An audit measures where you stand. It does not fix anything. That distinction matters, because most people start fixing at check 3 and never finish the audit, which is how you end up optimising the wrong thing for 6 months.
Work through this in order, write down every answer, and resist the urge to fix as you go. The fixing comes after, and the order you fix in depends on what the audit finds.
Record Your Baseline First
Before you check anything, write down 5 numbers. This takes 10 minutes and it is the step almost every audit guide skips, which is why most audits produce a to-do list instead of a measurement.
- Profile views for the last 30 days, from your Business Profile performance section
- Calls from your profile, same period
- Direction requests, same period
- Website clicks from your profile, same period
- Total reviews and average rating, today
Date the page and put it somewhere you will find it in 90 days. Without this, you will have no way to tell whether anything you do next worked, and you will be relying on the feeling that things seem better.
Why the Order Matters
The 5 sections below are a dependency chain, not a list of equal items. Each layer is a prerequisite for the one above it.
Fixing your website’s local content before fixing your primary category produces nothing, because the category decides whether Google considers you relevant at all. Chasing backlinks before fixing inconsistent business information produces nothing, because Google is not yet certain which business you are. Work top down.
Time budget: profile 30 minutes, reviews 20 minutes, business information 45 minutes, website 45 minutes, competitors 30 minutes. About 2 hours 50 minutes in total, and you can stop after any section.
Part 1: Your Profile, 6 Checks
1. Is your profile claimed and verified? Search your business name in Google while signed out. If you see a “Claim this business” or “Own this business?” prompt, it is unclaimed. Pass: verified and you can edit it.
2. Does your primary category match the top 3 in your area? Search your main service term from your own location. Look at the 3 businesses in the map pack and check the primary category each uses. Compare to yours. Pass: yours matches at least 2 of the 3.
3. Are your services or products listed individually? Open your profile and count the entries in the services or products section. Pass: every service you sell has its own entry with a description.
4. Is your business name exactly your real name? No city, no service keywords, no taglines. It must match your signage and registration. Pass: no extra words at all.
5. Have you posted in the last 30 days? Check the posts section for the date of the most recent one. Pass: at least 2 posts in the last 30 days.
6. Do you have at least 10 real photos, with 1 added in the last 90 days? Stock images do not count. Pass: 10 or more genuine photos and recent activity.
Failed checks 1 to 4 are the expensive ones, and check 4 in particular carries suspension risk rather than just a ranking cost. Our Google Business Profile guide covers how to set each of these correctly, and if your profile has already been pulled down, the suspension guide covers the appeal.
Part 2: Reviews, 4 Checks
7. How does your review count compare to the top 3 in the map pack? Write down their counts and yours. This is the only review benchmark that means anything, because national averages tell you nothing about your street. Pass: within 25% of the lowest of the 3.
8. Have you received a review in the last 30 days? Recency is weighted, and a profile whose newest review is 2 years old reads as a closed business. Pass: at least 1 review in the last 30 days.
9. Have you responded to every review, including the positive ones? Count unanswered reviews. Pass: zero unanswered, or under 5% of total.
10. Is your review request process compliant? Check what your software actually does. If any step asks how the experience was before deciding who gets the Google link, that is gating, and it is prohibited. Pass: every customer gets the same request, with no pre-screening and no incentive.
Check 10 fails more often than owners expect, usually because a third-party tool is doing it without anyone realising. The rules changed several times in 2026 and several previously standard tactics are now violations, which we cover in getting more Google reviews.
Part 3: Business Information, 4 Checks
11. Is your name, address and phone identical everywhere? Search your phone number in Google in quotes. Open the first 10 results and compare each listing to your profile, character for character. “Unit 105 – 2571 Shaughnessy” and “105-2571 Shaughnessy St” are 2 different strings. Pass: all 10 match exactly.
12. Are there duplicate listings for your business? Search your business name, your old name if you have rebranded, and your address. Look for more than one profile. Pass: exactly 1 profile.
13. Are you listed in the directories that matter locally? Not a hundred. The ones with local weight: your chamber of commerce, your provincial registry, the major Canadian directories, and any association in your trade. Pass: present and correct in at least 6.
14. Does your address setting match how you actually operate? If customers do not come to you, your address should be hidden and only service areas shown. Pass: the setting matches reality.
Check 11 is the longest single task in this audit and the one people abandon. It is also where duplicate and outdated listings surface. Our guide to building local citations covers the cleanup, and local SEO for service businesses covers check 14 in detail.
Part 4: Your Website, 5 Checks
15. Does your name, address and phone appear as text on your site? Not inside an image, not only in a contact form. Real text a crawler can read. Pass: present as text on your contact page and in your footer.
16. Do you have a real page for each area you serve? One page per municipality, with genuinely different content. The same page with a city name swapped does not count and Google treats it accordingly. Pass: a distinct page for every area listed on your profile.
17. Do you have a page for each service you offer? A single page listing 9 services cannot rank for any of them specifically. Pass: your top 3 services each have their own page.
18. Does your site load in under 3 seconds on mobile? Test the page people actually land on, not just the homepage. Pass: under 3 seconds on a phone, on mobile data.
19. Does your contact page make it obvious where you are? Areas served, hours, a tappable phone number. Pass: all 3 visible without scrolling on a phone.
Checks 16 and 17 are the ones that separate businesses that rank in 1 city from businesses that rank across a region. Our guide to location pages that rank covers how to build them so Google treats them as distinct, and for check 18, speed test tools covers how to measure properly.
Part 5: Competitors, 5 Checks
You cannot judge any of the above in isolation. 40 reviews is excellent in one market and last place in another.
20. Who are the actual top 3, and from where? Search from your own address, then from the centre of the main city you want, then from a suburb you serve. Write down the 3 businesses in each case. They will not be the same 3. Pass: you appear in the top 3 from at least 1 of those points.
21. What is their review gap over you? Count and average rating for each. Pass: you are not last on both count and recency.
22. What primary category do they use? If all 3 use one category and you use another, you have found your highest-return fix. Pass: yours matches the majority.
23. How complete are their profiles compared to yours? Services listed, photos, posts, description. Every empty section on their profile is an opening for you. Pass: yours is more complete than at least 2 of them.
24. How close are they to the searcher, compared to you? Distance is a ranking factor you cannot change. If all 3 are downtown and you are 20 kilometres out, no amount of optimisation puts you in that result. Pass: you are within a comparable distance for at least 1 of the areas you target.
Check 24 is the one that saves the most money, because it tells you which markets are genuinely winnable. The mechanics of why are covered in how the local 3-pack works, and for this region specifically, ranking across Metro Vancouver.
Scoring Your Audit
Count your passes out of 24.
19 to 24. Your foundation is solid. What is holding you back is either proximity, which you cannot change, or competitive volume, meaning reviews and content over time. Keep doing what you are doing and measure quarterly.
13 to 18. Typical for an established business that set things up once and moved on. You have specific fixable gaps rather than a broken foundation. Work through the failed checks in the order they appear.
7 to 12. Most of your local visibility is currently unclaimed. This is the best position to be in, because the fixes are cheap and the improvement is usually visible within weeks.
Under 7. Start with checks 1 to 4 only. Do not touch anything else until those pass, because nothing above them will work until they do.
What to Fix First
If you only fix 4 things, fix these, in this order.
- Check 4, your business name. Free, takes 2 minutes, and it is the one that carries suspension risk rather than just a ranking cost.
- Check 2, your primary category. The highest-return single change available to most businesses, and it takes 5 minutes once you know the answer.
- Check 10, review gating. If your process is non-compliant, every review you gather is at risk of removal, so fixing this before gathering more is the correct order.
- Check 8, review recency. Getting back to a steady flow matters more than the total.
Everything else is real but slower. Citation cleanup, location pages and content build compound value over months rather than weeks.
How Long Before Fixes Show
Different signals update at very different speeds, which is why an audit followed by a month of impatience usually ends in the wrong conclusion.
- Profile changes, including categories, description and photos, reflect within days.
- Citation corrections take roughly 2 to 8 weeks to propagate across directories.
- Review velocity and citation cleanup begin affecting map pack position in the 1 to 3 month range.
- New location and service pages take a similar timeframe to be indexed and start ranking.
Which means the honest window for judging this work is 90 days, and that is exactly why recording the baseline at the start matters.
When to Run It Again
Quarterly is the sensible cadence for a business actively competing. Twice a year is fine for a stable one. And always after any of these: moving premises, changing your phone number, adding a location, rebranding, rebuilding your website, or noticing a drop in calls you cannot explain.
The businesses that improve are not the ones with the best audit. They are the ones who ran the same audit 4 times and fixed 3 things each time.
After the Audit
Write down your score, your 5 baseline numbers, and today’s date. Fix the 4 items above. Then leave it alone for 90 days and run the audit again.
If you would rather have this done and the fixes handled for you, that is what our local SEO service covers, including a one-time option with no monthly commitment. Either way, send us your score if you want a second opinion on what to fix first.
Common Questions
How long does a local SEO audit take?
About 3 hours for a single location business if you work through it in order and resist fixing as you go. The longest section is checking your business information across directories, which takes 45 minutes on its own. You can stop after any section and pick it up later, since each part stands alone.
What tools do I need for a local SEO audit?
None that cost money. Your Google Business Profile dashboard, Google Search Console, a browser, and Google itself are enough for all 24 checks. Paid tools such as rank trackers and citation scanners save time on the repetitive parts, but they do not find anything this checklist misses.
How often should I audit my local SEO?
Quarterly if you are actively competing for local rankings, twice a year if your position is stable. Also run it after any change to your address, phone number, business name or website, since those are the events that quietly break the signals you have built.
What is the most common local SEO problem?
An incorrect primary category, followed closely by inconsistent business information across directories. Both are free to fix, both take minutes once identified, and both are invisible until you check for them deliberately.
Can I do a local SEO audit myself?
Yes. Every check in this list is something a business owner can do with a browser and 3 hours. What is harder to do yourself is the fixing, particularly citation cleanup across dozens of directories and building location pages that are genuinely distinct rather than duplicated.
