What goes on a local SEO checklist?
Four groups of jobs: your Google Business Profile, your website, your listings elsewhere, and your reviews. Most are one-off tasks, with a short routine each month to keep them fresh.
How does Google rank local businesses?
Google says local results are based mainly on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. You can't move your premises, so the checklist works on the other two.
Relevance is how well your profile and site match the search. Prominence is how well known and trusted you are, which comes from reviews, links, mentions and your wider presence online.
What's on the Google Business Profile checklist?
Your profile is often the first thing a local customer sees, before your website. Complete every part that applies.
- Verify the profile, and make sure you and someone else in the business have access.
- Use your real business name, with no extra keywords added.
- Pick the primary category that best describes your main service, then add relevant secondary ones.
- Add your address, or hide it and set service areas if customers don't visit you.
- Set opening hours, including holiday hours.
- List your services or products with short descriptions.
- Add real photos of your team, premises and work.
- Link to the most relevant page on your website, not just the homepage.
What does your website need for local SEO?
Your website should confirm everything your profile says, and add the detail a profile can't.
- Your business name, address and phone number on every page, usually in the footer, matching your profile exactly.
- A page for each main service, saying where you offer it.
- Area pages only where you genuinely work there and have something real to say.
- LocalBusiness schema with your name, address, phone number and opening hours.
- A contact page with a map, directions and how to get in touch.
- Reviews or case studies from local customers, where you have them.
Which listings and citations should you check?
Listings on other sites confirm you're real and where you are. What matters most is that every one shows the same details.
- Bing Places: Bing feeds some AI assistants, so this matters more than it used to.
- Apple Business Connect: controls how you appear in Apple Maps.
- The main directories in your sector, and your trade body's member listing.
- Your local chamber of commerce or business network, if you're a member.
What's on the reviews checklist?
Reviews help with prominence and help customers decide. Make asking for them part of how you finish every job.
- Send every customer a direct link to leave a Google review.
- Ask everyone, not just the customers you expect to be happy. Google's policies don't allow selective asking.
- Never offer money, discounts or gifts in return for reviews.
- Reply to every review, good and bad, politely and quickly.
What's the local SEO checklist, in order?
Work through these ten steps from the top. The first four do most of the work.
- Write down your exact business name, address, phone number and hours. Use them everywhere.
- Claim and verify your Google Business Profile.
- Set the primary category, secondary categories, services, hours and service areas.
- Add real photos and link the profile to the right page on your site.
- Put your name, address and phone number in your website footer, matching the profile.
- Add LocalBusiness schema and check it with Google's Rich Results Test.
- Give each main service its own page, saying where you offer it.
- Claim Bing Places and Apple Business Connect with the same details.
- Fix or remove old listings with the wrong address or phone number.
- Start asking every customer for a review, and reply to each one.
How often should you check your local SEO?
Spend a few minutes each month: reply to new reviews, update hours for holidays, add a few new photos and check nobody has suggested a wrong edit to your profile.
Run through the full checklist again whenever you move, change your phone number, rename the business or add a service.