Local SEO audit: the complete 50-point checklist

You have a Google profile, a few reviews, a website, and yet it is always the same three competitors who show up on the map. A local SEO audit is how you find out why, item by item, and then decide what to fix first.

Here is the complete local SEO audit checklist I use: 50 points split into seven blocks, with what to look at and how to check it for each. Further down, an interactive checklist calculates your score, sorts the fixes by priority and lets you download the result.

What is a local SEO audit?

A local SEO audit, also called a local search audit, is a review of everything that decides a business's visibility on location-based searches: "plumber Nantes", "bakery open now", "physio near me". It covers the Google Business Profile, mentions of the business across the web, reviews, the site's local pages and nearby competition.

The frame of reference is set by Google itself. Its help page on local ranking names three factors: relevance (does the profile match the search?), distance between the searcher and the business, and prominence, meaning how well known the business is. Every item on the checklist weighs on one of these three factors. I explain how they work, and the action plan that follows from them, in my local SEO guide.

How it differs from a standard SEO audit

A standard SEO audit examines a website: crawling, indexing, content, links. A local audit shifts the center of gravity, because what Google ranks in the local pack (the block of three businesses shown with the map) is a business, not a page. The profile, reviews and citations count as much as the website, and the result is measured in calls and direction requests rather than in average position.

When to run a local SEO audit

• When you take over a business, or when you create the profile.
• After a move, or a change of name, phone number or website.
• When you open a new location or a new service area.
• When calls or direction requests from the profile drop for no obvious reason.
• And at least once a year, even when everything is fine.

Before you start: target queries and tools

A local audit is done against a list of searches, not in the abstract. First write down five to ten queries your customers actually type: your trade alone ("locksmith"), your trade with your city ("locksmith Rennes"), your flagship services ("lockout service Rennes") and your business name. For each one, note the three businesses in the local pack. They are your real competitors, not the ones you imagine.

The tools you need are almost all free:

• Google Maps and Google Search, in a private window, from several places in your area.
• Your profile's performance data: interactions, searches that showed the profile, calls, directions, website clicks. Google only provides this data for verified profiles.
• Google Search Console, for the local queries that bring visits and the indexing of your local pages.
• Google's Rich Results Test for LocalBusiness markup, and PageSpeed Insights for mobile speed.
• A spreadsheet to record your contact details directory by directory, or the downloadable checklist below.

For the website side, most checks can be done with the tools covered in my article on the free SEO audit.

1. Google Business Profile audit (15 points)

This is the most profitable block, and the one where the blocking errors hide. The Google profile audit starts with a search for your name in Maps, then continues in the management interface.

1. Profile claimed and verified. You own it with your own account, not just the agency or contractor who created it. An unverified profile is less likely to show up and gives you access to no statistics.
2. One profile per location. Search for your name, your phone number and your old address in Maps. A profile left at the address you had before moving is enough to split your reviews and blur your location. Google's guidelines are clear: one profile per business location.
3. Real name, nothing added. The name must be the one on your sign and your documents. Adding a city, a service or a slogan ("Dupont Plumbing 24/7 Emergency Rennes") breaks Google's guidelines and exposes you to a suspension.
4. Primary category. It is the field that weighs most on relevance. Compare it with the category of the three businesses in the local pack for your main query: if all of them chose "Locksmith" and you chose "Security service", that is your problem.
5. Secondary categories. Google asks you to select "as few categories as possible". Keep the ones that describe a real, important service and remove the others.
6. Address and map pin. For premises that welcome customers: full address, pin placed on the right entrance. A pin in the middle of a block sends your customers to the wrong place.
7. Service area. If you travel to your customers without receiving them, the address must be hidden and replaced by a service area. Google's guidelines limit it, in principle, to two hours of travel from your base: declaring three counties gets you nothing.
8. Local phone number. A number that reaches you directly, identical to the one on your website. Google prefers a local number to a call center number and refuses premium-rate numbers.
9. Website link. It points to the right page (the home page, or the location page for a multi-location business), over https, with no broken redirect. While you are at it, check that it does not point to an old business.site website: Google shut those sites down in 2024.
10. Hours. Exact regular hours, and special hours filled in for public holidays and vacations. A customer who finds the door closed rarely leaves a kind review.
11. Description. 750 characters maximum, with no links or promotions: what you do, for whom, where. Only the first lines show without a click, so they carry the essentials.
12. Services, products and attributes. Detailed services, payment methods, accessibility, booking. These fields feed relevance and filtered searches, and they are rarely filled in completely.
13. Photos. Storefront, interior, team, completed work: real, recent photos. Also look at the ones added by users, which sometimes show first.
14. Posts. Note the date of the last update or offer published. The effect on rankings is modest, but an active profile reassures a customer who is hesitating.
15. Edits and alerts. Check the interface for edits suggested by Google or by users (hours, category, address) and make sure the profile has no restriction. An edit accepted without you can make a profile you believe is up to date wrong.

2. NAP consistency and citations (7 points)

NAP stands for Name, Address, Phone. A citation is any mention of these details on a third-party site, with or without a link. Google cross-checks them to confirm that the business really exists where it says it does, and contradictory versions weaken that cross-check.

16. A reference version. Write the official version once and for all: exact trading name, address in postal format ("12 Lilac Street" everywhere, not "12 Lilac St. Bldg B" in one place and "12, lilac street" in another), phone number. The rest of this block is compared against it.
17. The website. Footer, contact page, legal notice and structured markup use exactly the reference version.
18. General directories. Apple Business Connect (which feeds Apple Maps), Bing Places, your Facebook page and the main national directory in your country (PagesJaunes in France, Yelp in the US): note what each one shows, line by line.
19. The platforms in your industry. Depending on your trade: booking, appointment and quote request platforms, your trade federation's directory. These are often the most viewed citations, so the most important to keep accurate.
20. Traces of the past. Old address, old number, old name: a move leaves outdated mentions all over the place. List them and fix first the ones that show on page one for your name.
21. Listings created without you. Some directories generate listings automatically from business databases. Claim the ones that appear under your name so you can correct them.
22. Official data. In France, many business directories pull the public INSEE data: check on the government's Annuaire des Entreprises that your location's address is up to date, otherwise the error spreads. Elsewhere, check the equivalent source: your country's official business register or the data providers that feed local directories.

There is no point aiming for hundreds of listings. Five to ten platforms that people actually use in your industry, perfectly consistent, beat a mass distribution that multiplies the chances of error.

3. Customer reviews and reputation (7 points)

Reviews weigh on prominence, Google's third factor. Its help page says it plainly: the more reviews and positive ratings a business gets, the better its local ranking. They also weigh on the customer's decision, since customers read them before calling.

23. Volume, against competitors. Note your number of reviews and that of the three businesses in the local pack. What matters is not the absolute number, it is the gap.
24. The rating and its trend. Average rating, then the rating of the reviews from the last twelve months. A decent average hiding a recent run of bad reviews points to an operational problem, not an SEO one.
25. Recency. Date of the latest review and monthly pace. A steady flow is more reassuring than an old peak.
26. Replies. Share of reviews with a reply, response time, tone of the replies to negative reviews. A calm, factual reply clearly softens the effect of a harsh review on those who read it.
27. How reviews are collected. Does a review request go out after every job, with the direct link the profile provides? It must go to every customer: Google's policy forbids selectively asking only satisfied customers.
28. Compliance. No reviews in exchange for a discount or a gift, no reviews written by the business or people close to it, no pressure on site. Google's contribution policy forbids these practices, and the reviews involved can be removed.
29. What the reviews say. Read what customers describe: services mentioned, neighborhoods, recurring complaints. It is valuable material for the profile and for the website pages, and sometimes the sign of something to fix in the service itself.

4. Local pages on the website (8 points)

The profile belongs to Google, the website belongs to you. It confirms what the profile says, carries the pages that rank in the results below the local pack, and gives answer engines precise information to reuse.

30. One page per location or per area you really serve. A multi-location business needs one page per branch, a tradesperson one page per area where they genuinely work.
31. Unique content on each page. Services offered there, completed work, team, access, response times. A series of identical pages where only the city name changes is what Google calls doorway pages, which its spam policies forbid.
32. Title tag and main heading. The service and the city appear in the title and the H1 of each local page, phrased the way your customers search for them.
33. Contact details and access. Address in the reference format, tap-to-call phone number, hours, map or directions link, parking if it matters to your customers.
34. Local proof. Photos of work done in the area, reviews from local customers, local partners and associations. They are what ties the page to the territory.
35. Internal linking. Local pages are reachable from the menu or the home page, and linked to the service pages. A page that nothing links to from the rest of the site stays invisible.
36. Commitments written out clearly. Towns served named, hours, stated response times: precise sentences that answer engines can reuse as they are. The method to check this is in my guide to the AI visibility audit.
37. Indexing. Every local page is indexed: URL Inspection in Search Console confirms it in seconds.

5. Technical and structured data (6 points)

The technical side of a local website is rarely the first obstacle, but it can cancel out the rest. These six checks take little time; to examine the whole site, follow my technical SEO audit checklist.

38. LocalBusiness markup. Present on the home page and the location pages, with the most precise type possible (Restaurant, Dentist, Plumber…) and values identical to those on the profile. Validate it with the Rich Results Test.
39. Mobile and speed. Local searches mostly happen on phones. Test your local pages in PageSpeed Insights on mobile, then browse them yourself on a smartphone.
40. Crawler access. No local page blocked by robots.txt, marked noindex, or with a canonical tag pointing to another page by mistake.
41. One-tap actions. Tap-to-call phone number, directions link, booking or quote button visible without scrolling.
42. Tracking visits from the profile. Add UTM parameters to the website link in the profile. Without them, those visits blend into organic traffic in your analytics tool.
43. Local queries in Search Console. Filter the queries that contain your cities and your services: which ones show your pages, at what position, with what click-through rate.

6. Local competitor analysis (4 points)

A local audit without comparison says little: a number of reviews is only good or bad compared with the neighbors'. Go back to your target queries and the three businesses in the local pack for each one.

44. Their profile. Primary category, number of reviews, rating, pace of recent reviews, number and freshness of photos.
45. Their location. Where are they relative to the target area? A competitor based in the city center starts with a distance advantage that nothing cancels: you work around it with prominence and local pages.
46. Their website. Do they have city pages, unique content, local markup? Who talks about them: local press, clubs, associations, suppliers?
47. The gap to close. Sum up, in one line per competitor, what they have that you do not. That line sets your priorities far better than the raw list of your weaknesses.

7. Local rank tracking (3 points)

Your position in the local pack depends on where the search is made from. The same business can be first on its own street and missing two kilometers away. A single search from your office therefore measures nothing.

48. Rankings on a grid of points. Check your position on each target query from several points across your area: by hand in a private window, or with a geo-grid rank tracking tool. The resulting map shows where you are visible and where you disappear.
49. Profile metrics. Calls, direction requests, website clicks and the search terms that showed the profile, recorded every month. These are the figures closest to your revenue.
50. AI answers. Ask ChatGPT, Perplexity and Gemini your customers' questions ("which locksmith in Rennes can I trust?") and note who gets cited.

Record all these values on the day of the audit. Without a starting point, there is no way to tell in three months whether the fixes had any effect.

Prioritizing fixes: the impact and effort matrix

A 50-point list is not handled in checklist order. I rank every non-compliant item on two criteria: its likely impact on Google's three factors, and the effort it takes. Four levels come out of it.

Blockers come before everything: writing city pages is pointless while the profile is duplicated or miscategorized. Routines start in the first week, because their effect adds up. Projects get planned over two or three months.

The local SEO audit checklist to fill in

The checklist covers the 25 points that weigh the most. Enter your situation, tick what is compliant: it calculates a score per block, sorts the fixes in the order of the matrix, and lets you copy the plan or download the checklist as a CSV file to track it in a spreadsheet.

Local SEO audit report template

Whether you run the audit yourself or commission it, the report should fit in five parts. An 80-page document with no priorities ends up in a drawer.

1. The five-line summary. Where the business stands, the two or three blockers, what will pay off fastest.
2. The current state. The 50 points with their status (compliant, to fix, to check) and a screenshot when it helps understanding.
3. The competitive comparison. One table per query: category, reviews, rating and local pages, for you and for the three in the local pack.
4. The action plan. Fixes ranked by priority, with an owner and a deadline, split into 30, 60 and 90 days.
5. The baseline metrics. Grid rankings, calls, directions, number of reviews, AI answers. These are what the work will be judged on.

The same logic applies to a full website audit: I show it on an SEO audit report example, with the 47 points I check on technical, content and links.

How often should you do a local SEO audit?

A full audit once a year is enough for a stable business. In between, a fifteen-minute monthly check covers the essentials: new reviews and replies, upcoming special hours, suggested edits on the profile, photos added by users, calls and directions for the month.

Run a full audit again without waiting after a move, a change of name or number, the opening of a location, a website redesign or a lasting drop in calls from the profile.

Do the audit yourself or hand it over?

For a single location, this checklist takes a few hours, with no paid tools. The profile, NAP and review blocks need no technical skills: they need method and patience.

The audit is worth handing over in three cases: a multi-location business, where duplicates and inconsistencies multiply; a website whose technical side is beyond you; a blocking situation (suspended profile, sudden drop in calls) where the diagnosis has to be fast. I run it as part of my local SEO service, and it is included in every SEO audit I carry out. To compare what is on the market, I have gathered the price ranges I see in an article on SEO audit pricing.

Written by

Anthony Courtin

SEO, GEO & AI automation consultant

I help SMBs and independent professionals with their visibility (Google, ChatGPT, Perplexity) and with real-world use of AI at work. I also train teams in-house and help them rethink their processes. Everything I write here, I use on client projects.

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