Local SEO Checklist

Almost nobody searches the phrase you would put on a billboard. They search a service and a place, or they search nothing at all and tap the map. Guessing this wrong makes every other step aim at the wrong target.

For most local businesses this is worth more than the website. If you cannot have one, or will not, that is a real position and there is a way to work without it.

Not similar. Identical, down to whether you write Street or St. Every mismatch is a small reason for a search engine to wonder whether you are one business or two.

Pages can be live, linked and invisible. Check in Search Console before you spend a month improving something Google has never fetched.

The primary category does more work than anything else on the profile. Specific beats broad, but only if it is accurate. Everything else goes in the secondary ones.

You can serve a region without publishing where you sleep. Google supports this properly and it costs you nothing in ranking.

Real and slightly imperfect beats stock every time. Stock photography on a local profile reads as a business that has nothing of its own to show.

Hours that are wrong are worse than hours left blank, because somebody drives over and finds you closed.

One page listing nine services ranks for none of them. Nine pages, each answering one question properly, is the whole trick and most of the work.

In text, not inside an image, and not only in the footer. On a phone it should be one tap from wherever somebody lands.

Usually one oversized photograph is the entire problem. Not the theme, not the host, not the plugins.

A page per town is legitimate. Twenty pages generated from a template with the name swapped is not, and it reads as exactly what it is.

The title is the one line of your page that appears in the result. Google cuts it on width rather than character count, which is why the limit moves.

This does not make you rank. It makes a machine able to read what your page already says, which is a different and smaller claim than most people make for it.

Contact forms fail silently and quietly for months. The form says thank you, the message goes to spam or nowhere, and you conclude the marketing is not working.

Three real jobs described plainly are worth more than any amount of copy about serving the greater area.

A mailbox rented to look like an office is a suspension waiting to happen, and it is the single most common reason a profile gets pulled.

Not by email a week later. In person, while they are pleased with you, with the link already open on your phone.

The reply is not for the person who wrote it. It is for the next person reading, who is deciding what you are like when something goes wrong.

They are easier to spot than the people selling them admit, and losing the profile costs more than every review you bought was worth.

They measure different things and will never match. Knowing which one to believe for which question saves a lot of pointless alarm.

Traffic that does not call is not a result. If you only measure visits you will congratulate yourself for a busy month that sold nothing.

Map results change street by street. Where you rank from your own office tells you almost nothing about where you rank across town.

A handful of real ones matter. The rest is a product sold by the people who run the submission software.

If somebody proposes this, read the rest of their proposal very carefully. It tells you how they think about risk that is yours and not theirs.

Volume on its own does nothing. One page that genuinely answers a question beats a year of filler, and costs less to write.

The assistants mostly cite pages that already rank and already say something specific. The work that gets you cited is the work in the sections above.