The local SEO checklist, in the order that actually matters

This is everything worth doing for a local business, in the order I would do it. Work down it and stop wherever your time runs out, because the top of the list does most of the work.

Do these first, they are most of the result

1. Set the correct primary category. Five minutes. The biggest single ranking lever on your profile.
2. Fill in every service with a description. One afternoon. Most profiles leave this empty.
3. Start asking every customer for a review, with follow-ups. Forever, not for a fortnight. This is the one that compounds.
4. Reply to every review, including the old ones.
5. Hide your address if customers do not visit you, and set a sensible service area. This is also the top suspension risk if you get it wrong.

Then these

1. Add real photos of your work, a few a month.
2. Add secondary categories for everything you genuinely do.
3. Check your hours, including public holidays.
4. Write the business description. 750 characters, in the words customers use.
5. Seed the Q&A section with the questions you answer on the phone every day.
6. Fix your name, address and phone so they are identical everywhere, starting with anywhere showing an old phone number.

Website, once the profile is sorted

1. One page per service, not one page listing all of them.
2. Phone number in the header of every page, tappable.
3. Title tags naming the service and the area.
4. LocalBusiness schema matching your profile exactly.
5. Check it loads fast on mobile data, not wifi.
6. Put your Google reviews on the site.
7. sitemap.xml and robots.txt. Five minutes and plenty of local sites have neither.

Then, if you still have time

• Suburb pages, but only for suburbs you can say something genuine about.
• Local links. The club you sponsor, the supplier that lists installers, local directories.
• Google Posts, once a fortnight.
• Guides answering the questions customers ask, like this one.

Things you can safely ignore

• Citation blast services. Listing you on 300 directories. Mostly dead weight now.
• Geotagging photos. No good evidence, and Google strips the data.
• Keyword stuffing your business name. Small temporary gain, real suspension risk.
• Posting daily. Fortnightly is fine.
• Anyone promising guaranteed first position. Nobody can guarantee that and the ones who say so are usually doing something that gets you suspended.

How to use this

Do the first five. Give it two months. Then check your profile insights and see what moved.

Most businesses never finish the first five, which is exactly why doing them is enough to get ahead.

Rather not do this yourself? Our Google Business Profile management handles the profile, the posts and the reviews every week, for one monthly fee.