The Local SEO Checklist

This is the local SEO checklist we run on every client, in the order we run it, and the order is the point.

Most checklists on this subject are long, and length is how they fail. Forty items in no particular sequence, each one true, none of them ranked, and the owner who prints it out does the easy ones first because that is what people do with a list. Two months later the photos are updated and the blog has three posts, and the primary category on the Google Business Profile is still wrong. The business is still entered in the wrong race. Nothing above it on the list was ever going to fix that.

So this one is short where it can be and strict about sequence: eight steps, done in this order, each one finished before the next one starts, and a hard stop at the end. Then measure. It is the checklist we run on every local client in the Walla Walla Valley and the Tri-Cities. It has not changed much in three years, because the things that move a map pack ranking have not changed much either; what changes is which of them a given business has never done.

Step zero: measure before you touch anything

Before the local SEO checklist starts, you need a before, and a single search from your own desk is not one.

Proximity to the searcher is one of the heaviest weights in map pack ranking. The result you get standing in your own building is the best result you will ever get, and it tells you almost nothing about the person searching from the far side of town. Measure on a grid instead: the same search run from a dozen points across the area your customers actually live in, so you can see where you hold a slot and where you vanish. Screenshot the three businesses in the pack for your main search and write down who they are. You will check this again at the end. The whole point of the next hour is whether those three names change.

While you are there, note the category each of them uses. It is visible on the profile, and it is usually the first clue to why they are in the pack and you are not.

Step one: the Google Business Profile, category first

The profile is the highest-leverage thing on this list and it is the one most often filled out in a single afternoon years ago and never opened again.

The primary category

One field decides which race you are in. A dentist listed as Dentist and a dentist listed as Cosmetic Dentist are competing for different searches, and the one that matches what you actually want the phone to ring for is the choice. Pick the category your best customers would search, not the broadest one available. Then add secondary categories for the real services and stop before the list starts describing things you could theoretically do. Piling them on dilutes the one you want to win.

Name, address, phone, exactly once

The business name on the profile is the name on the sign. Not the name plus the town, not the name plus the three services you want to rank for. Google’s guidelines are plain about this. The businesses that stuff keywords into the name field are the ones that get reported by competitors and quietly edited by Google, and both happen more than people think. Address and phone number go in the form they will appear everywhere else on the internet, down to the suite number and the way the street is abbreviated, because step two depends on it.

Hours, services, products

Hours that are right, including the holidays nobody updates until a customer stands outside a locked door on Presidents Day. Services entered as services, in the service fields, rather than described in a paragraph. Products where the category supports them, which is more categories than owners expect. Each of these is a field Google can read directly, and a field it can read directly beats a sentence it has to interpret.

Photos that are yours and recent

Twelve real photos taken this year outperform three stock images from a franchise kit, and the outperforming is visible in how many people tap through. Exterior, so they recognize the building; interior, so they know what they are walking into; the team, if the team will stand still for it; and the work itself, which is the photo people actually look at. Replace the oldest ones a few times a year and keep the geotagging superstition out of it; the photos matter, the metadata folklore does not.

The feed features

Posts, questions and answers, and messaging behave like a feed rather than a form, which means they reward attention rather than a one-time fill. Post monthly, even briefly, and seed the questions section with the four things people call to ask, then answer them yourself before a stranger does. And if messaging is switched on, somebody has to answer it inside a few hours or it should be switched off – an unanswered message is worse than no button.

That is step one, and it is the longest step and the one where the measurable movement usually comes from; it is not finished until every field that can be filled is filled with something true.

Step two: citations, fixed once

A citation is any place online that lists your name, address and phone number, and Google reads a great many of them to check whether the internet agrees with itself about who you are and where.

It usually does not agree. The directory that still has the suite number from the last location, the phone number from before you dropped the landline, the business name typed three different ways by three different people in three different years. None of those alone costs you a ranking. Together they are static in a signal Google would rather have clean. The fix is boring and finite. Do it once.

Start with the four that feed everyone else: Google, Apple Maps, Bing Places and Yelp. Then the data aggregators that the small directories copy from. Then the industry directories that matter in your category, which for a dentist means the insurance directories and for a contractor means the licensing board and the trade associations. Match every one of them to the profile, character for character. Then stop. The long tail of tiny directories is not worth the afternoon – most of them copy from the aggregators anyway.

This is a one-time job for a business that has not moved and has not changed its number. If somebody proposes doing it for you every month, ask what changes between months.

Step three: the review system

Reviews carry weight in the pack and they carry more weight when they keep arriving, so the work here is a habit rather than a campaign.

Build the ask into the moment the customer is happiest, which is rarely the moment they pay and often the moment the job is finished and they can see it. Make the route two taps. A text with the direct review link, sent within the hour, beats a card at the register. Both beat an email blast to everyone at once, which produces a suspicious cluster in one week and silence for the next eleven. Then respond to every review. Respond to the bad ones first, because the reader of a one-star review is deciding whether you sound like somebody they would want to deal with when something goes wrong.

The other half of this step is what the reviews say. A review that mentions the service and the town in passing does work for the searches you show up in that a bare five stars does not. You cannot script that. You can ask for it. “Would you mind saying what we did?” gets you a sentence, and the sentence is the asset.

Step four: one real page per service

Now the website, and the first thing to check is the services page, because the failure we see most is one page listing nine things a business does and competing for none of them.

Every service you want to be found for gets its own page. The page answers the whole question somebody has when they type that service into a phone: what it is, what it involves, how long it takes, what could go wrong, what to bring, and how to book it. Not three hundred words and a stock photo. A page a customer would read to the end. That is the work that moves the blue links under the map and feeds the pack at the same time. It is slower than everything above it on this list. It is also the only step that keeps working in a month when nobody touches anything.

Write the pages in the order of the searches you most want, not the order of the menu. If the grid in step zero showed you vanishing for one particular service, that page goes first.

Step five: the technical floor

Underneath the pages sits the floor, and a soft floor undoes the four steps above it.

Speed on a phone, on bad signal, from the parking lot: that is the test, not the score on a desktop in the office. Correct heading structure, one first-level heading per page and no skipped levels, so a machine can read the page’s shape. Local business schema that tells Google your hours, your address and your service area outright instead of making it guess from the footer. Name, address and phone in the footer of every page, matching the profile character for character. A sitemap that lists the pages that exist and none that do not. A site that answers on one address rather than four variations of it.

None of this is visible to a customer and all of it is visible to the crawler. That is why it is the step most often skipped, and most often the reason a business with good pages sits on page two.

Step six: location pages, only where you have earned them

A page for a place you actually serve, written by somebody who has been there, is a good page. Forty pages generated from one template with the town name swapped are the thing Google spent a decade learning to ignore.

The test is whether you could write the page without a template. If you have customers in College Place and Milton-Freewater, and you can say something about serving each of them that is true and specific, write those two pages. If you would be writing a page for Dayton because it is on the map and you might get a call from there someday, do not. A location page you cannot fill with real detail is a page that tells Google you are padding, and padding is a signal too.

Step seven: links that happen locally

Links still matter in local search and the good news is that local links are easier to earn than the national kind, because you already know the people.

The chamber of commerce, which lists its members and rarely checks whether the link still works. The suppliers who list their dealers. The youth league you sponsor, which has a website with a sponsors page nobody updates until asked. The local paper, when there is a story. The business association for your street. None of these is a link-building campaign and every one of them is a real link from a real local site, which is the kind that counts. Ask for the ones you have already earned before you go looking for new ones.

Step eight: measure again, then leave it alone

Run the grid again. Compare the three names in the pack to the three you wrote down in step zero. If one of them is now yours, the list worked. If none of them moved, the answer is almost always in step one or step four rather than in something you have not tried yet.

Then set a cadence and keep it, because the profile work will drift if nobody looks at it: the grid monthly, the profile monthly, the reviews weekly, the pages as the plan says. What you should not do is start over. The most common mistake after a checklist like this is finished is treating a flat month as a sign that something was done wrong, ripping out the category or the pages, and resetting the clock. Profile changes show up in weeks. Citation and review work shows up inside a quarter. Pages take three to six months to be visible and closer to a year to be worth what they cost, and the middle of that stretch looks flat on every graph we have ever watched. Month four is normal. Leave it alone.

What is deliberately not on this local SEO checklist

Five things are missing on purpose, and each one is on somebody else’s list.

No keywords in the business name, because it works right up until the week it gets you edited or suspended. No reviews you did not earn, from anyone, for any reason. No mailbox-store address to get a listing in a town you are not in, which is the fastest known route to losing the listing you already have. No monthly citation subscription for a business that has not moved. And no forty-town page generator, because a large site full of pages nobody would read is not a large site, it is a small site with a weight problem.

The local SEO for small business page covers why the map pack works the way it does, and Google Maps SEO goes deep on the review mechanics this checklist only touches. The small business SEO hub is where the whole thing fits together.

Common questions

How long does the local SEO checklist take to run?

Steps zero through three are a solid week for one location if the citations are messy, and an afternoon if they are not. Step four is the long one, because a real page per service takes a working day each. The technical floor is an hour on a clean site and a project on a broken one.

What is the most important item on a local SEO checklist?

The primary category on the Google Business Profile. It decides which searches you are eligible to win at all, and every other item on the list is working inside that decision.

Do I need a local SEO audit before the checklist?

Step zero is the audit: a grid measurement and a screenshot of who holds the pack. Anything more elaborate than that before the work starts is usually a sales document.

How often should I repeat the local SEO steps?

Run the full list once; after that it is the profile and the grid monthly, reviews weekly, and the citations only when something about the business actually changes.

Can I do the local SEO checklist myself?

Steps zero through three, yes, and you should if money is tight, because the highest-value hour on this list is the one where the primary category gets fixed. Steps four and five are harder to do part-time, and most owners who start the citation clean-up on their own stop halfway through it.

Why did my ranking not move after I finished the list?

Check where you measured from first, because a search from your own building is not a ranking. Then check the date: profile changes show in weeks, everything else takes a quarter or more, and a flat month four is the normal shape of the curve rather than a sign the work failed.