The local SEO checklist, in the order that matters

You rank on page two for the thing you actually do, while a competitor two streets away sits in the map pack with half your reviews and a worse website. It rarely comes down to budget. In most local audits we run, the gap is six unglamorous fixes that nobody has got round to, and four of them are not on the website at all.

Work through this in order. The profile items change visibility in weeks. The website items follow the normal SEO timeline of three to six months, which is covered in more detail in how long SEO takes to work.

The checklist

Get the Google Business Profile to 100% first

The profile is the highest-leverage thing you own, because it feeds the map pack directly and does not wait on crawling. Two fields do most of the work.

Primary category. This is the single strongest relevance signal in local search and most businesses pick it too broadly. A physiotherapy practice categorised as “Medical clinic” is competing with every clinic in the city; categorised as “Physical therapist” it competes with the right handful. Change it, then watch your map pack positions for two to three weeks before changing anything else, so you know what caused what.

Services. Add every service individually with a two or three sentence description written in the words customers use. This is free text that Google reads, and for clinics in particular it is where treatment names belong.

Then the maintenance items: photos on a cadence rather than in a burst, posts for genuine offers, and the Q&A section seeded with the questions your front desk answers every day. For restaurants, keep the menu, the dietary attributes and the booking link current, because those are the fields that decide whether someone taps through or taps the next result.

Reviews: velocity beats volume

A business that gains two reviews a week for six months looks healthier than one that collected 40 in a fortnight and nothing since. Build the ask into the job rather than relying on memory:

• Send the request 2-24 hours after the appointment or delivery, by SMS, with a direct link to the review form.
• Ask one staff member to own the number weekly. A target of one or two a week is more achievable and more useful than a campaign.
• Reply to every review inside 72 hours. On positive ones, name the service in your reply. On negative ones, acknowledge, offer to take it offline, and do not argue in public.
• Never gate, incentivise or filter. It breaches Google’s policies and the whole profile is the thing at risk.

NAP consistency: boring, and it is the problem

Name, address and phone number must match character for character everywhere. Pick one canonical format, write it down, and then correct the platforms that matter: Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, your own site footer, and the two or three directories specific to your trade.

Common culprits: a tracking phone number on the website that differs from the profile, an old suite number from before you moved, and the same business listed twice because someone claimed it on a second email address. Duplicate listings are worth hunting down and merging before you do anything else.

Location and service pages that do not cannibalise each other

The rule is one page per location and one page per service, and each page must earn its own existence. A page for Clapham should mention the nearest station, the parking situation, the practitioners who work there and the hours that branch actually keeps. If you could swap the town name and the page would still read correctly, it is duplicate content and all of them will underperform.

Technical specifics worth getting right:

• URL pattern /locations/clapham/ and /services/root-canal/, not query strings.
• LocalBusiness (or the relevant subtype, such as Dentist or Restaurant) schema on each location page, with address, geo, openingHoursSpecification and telephone matching the profile exactly.
• Internal links both ways: each service page links to the locations offering it, each location page links to its services.
• A unique title and H1 per page. If two pages target the same phrase, consolidate them.

Map pack versus organic: two competitions

They are decided differently and should be reported separately.

City-centre average positions flatter you. Check rankings from several points across the area you actually serve, because proximity means a customer three miles out sees a different map pack from one across the road.

What this looks like when we do it

For a UK deep house cleaning business the work was profile completeness, review flow and service-area pages built one by one rather than spun. For Reckenen, an accounting practice on WordPress, it was local landing pages and schema on a site that already had the authority but was not telling Google where it operated. Neither needed a rebuild.

Most of the checklist above you can do yourself, and you should: the profile items cost nothing but attention. If what you find is 40 directory listings with three different addresses, or eight location pages that are the same page, that is the point where our SEO team is worth paying for. Either way, the free audit will tell you which of the fifteen items are actually costing you, and you keep the action plan whether you hire us or not.