How to Run a Local SEO Audit, Step by Step

Quick quiz

How should you get more local customers from Google?

Question 1 of 425%

Is your Google Business Profile complete?

No, or I don't know what it isPartlyYes, with photos and reviews

What a local SEO audit covers, and what it does not

Local results mix a map with a short list of businesses, often called the local pack. Google's help page on improving local ranking names three factors:

• Relevance: "Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for."
• Distance: "Distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who's searching."
• Prominence: "Prominence means how well-known a business is." Google says it depends partly on how many websites link to the business and how many reviews it has.

Read that list as a plan. You cannot move a customer closer to your address, so distance stays fixed for each location. The audit focuses on relevance and prominence. Relevance comes from what your profile, listings and pages say about you. Prominence comes from links, mentions and reviews. Every check below serves one of those two.

What the audit is not

It is not a full technical audit of your site, and it is not a content plan. If you want the individual points in one list, our 30-point local SEO checklist covers them. This article is about running the audit: the order, the evidence to keep, the scoring, and the mistakes that waste the most time.

Why reviews matter before anything else

Customers read reviews before they call. In its 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey, BrightLocal reports that 97% of consumers read reviews for local businesses, and 41% say they always do, up from 29% the year before. The sample is 1002 adults in the United States, so treat these as US figures, but they are a good reason to put reviews near the top of your audit.

Set up the audit before you open a tool

Write down your master facts

Create one document with the facts every listing should show: the trading name, the address in one exact written form, the phone number with the country code, the opening hours including holiday changes, the main website URL, and the services. This is your source of truth. Every later check compares something against it, so a vague master sheet makes every finding vague. Add the rules for review replies and the name of the person who approves changes, or two people will fix the same listing in two different ways.

Decide the scope: one location or several

A single shop with a simple website can finish the full audit in a few sessions. A business with several locations needs the profile, listings and reviews checked per location, because each address has its own profile and its own citations. Keep one row per location in the master sheet.

Set the cadence

Jeff Riddall's local SEO audit checklist at Search Engine Journal, published November 7, 2025, suggests reviewing audit items every six to 12 months, depending on the size of your web presence. Use that interval for the full audit. Profile changes, new reviews and AI answers move faster, so check those in between.

Area	What you check	Where the evidence lives	Owner
Google Business Profile	Facts, category, photos, replies	Profile dashboard, dated screenshots	Profile owner
Citations	NAP consistency and duplicates	Search results, listing exports	Marketing or operations
Website	On-page signals, schema, crawl	Crawler export, validator reports	Web or SEO lead
Reviews	Count, rating, replies, themes	Each review platform, dated exports	Customer service
Links	Referring sites and local mentions	Search Console, a backlink tool	SEO lead
AI answers	Which businesses and facts AI names	Logged answers with date and tool	SEO lead

Audit 1: your Google Business Profile

Google's own tips for improving local ranking double as an audit list. Google asks you to verify your business, keep the information up to date, respond to reviews, add photos and videos, and, for retail businesses in eligible regions, add in-store products. Run each tip as a check in every audit, not as a one-time setup task.

Check every field against your master facts

Compare the name, address, phone, hours and website with your master sheet, one field at a time. Small differences such as "St." and "Street" look trivial to a person. They are exactly the mismatches that split your signals, so record them as findings. Check the holiday hours too. Hours that are right in a normal week and wrong at Christmas are common, and customers notice on the day they try to visit.

Confirm the primary category

Google's help page does not list categories as a ranking factor. It does list managing your business category as part of keeping your information complete. The primary category should describe your main service in the words a customer would use, and the page on your site that targets that service should match it. If the profile says "Plumber" and your site only talks about heating repairs, one of them is wrong for the work you want.

Set the physical location or service area correctly

The profile must reflect how you serve customers. A business that goes to clients needs its service area set. A shop where customers walk in needs its address shown. Check the map pin as well: a pin on the wrong building sends customers to the wrong door. Compare it with the street view and your own photos.

Review photos, posts and products

Google says photos and videos help you "show customers what you offer and tell the story of your business." Its help page does not list photos as a ranking factor, so treat them as work that helps customers decide. Outdated photos are still a finding: a storefront that has changed, or a menu from two years ago, damages trust before the customer calls.

Audit 2: NAP consistency and citations

A citation is any online mention of your business name, address and phone number, with or without a link. Search engines and customers both compare those mentions. One wrong digit on one directory is a small problem. Ten directories with ten versions of your address make it hard for anyone to trust any of them. The goal is one consistent set of facts across the places that matter, not a count of listings.

Build your comparison set from search results

Search your business name and read the first three to four pages of results, as SEJ suggests. For each listing, note the site, the NAP it shows, whether you have claimed it, and whether it is correct. Our guide to business directories explains which listings still matter for local SEO and AI visibility.

Find and resolve duplicates

Duplicates appear when a directory creates a second listing from a typo, an old address or a name variant such as "Smith Plumbing Ltd" next to "Smith Plumbing". They are the most common citation problem and the slowest to fix, because you often need the directory's own merge or closure process. Log each duplicate with its URL, the wrong field, and the process to fix it. Our page on local listing management walks through the cleanup.

Watch the mentions you do not control

SEJ advises monitoring Reddit for brand and product mentions, and engaging transparently and without promotion. Do not post as a customer or ask friends to write threads. Check whether the facts in a thread are right, and reply openly as the business when a correction helps.

Use one format everywhere

Copy your address and phone number from your website footer and use that exact form in every listing, with the country code on the phone number. Google's structured data documentation asks for the same thing: "Be sure to include the country code and area code in the phone number."

For one location, start by hand. For several locations, a listing tool saves hours, but its results are a starting point, not the verdict.

Audit 3: your website's local signals, schema and crawl

Your website is the one listing you fully control. It is also where search engines and AI tools check whether the facts on your profile are real. This part of the audit covers four things: page focus, visibility of key facts in the HTML, structured data, and crawlability.

Give each local page one job

SEJ recommends keeping each page focused on one topic, and using keyword variations consistently in titles, URLs, headings and body text. For local pages, that means one service in one area per page. Pages that differ only by city name, with the same paragraph repeated, look like thin copies. Our guide to local landing pages shows how to build location pages that stand on their own. Give images descriptive filenames and alt text, as the same checklist recommends.

Make the key facts visible in the HTML

SEJ also recommends confirming that key content appears in the raw HTML or through server-side rendering. Some LLMs do not execute JavaScript, so a phone number that appears only after a script runs may never reach them. Test it: load the contact page with JavaScript turned off, or view the page source, and check that the address, hours, phone and services are all there.

Write LocalBusiness schema, field by field

LocalBusiness markup describes your business to machines in a standard format. Google's documentation names two required properties, name and address, and recommends more. Four rules matter most in an audit. The geo coordinates need at least five decimal places for both latitude and longitude. Opening hours use the hh:mm:ss format for opens and closes, and the YYYY-MM-DD format for validFrom and validThrough on seasonal closures. The priceRange must be shorter than 100 characters. And, because Google says the more address properties you provide, the higher the result quality, fill in the full address.

{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "LocalBusiness",
  "name": "Example Plumbing Co.",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "telephone": "+33 1 23 45 67 89",
  "priceRange": "€€",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "12 Example Street",
    "postalCode": "75001",
    "addressLocality": "Paris",
    "addressCountry": "FR"
  },
  "geo": {
    "@type": "GeoCoordinates",
    "latitude": 48.85661,
    "longitude": 2.35222
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": {
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday", "Tuesday", "Wednesday", "Thursday", "Friday"],
    "opens": "08:30:00",
    "closes": "18:00:00"
  }
}

This is an example with placeholder values. Replace every value with your own, and check the coordinates against the map pin from Audit 1, so your markup and your profile agree.

Do not mark up reviews you do not qualify for

This is the most common markup mistake in local audits. Google's page says the review and aggregate rating properties are "only recommended for sites that capture reviews about other local businesses." A plumber that adds a rating built from its own Google reviews to its LocalBusiness markup is outside that guidance. Remove it, and check whether a plugin added it for you. Google also warns that "The problem can be caused by either spammy content or spammy markup usage," and that "If your site violates one or more of these guidelines, then Google may issue a manual action against it."

Validate the markup and the page

SEJ recommends validating LocalBusiness, Product, Service, Review and FAQPage markup with Google's Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. The Rich Results Test shows what Google can read from a public URL or code snippet. The Schema.org validator checks the structure against the vocabulary. Record the date and result for each key page, because a theme update can break markup that passed last month.

Check the crawl basics

SEJ asks you to find broken or misdirected internal links, and to use canonical tags correctly: canonicals on pages you did not create, and a self-referencing canonical on unique pages. For speed and stability, it points to Core Web Vitals in Search Console and to Google Lighthouse for deeper analysis. Broken links between location pages are a common finding, because those pages usually grew by copy and paste.

Audits 4 and 5: reviews, links and Search Console

These audits feed prominence. Reviews and links both shape how well known your business looks to Google and to customers. Search Console shows whether Google can index and trust the pages you already have.

Reviews: count, rating, replies and themes

Google's help page says that "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking," and that replying to reviews shows customers you value their feedback. SEJ adds three tasks: respond to all reviews, positive and negative, as soon as possible; analyze reviews for missed responses and recurring service themes; and inventory reviews on Facebook, Yelp, TripAdvisor, Houzz and similar sites. For each platform, record the count, the average rating, the share of reviews you have answered, the date of the latest review, and the three most common complaint themes.

The themes matter more than the average. A rating that slips because of one repeated complaint about booking tells you something the number cannot. Put the theme into the plan as a service fix, not only as a reply.

Ask every customer, not only the happy ones

Some checklists advise asking for positive reviews. Do not follow that as written. Asking only satisfied customers skews your rating, and it can break the rules of the platforms you ask on. Ask every customer in the same way, at the same point in the job, and let the rating reflect the whole experience.

Links: the other half of prominence

Google ties prominence partly to the number of websites linking to a business. For a local audit, the useful links come from your city and sector: associations, suppliers, local media, sponsors and partners who name you. SEJ suggests reviewing backlinks in Search Console's link reports, using a backlink tool to find domains that link to competitors but not to you, and checking referral sources in your analytics. Our guide to local link building covers where those links come from.

Content and Search Console

Search Console answers a question your profile cannot: is Google indexing the pages you have? SEJ asks you to check for pages that are not crawled or indexed, check for manual actions, and review rich results, mobile and desktop experience, security issues and performance data. Open the reports for your verified property and write down each error with its URL. The public overview is shown below, but the reports themselves need a signed-in account.

On content, SEJ recommends mapping each page to one of four journey stages: informational, transactional, navigational or commercial. A local page that answers a buying question needs different content from a page that explains a service. SEJ also suggests FAQ sections written for each page and warns against generic FAQs. Answer the questions a customer asks on that exact page.

Audit 6: AI answers and local visibility

AI assistants now answer local questions directly, and they draw on the same facts you audit above. SEJ calls a fully optimized Google Business Profile the foundation for AI visibility. It also suggests mapping transactional and informational intent, writing direct answers to natural-language questions, and evaluating booking or reservation integrations where they apply. The output of this audit is a log rather than a score.

Check	What to record	Why it matters
Questions	The questions a buyer asks in your city, typed the way they type them	A repeatable test needs the same questions every time
Named businesses	Which businesses each tool names for each question	This is the competition the answer uses
Your presence	Whether your business or site appears, and with which link	Shows whether AI can connect your facts to you
Facts stated	Whether hours, services and address in the answer are correct	Wrong facts usually trace back to a source you can fix
Date and tool	The date, tool and model for each run	Answers change between runs, so compare like with like

Run the same questions each time

The same question asked on two days can name different businesses, and a small change in wording changes the answer. Keep the question list fixed, record the date and tool with each answer, and repeat the run at the same interval. One answer proves little. A pattern over several runs shows whether a fix worked.

Trace wrong facts to their source

When an answer gives the wrong hours or an old address, find where the tool probably read it: your profile, a directory, your site or a review. Then fix that source. You cannot edit an AI answer, but you can correct the listing, the page or the markup that feeds it.

Four ways to run the audit, compared

You can run a local SEO audit in four main ways, and none is best in every case. Each one answers a different question, so the right choice depends on how many locations you have and what you need to know.

Manual audit with a checklist

Principle: you open each source, read it, and compare it with your master facts. When it fits: one location, a small budget, or a first audit when you do not yet know where the problems are. Advantages: free, thorough, and close to what a customer sees. Limits: slow across many locations, and easy to skip items when you are tired. Example: you search your business name, read the first three to four pages of results, and log each listing against your sheet.

Listing and citation scanner

Principle: the tool searches many directories and compares each listing's name, address and phone with the facts you enter. When it fits: several locations, or once you know duplicates are a problem. Advantages: finds mismatches and duplicates in one pass, and exports a list. Limits: it can match the wrong business or miss a listing, so a person must check what it flags. Example: you export the results and fix the mismatches on the profiles you already claim before the rest.

Rank grid tracking

Principle: the tool measures where your business appears in the local pack from several points around its location, so you see the map as a customer in each area sees it. When it fits: service-area businesses, or competitive areas where rank changes sharply from one neighbourhood to the next. Advantages: shows coverage across an area, not a single rank. Limits: it costs money, and one point is only a sample. Example: you track a grid around your address for your main service, then compare it with the areas where you actually take jobs. Our guide to local rank tracking explains what to measure in the map and in AI results.

Full audit platform

Principle: one platform crawls the site, checks markup, reads the profile and reports everything with a consistent score. When it fits: agencies and teams with many sites, where the same checks must run every month. Advantages: consistent scoring and shareable reports. Limits: the score depends on the data it reads, and a high score can hide one wrong fact that matters most. Example: the platform flags a missing schema field on every location page, and you check two of them by hand before you roll out the fix.

Method	Best for	Main advantage	Main limit
Manual checklist	One location, a first audit	Thorough and free	Slow and easy to skip
Listing scanner	Several locations, duplicate cleanup	Finds mismatches in one pass	False matches need a person
Rank grid	Service areas, competitive neighbourhoods	Shows coverage across an area	Costly, and one point is a sample
Full audit platform	Agencies, many sites	Consistent scoring and reports	The score can hide a critical fact

A sensible sequence for most businesses: start with the manual checklist, add a listing scanner once duplicates exist, add rank grid tracking only when rank questions come from specific areas, and use a platform when the number of sites makes manual checks unrealistic.

A step-by-step audit you can run in a few sessions

Facts come first, because every later check compares against them. The website comes before reviews and links, because a site fix is quicker to make than a directory's duplicate process.

Step 1: lock your master facts

Write the facts once, in exact form, and have the owner approve them. If two people give different hours, the audit will flag the disagreement, and settling it takes longer than the audit itself.

Step 2: audit the profile

Go through the profile field by field, using the checklist in Audit 1. Attach a dated screenshot to each finding, and mark each item correct, partly correct, or wrong.

Step 3: scan your listings

Search your business name with your main city and service, and read the first three to four pages. Log every listing that shows your business, with the NAP it displays and whether you have claimed it.

Step 4: check the website

Test the contact page and two location pages with JavaScript off. Run the key pages through the Rich Results Test and the Schema.org validator. Check the links from your service pages to your location pages, and log each broken one with its URL.

Step 5: pull the review data

For each platform, record the count, the average rating, the share of reviews you have answered, the date of the latest review, and the top complaint themes. Keep the export with its date, so the next audit has a baseline.

Step 6: check Search Console and links

Read the indexing and manual action reports for your verified property, and note any page that is not indexed without a good reason. List the sites that link to you, grouped by type, and mark those from your city and sector.

Step 7: log the AI answers

Run your fixed question list in the tools your customers use, and record the businesses and facts in each answer with the date and tool. This is the first run of a log you will repeat, so do not judge the result from one run.

Score the findings and turn them into a plan

An audit only helps if it ends in changes. Score every check on the same three-point scale: correct, partly correct, or wrong or missing. Then write each gap as a finding with an impact, an effort, an owner, a due date and a status. The score lets you compare this audit with the next one. It is not a grade for the business, so do not argue about it in a meeting.

Finding	Impact	Effort	Owner	Due	Status
Wrong phone number on two directories	High	Low	Operations	Set a date	Open
Duplicate listing with an old address	High	Medium	Operations	Set a date	Open
Recent reviews without a reply	Medium	Low	Customer service	Set a date	Open
Own reviews marked up as an aggregate rating	Medium	Low	Web lead	Set a date	Open
Thin location pages with copied text	Medium	High	Content lead	Set a date	Open

Fix now, fix next

Fix now: wrong facts on the profile or in the main directories, duplicates that send customers to the wrong door, and recent reviews without a reply. These are quick, and customers see them first. Fix next: schema corrections, copy changes on location pages, link building and content refreshes. These take longer, and they pay off once the facts are right. To estimate which fixes are worth the most, the free Local SEO ROI Calculator gives a rough picture to compare them against.

Keep the evidence

Store the screenshots, exports, validator reports and prompt logs in one folder, named by date. When a finding is closed, keep the before and after evidence beside it. When someone asks why a listing changed, the answer should take a minute to find.

Set the review rhythm

SEJ suggests reviewing audit items every six to 12 months, depending on the size of your web presence. Between full audits, check the profile and the review platforms on a fixed schedule, and run the AI log at the interval you chose. Those checks catch most problems before a customer does.

Common mistakes, and how to fix each one

These mistakes come up in almost every local audit. Each one below says what it is, how to spot it, and how to fix it.

Mistake 1: auditing the profile and skipping the citations

What it is: you check the Google Business Profile carefully, but never compare the facts on other directories. The profile is right, and a directory that ranks for your service still shows an old phone number.

How to spot it: search your business name and read the first three to four pages of results. Any listing with a fact that differs from your master sheet is a finding.

How to fix it: make citations a required step of every audit. Fix the wrong facts on each listing, starting with the ones that rank for your name.

Mistake 2: leaving duplicates alive

What it is: an old or misspelled listing keeps running beside your real one. Customers land on the wrong page, and reviews split between the two.

How to spot it: look for a different name variant, an old address, or a phone number that no longer answers. Check your reviews for entries that seem to belong to another address.

How to fix it: log each duplicate with its URL and the directory's process. Claim the real listing, request the closure of the duplicate, and keep a note of each request, because cleanup often takes several rounds.

Mistake 3: marking up your own reviews

What it is: the LocalBusiness markup carries an aggregate rating built from your own reviews. Google's page says that property is "only recommended for sites that capture reviews about other local businesses," so this use falls outside that guidance.

How to spot it: view the page source or run the URL through the Rich Results Test, and look for an aggregate rating. Check your theme and plugins too, because some add it automatically.

How to fix it: remove the markup and retest the page. You can still show the reviews on the page as ordinary content.

Mistake 4: asking only happy customers for reviews

What it is: the team sends review requests only to customers who seemed pleased. The rating looks good for a while, then stops reflecting the business, and it can break the rules of the platforms involved.

How to spot it: compare the number of reviews with the number of completed jobs over the same period. Long stretches of only positive reviews are a warning sign.

How to fix it: send the request to every customer, in the same way and at the same point in the job. Reply to every review, the negative ones included.

Mistake 5: reading one rank check as the truth

What it is: you check your rank once, from your own street, and decide the profile works or does not. Local results change by neighbourhood, device and time, so one check is one sample.

How to spot it: your notes say "ranks first" with no date, no location and no tool. Nobody can repeat the check the same way.

How to fix it: record the location, date, tool and query for every check. For service areas, check several points, or use a rank grid, before you draw a conclusion.

Mistake 6: hiding the facts in JavaScript

What it is: the address, hours or services appear only after a script runs. Some AI tools do not run JavaScript, so those facts never reach them, and their answers about your business are thin or wrong.

How to spot it: load the page with JavaScript off, or view the page source. If the facts are missing, the problem is real, even when the page looks complete in a browser.

How to fix it: render the key facts in the HTML, through server-side rendering or static content, and keep the same facts in the profile and the schema.

Questions people ask about local SEO audits

How often should you run a local SEO audit?

Run the full audit every six to 12 months, depending on how much your business and web presence change, as SEJ suggests. Check the profile and reviews in between, because they change faster than your site. A move, a new location or a new service should trigger an audit straight away.

What is the difference between a local SEO audit and a local SEO checklist?

A checklist lists what to look at. An audit runs that list: you check each item, record the evidence, score the result, and turn each gap into a task with an owner. A checklist alone does not tell you what to fix first.

Can you run a local SEO audit without paid tools?

Yes. You can cover most of it by hand, with search results, your profile dashboard, your website with JavaScript off, the Rich Results Test, the Schema.org validator and Search Console. Paid tools save the most time on citation scans, rank grids and repeated AI checks across several locations. Start by hand, and add a tool where manual work becomes the bottleneck.

On the site side, Sorank helps with part of this work. Content Optimization fixes and refreshes existing pages, which is where many on-page findings end up. It does not replace checking your Google Business Profile, your listings or your reviews, which still need your own eyes and processes.