved duplicate, mismatched details on Yell and Bing, unanswered reviews, and one page doing the work of eight. Ask for a date against each.
Direct recommendation. If your list runs past five items and you know you won’t get to them, that’s the point to get help. Our pricing is public, and you’ve had the checklist free either way.
Local SEO audit questions UK owners actually ask
How often should I run this audit?
Run the full hour when you set up or take over a business, then every 6 to 12 months. Check NAP consistency, citations and reviews monthly or quarterly, because those change without you doing anything. Diary the quick checks rather than rerunning the whole hour.
How can I tell if my SEO agency isn’t actually doing local SEO?
Red flags: never mentioning your Google Business Profile, citations, reviews or local landing pages in a report; a fixed-price package sold with no audit of your site or market first; refusing to say exactly what was changed; guaranteeing a number one ranking; a long contract with high upfront fees before any result; bulk link volume with no named domains. None of these on its own proves bad work. Two or three together is a conversation worth having.
Do I need SEMrush or Ahrefs to do this properly?
No. Paid suites at £200 a month and up are overkill for most trades businesses, and Google Search Console, GA4 and Google Business Profile Insights cover routine monitoring for nothing. Paid tools save time and add competitor data. They don’t reveal anything this checklist misses at a single location.
Will adding more categories to my profile dilute my rankings?
No, that’s a myth. Sterling Sky’s repeated testing found relevant additional categories generally expand visibility, because they give Google more context about what you do. “Relevant” is doing the work in that sentence. Categories that don’t describe how you actually operate should still come off.
My rankings look the same but the phone has stopped ringing. What’s going on?
Possibly AI-generated local packs. Figures cited by Sterling Sky from a tool called Placescout put them at around 13% of local queries, showing roughly 32% fewer unique businesses than a traditional three-pack and often dropping the click-to-call button. Those are tool-sourced numbers, not Google’s. Practitioners call the effect rank blindness: your tracked positions hold steady while contact volume quietly falls.