Local SEO audit you can run yourself in an afternoon

Aug 22
4 min read

Updated: 5 days ago

Introduction

Most audits sold for this are a report generated by a tool, listing dozens of findings ranked by severity according to the tool rather than to your business.

The version worth doing is manual, takes an afternoon, and produces a short list of things that are actually wrong. Nearly all of it can be done by the owner.

1. A local SEO audit starts with your listing, field by field

Open your business listing and check every field, not the summary score.

Business name exactly as it is in reality, primary category as specific as possible, secondary categories accurate, full service list with descriptions, complete hours including exceptions, all attributes, website link pointing to a working page, phone number, photographs across all four types, and the questions and answers section.

Write down every field that is empty or wrong. Incompleteness is the most common finding and the cheapest to fix.

2. Check your information is identical everywhere

Search for your business name and phone number and see every place it appears: directories, social profiles, review sites, association listings, old supplier pages.

For each, check name, address, phone and hours against your listing. You are looking for inconsistencies — an old phone number, a previous address, a variant spelling, an abbreviated street name.

Fix what you can edit, and note what you cannot. Old listings with wrong phone numbers actively cost you enquiries.

3. Look for duplicate listings of your own business

Duplicates split your reviews and confuse which entry gets shown.

They arise from previous owners, staff creating a second listing, moves, or automated data providers. Search your business name, your address and your phone number separately, and look at the map for your location.

Duplicates can usually be reported and merged. This is worth doing early, because everything else you improve gets divided between them until it is resolved.

4. Audit reviews on volume, recency and response

Three numbers: how many you have, when the most recent arrived, and what proportion have a reply.

If the newest review is more than a month old, you do not have a review habit — that is the finding. If replies are missing, especially on negative reviews, that is visible to everyone reading.

Compare with the two or three competitors who appear alongside you. This is usually the clearest gap and the one that most affects whether you are chosen once shown.

5. Test the site as a customer on a phone

Open your website on a phone using mobile data, not office wifi.

Time how long it takes to be usable. Check that your location and hours are visible without scrolling far, that the phone number is tappable, that the contact form works and delivers, and that nothing important is hidden behind a banner.

Then submit your own enquiry and time the reply. A slow response is a marketing problem larger than anything on your listing, and this is the only way you will notice it.

6. Check what search engines can see

Two quick technical checks.

Search for your business name and confirm the right page appears, with a title and description that read sensibly. Then look at your search console for the queries you appear for, and whether impressions are rising or falling.

Also confirm your address and hours appear as plain text on the site rather than only inside an image or a map widget, since text is what can be read.

7. Compare yourself with who actually appears

Search the two or three terms that matter most, as a customer would, and look at who ranks above you.

For each, note what they have that you do not: more reviews, more recent ones, more photographs, a more specific category, more complete services, a faster site.

This is more useful than any benchmark, because these are the businesses you are being compared with in practice.

8. Rank the findings by effort, and fix the free things first

The audit will produce twenty items. Order them by cost rather than by importance.

Completing listing fields, fixing wrong phone numbers, replying to reviews, correcting hours and reporting duplicates are all free and can be done this week. Site speed and content take longer.

Then set a date to repeat the audit — twice a year is enough. Keep the previous list, because the most telling result is which items you identified last time and have still not fixed.

Conclusion

Work through your listing field by field, verify your details are identical across every other listing, and find and merge duplicates before improving anything else.

Assess reviews on volume, recency and reply rate against the competitors you actually appear beside, test your own site and enquiry response on a phone, confirm your details are readable as text, then fix the free items first and repeat the whole audit twice a year.