Local SEO Audit

Local SEO Audit Guide The Ultimate 6-Step for 2024

Posted on July 5, 2024

Maximize your local search visibility with our Local SEO Audit Guide. Learn to optimize your Google My Business profile, ensure consistent NAP details, gather positive customer reviews, and leverage local keywords. Follow these steps to enhance your local SEO audit and attract more nearby customers.

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How to Conduct a Thorough Local SEO Audit in 2024

A local SEO audit involves identifying issues that hinder your business from achieving top rankings in local search and on Google Maps.

By implementing this audit process, I increased calls for a local business by over 50% compared to the previous year.

Their local organic performance skyrocketed by over 600%, jumping from an average of 15 clicks per day to more than 100 clicks per day.

In this guide, I’ll detail exactly how to conduct a thorough local SEO audit and achieve impressive results like this:

Local SEO Audit Guide

1. Local SEO Audit Fundamentals

The initial step involves assessing the current situation and preparing effectively. I’ll introduce the tools I use and highlight key factors to consider during this evaluation process.

Local SEO Audit Tools

Various tools are available to aid in conducting a local SEO audit. Some are free, while others may require payment.

You don’t have to pay for tools, but investing in them can save you valuable time.

Ultimately, the choice between a paid or free plan for your preferred local SEO tools is yours to make.

What Search Engines Are Important To You

Google is the primary search engine you should prioritize. Additionally, other search engines can also drive significant traffic to your business.

Google Analytics provides insights into the various traffic sources through which customers find your business. Evaluate the traffic volume and explore opportunities, such as registering for Bing’s local search profile, to expand your reach.

Rank Checking

To check your local rankings on Google impartially, consider using an unbiased local search results checker.

That’s because Google employs various personalization filters to display highly relevant but potentially inaccurate search results.

Those unbiased local search results checkers reset Google search results to display them in a less personalized and biased manner.

Search Grid Check

You’ve likely heard the phrase “how can I get to #1 on Google.” However, in local SEO, achieving a straightforward #1 ranking on Google’s local search isn’t so simple.

Your local business may achieve #1 rankings in one area while not appearing in the top 20 in numerous other areas.

As local rankings depend heavily on the distance from the searcher to the business, rankings change when distance changes.

Because no one has the time to check millions of rankings from all possible locations your searching customers could search from, you should use a local search grid checker.

It displays a grid of ranking positions in a determined area that you can use to create before and after comparisons, or simply check out how your business or the businesses you’re taking care of are doing on local search.

Check out my extensive local search grid how-to guide for Brightlocal.

Competitor Analysis

Have you ever heard of the term “reverse engineering”? It describes a process of observing a working strategy and applying it to your own business instead of plain trial and error.

That’s how I conduct competitor analysis with great success. We don’t have to reinvent the wheel. Our best competitors (and greatest nightmares) will tell us exactly what we need.

Semrush’s keyword magic tool can help find the most significant competitors. You can then try to figure out what keywords they’re ranking for and what exactly they do in terms of marketing efforts.

Keyword research is a very broad topic, They could fill books with information about it. I want to give you an overview of 3 of my most commonly used tactics to find local keywords that promise the best results.

Local SEO Bible 2024 Step By Step PDF Free Download

1. Keyword Gap Analysis

You can add competitors’ URLs to the keyword gap tab in Semrush and it will show you the terms your competitors are ranking for, opportunities, and missing keywords. You can then export the list and add it to your keyword spreadsheet.

2. Google's Auto-Suggest

This is a great and easy way for people who don’t want to spend a lot of time and money on keyword research.

You can start by searching for related keywords and Google would give you suggestions based on what you type in.

If that’s not enough, you can type in a specific keyphrase and then add additional letters. Google will then display more suggestions based on the letter you’ve added.

3. Google Ads

The most expensive, but still most accurate way to do keyword research is using Google Ads. You can run a broad match campaign for your main keyword and Google will show you all the related keywords people searching for in your local area (impressions).

Then you can start building a negative keyword list and eliminate the irrelevant keywords.

This way you will narrow down the keywords to figure out which of them get the most clicks, drive most conversions and lead to biggest profits. You can’t get more accurate results than this.

Traffic

Use Google Analytics to figure out where the current traffic is coming from.

A few of the fundamental sources are:

2. Google Business Profile Audit

Auditing the Google Business Profile is certainly one of the most important tasks within a local SEO audit.

Duplicate Google Business Profiles

When you open up a new location on Google Business Profile, Google will usually tell you if there are existing GB Profiles that match your business’ location, parts of the address, phone number, or name.

If Google didn’t tell you anything and you want to be sure there is no duplicate floating around, go to Google and search for your business name, phone number, and address.

If you’ve got a match, try to figure out if the business info you’ve found can be confusing to your customers. If yes, contact Google or mark the business as closed.

Check For Actions Taken Against Your GBP

If Google has taken action against your business profile, you should try to get it unsuspended before you move on with the optimization.

Here’s a quick guide:

Accurate And Complete Information

This is part of my ultimate Google Business Profile checklist. You should check it out if you want to maximize your GBPs’ performance.

1. Does Your Listing Qualify?

https://support.google.com/business/answer/7107242

2. Is The Business Information Verified?

https://support.google.com/business/answer/3038177

3. Choose And Optimize Your Business Name

4. Pick The Best Categories To Describe Your Business

In order to find the best categories for your Google Business Profile, you can use a tool like Pleper. It will show you a bunch of data, including categories of specific GBPs.

6. Pinpoint Your Service Areas

7. Did You Add Business Hours?

8. Did You Add A Phone Number?

9. Include Your Website

10. Add An Appointment URL

11. Add A Business Description

Be sure to include the following information in your business description:

12. Showcase Products And Services

13. Select Highlights And Attributes

14. Fill Out The Menu/Order/Booking Items

15. Take High-Quality Pictures And Videos

Try to cover all areas Google recommends:

16. Enable The Messaging Feature

17. Pay Attention To Reviews

18. Use The Insights Section To Draw Conclusions And Make Improvements

19. Write Posts And Updates

20. Add An Opening Date

21. Use Google's Business Site

In case you’re wondering where you can find this site. I’ve created a complete guide on how to get the Google Business Site back.

22. Make Use Of Justifications

Spam Fighting

Fighting spam can significantly impact your Google Business Profile’s performance on local searches. Here’s what you can do to take advantage of some of the features that allow for removing spam from Maps and local searches:

3. Local SEO Website Audit

A website audit is certainly of the most time-consuming parts of a local SEO audit. You can do that manually by using multiple free tools like Chrome extensions or you use a tool, like Semrush, that saves you time and stress. I’m using Semrush in this local search audit tutorial.

Technical SEO Audit

Run Your Site Through An Audit Tool Like Semrush.

If Semrush shows you a bunch of errors and warnings, it’s time to take action. Follow Semrush’s recommendations until your website is error-free. Be careful, though, only take care of all the warnings if you know what you’re doing. Semrush is only a helping hand, not a clone of an expert you.

Check For Manual Actions On Google Search Console

Google Search Console will show you potential manual actions taken against your website. That is a rare case, but if you’ve violated Google’s webmaster guidelines, GSC will tell you about them.

Fix Sitemap Issues And Check For Further Crawling And Indexation Issues

A sitemap helps Google understand what web pages you’d like it to index and what should be ignored. Never add pages to the sitemap that are meant to be no-index. SEO plugins like RankMath or Yoast create their sitemaps, you only need to submit them to Google Search Console.

You can perform a quick site search yourself to see how many pages are indexed by Google. Use the site operator to see how many pages are indexed on your site.

Identify Technical Problems Such As Broken Links Or Wrong Redirects

Semrush or Screaming Frog can help identify broken links or false redirects. Make sure you remove broken links if the pages they point to don’t exist anymore or redirect them to the correct destinations. Don’t mislead users by redirecting trashed pages to irrelevant pages. It’s ok to have 404 error pages if you don’t have substitutes for them.

Make Sure Your Website Is Mobile-Friendly

Everyone talks about it, everyone knows of its importance, not everyone does it: Optimizing the mobile version of a website. Be sure to eliminate all errors and warnings the mobile-friendly test tells you about.

Your mobile hotspot (above the fold) must be optimized for fast loading, rankings, and conversions. Meaning, that try to keep it simple by using one headline, one claim/sub-headline, and one main call-to-action button.

Remove clutter and secondary CTAs – users want a nice experience, not getting overwhelmed by too many options.

https://search.google.com/test/mobile-friendly

Security

Check Your Site's Page Speed And Performance With Dev.Web

The tool does not only show you performance metrics such as core web vitals like largest contentful paint (LCP), cumulative layout shift (CLS) & first input delay (FID) that can have an impact on your search engine rankings. It also provides information about accessibility, best practices, and SEO.

https://web.dev/measure/

Check If The Site Uses Schema Markup

Schema markup is a specific type of code that translates the page content into understandable information so that a search engine knows what the page is about without needing to guess. You can do a quick schema audit by visiting the rich results tester.

There are many schemas that you can use for a local business website.

Here are some that helped me get great results:

Schema for a local business (organization)
Article & breadcrumb Schema for blog posts
FAQ schema for frequently asked questions on service pages or blog posts
Product Schema including star ratings

Perform An On-Page Audit

Title

Make sure your title tag includes the main keyword. Exact matches at the beginning of the tag work well. Numbers, power words, and information in brackets are a great way to boost the click-through rate. Also, try to experiment with the phrase “near me”. Many big business directories like Yelp are using this with great success.

Meta Description

Include your main keyword, the location or service area and try to be as incentivizing as possible. Make the user excited about the content that awaits him. List the main benefits of your service/product. Get inspired by Google Ads result for same and similar keywords.

URL Structure

Keep the URL keyword-rich but stick to a short structure. Remove all the filler words and avoid deep hierarchies. Keywords in URLs are still a ranking factor. Try to find a balance between keywords and keeping it short.

Above The Fold Optimization

Above-the-fold refers to the part of a web page that is visible to the user when they arrive on the page.

This is my favorite part of on-page optimization as it’s super powerful and seemingly the majority of small businesses are not paying enough attention to it. Try to optimize this part of the page for conversions in the first place.

Don’t focus solely on keywords. All you need is a distraction-free area that tells the user exactly what they should do. For most service pages that are leading him to contact the business immediately, either through phone, contact form, or to book an appointment. What you need is: Headline, sub-headline/claim, call to action button/form.

Internal Linking

Be sure to interlink all relevant pages on your site with each other. Especially linking to pages that have been recently created is something many people forget. That can have a huge impact on your rankings and the overall performance of your site. Additionally, it’s highly underrated, too.

Image Optimization

You want to fill your content with many images. Images are mainly there to grab readers’ attention again and again when scrolling through the page. So make sure they’re loading fast, of high quality, optimized for the search engine (keyword-rich file name & alt-text). You can also geotag those images or add information inside the EXIF data.

Exif data tool: https://www.thexifer.net/

Analyze Search Intent

Satisfying search intent tells Google the search result is congruent to the page’s content. It’s a match. If it’s a great match, Google will benefit you with better search results like rich snippets, people also ask boxes, and a lot more. The title, the meta description, and the URL should give your reader a taste of what they can expect on the page. Make sure they get what you’ve promised.

Semrush uses a great categorization when it comes to search intent.

Categories differentiate in:

Whenever you create a new page, be sure to consider these intents. Service or product pages are mostly a mix of the latter three, while people who simply want to educate themselves have a pure informational intent. You don’t want to mix the first one up with the rest of the intents. Creating a blog post for sales won’t promise you the best results, just like creating a service page is not a great fit to rank for info queries.

High-Quality Content

Is the content you consume high quality? Is it fun to read? Is it exciting to scroll through?

Here’s a list of things you can pay attention to when analyzing the quality of website content:

Duplicate Content Audit

I feel like many people have a different understanding of what duplicate content means to their local SEO campaign. First of all, duplicate content is not penalized by Google. Read that again, there is no penalty for duplicate content. Google doesn’t care whether you copied something or crafted it all by yourself.

All that matters is that Google is likely to show the “better” one of the duplicates to its users on search. And no, Google won’t automatically choose the “first” piece. You can steal your competitors’ content and do a great job on search. (if that’s legal is another story).

When we use search operators to identify duplicate content, it shows us the number of appearances of the specific search phrase across the web. In this example, you can see, there are 81 results for the specific phrase on our test page.

The second screenshot shows that there are 148 results for the chosen phrase off site. So the competition and other sites are using this phrase more often than our local business site. Make sure you test this with popular phrases of your business.

If you realize that some pages have interrupted search impressions on Google Search Console, that’s often a sign that your pages are affected by duplicate content problems. Google only wants to show the best result to its users, not the second-best. Check your pages and see if you can make them more unique. Target one keyword and its synonyms per page and you’ll do just fine.

Content Audit

A content audit is a kind of like taking inventory of your existing content while matching them with your goals. This content audit will help you identify content-related issues so that you can turn your website into an amazing experience for your potential customers.

General Homepage Considerations

A local business homepage is supposed to either rank for

An example for 1. would be “United Heating & Cooling Company” – which contains the primary keyword “heating & cooling”. In this case, it’s better to make the homepage the main service page that targets “plumbing”, “plumber in city”, “plumbing company” etc.

If you’re thinking about a relaunch and the business has multiple locations, don’t use a specific location on the homepage that you use somewhere else – that might confuse Google.

Goal: More leads/sales from customers that search for the service AND the brand name.

An example for number two would be “manningmechanical.com” with the title: “Manning Mechanical”.

It’s a HVAC contractor but it doesn’t explicitly say that. Here it can make sense to create an additional service page about HVAC that targets the main service and leave the homepage with their brand name “Manning Mechanical”.

You can also make it about the main service – it depends a bit on the rest of the website structure. The topic is certainly very complex, I just want you to show some ways to approach the problem.

Goal: Sales from customers that explicitly searched for the business (direct search) and inform potential customers about business reputation, services, background info.

Homepage Content

Nothing is set in stone. If you think, certain sections aren’t a good fit for your specific case, that’s ok, just leave them.

Service/Product Pages

Blog

Service Area/Location Pages

Contact Us

Does the “Contact Us” page provide all relevant ways to contact the business?

About Us

What is the one thing that many people do when they check out a website? They check the “About Us” section.

A story combined with authentic pictures (no stock images) can make a huge difference. I can speak for myself, many times I come to a website that I would like to do business with, the first thing I do is check out their “About Us” section. If I can’t figure out who they are and if I can trust them, I’m gone forever.

4. Local Citation Audit

Citations or business info submissions on directories or other sites are a big part of local SEO. To perform an effective local search audit you should pay attention to the following steps:

1. Are Citations Indexed On Google?

To be considered by Google the directory submission pages need to be indexed. Check the image below to see how you can search for your specific citations on certain directories. (site:citation-site.com “brand name”)

However, just because a page is indexed doesn’t necessarily mean Google uses it currently for ranking evaluations. Make sure you can find the respective pages on Google.

2. Is Your Business Listed On All Relevant Directories & Sites?

You will need to find existing citations and opportunities. When building citations, focus on the following categories

Global / high authority sites & directories Facebook, Yelp, Google, Bing, Foursquare

National bbb.org., botw.com, chamberofcommerce.com

Industry-related houzz.com, angieslist.com

Local nycbusinessdirectory.com, ladirectory.com

3. Check If The Business Info Is Consistent Across Those Sites And Fix Errors

Make sure name, address, phone number, website and hours are consistent across all directories. Data inconsistencies can confuse Google. It might be that Google doesn’t recognize specific business listings if the data doesn’t add up.

There are two ways that I recommend:

You can either run a citation tracking campaign with Brightlocal and let them do the job for you. It’s a bit more expensive but also more reliable.

Or you can do this manually and hire someone from Fiverr who checks all different listings. This needs at least some experience with the Fiverr gigs. Not all sellers provide the same quality, and if things with your listings get messed up that can be huge trouble.

5. Local Search Reputation Audit

A positive brand reputation is not only crucial as it works towards a better brand recognition, it is also important as it factors into prominence, one of the big local search ranking factors.

6. Local Off-Page Audit

Off-page activities involve anything that drives awareness and referral traffic from external sources to your site.

Backlink Analysis

A backlink analysis will tell you about the strength of your backlinks and your competition’s. It’s crucial to understand what backlinks can make a difference and which pages have the potential to get improved.

Here are a few tools that you can use to perform a backlink analysis:

I’ve been using Semrush for a while and it does a great job when auditing backlink profiles. What we need first is an overview of our competitors’ backlinks compared to ours.

All you need to do is click on backlink analytics on the left sidebar, choose your project and run a new report.

Semrush is showing your competitors’ backlinks and yours.

It also reveals those pages that have a great potential of getting improved.

What you need to focus on is the number of backlinks, referring domains, the domain rating, backlink types (text, image, form, frame), and link attributes (follow, no-follow, sponsored, UGC).

If you want to maximize your efforts, you can also run a backlink audit on Semrush. It will show you certain backlink toxicity scores and whether you should disavow links or not.

If you’re a beginner, you shouldn’t focus much on the backlink audit tool as disavowing links can do more harm than good if you don’t know exactly what you’re doing.

Most of the time you won’t need to take any action as Google knows quite well how to differentiate between good and bad links and when to penalize a business would be the correct action.

Local Backlink Checklist

When you’re auditing your backlink profile you also want to think about how perfect backlinks for your local business would look like. In order to make it as easy as possible for you to identify good backlinks, I’m going to show you a backlink checklist that you can use for your local business.

Organic rankings factor into local search results as well. Backlinks are still a very powerful way to boost them. Try to keep an eye on your backlink profile and fill it regularly with relevant links.

Social Media

Social media is not a direct ranking factor but it can help you achieve better search results in different ways:

What you can do?

Partner Up

Build relationships with other local businesses and influencers. You can share each others’ audience and maybe get backlinks and brand mentions from them as well.

Is this something the business you’re auditing does?

7 Simple Steps To Audit Your Reviews

1. What Sites List Your Business Reviews?

The easiest way to figure that out is by searching for your brand on your preferred search engines like Google, Bing, or Ecosia. The citation audit will also tell you about the most prominent sites that list your business info.

2. Have All Reviews Been Replied To?

That includes all the sites you’ve just found that list reviews for your business.

3. What About The Quality Of The Replies?

This is what they should be:

Are the reviews random or directly targeted towards a specific service or experience?

4. Is There A Review System In Place That Gets New Reviews On Autopilot?

An automated review system is crucial to get a good stream of incoming reviews. If this is not set up, how does the business receive its reviews?

Since you would need around 30 5-star reviews to make up for one 1-star review, you should get as many great reviews as possible. A system that brings in new reviews on autopilot is a great preventative measure.

5. What Are Other Sites That Mention Your Brand Apart From The Known Ones?

Q&A sites like Quora or online forums like Reddit are often places where customers share their opinion with other interested people. Find other sites that mention your brand.

6. Who Is Talking Negatively About Your Business?

Not only typical review sites or the Google business profile are used to blow off steam. If you want to find negative feedback about you brand, search for “do not purchase from [brand]”, “worst experience [brand]” or “negative reviews [brand]”.

7. Are There Potential Brand Advocates?

Figure out who tags or mentions your business regularly. Maybe there are people or brands with a bigger following that you could cooperate with.

Final Words

Performing a local SEO audit properly can be time-consuming if you want to do it correctly. Not all of the points mentioned in this local search audit are necessary to consider. If you do it for a client, make sure you understand their pain points and align the audit to what they need.

Tell Me What You Think!

Please, leave a comment below and tell me for what you’re going to need this local SEO audit? Maybe you’ve found something that’s missing and you’d like to share it?

Anyway, I’d be happy to hear from you what you think!

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