The Local SEO Checklist, in the Order That Pays

The Two Fields a Local SEO Checklist Has to Start With

Two settings on your Google Business Profile draw the outer boundary of what you can win. Everything below adjusts how well you do inside that boundary, so both get handled before you touch a photo.

1. Read your primary category out loud and ask whether a customer would say it. Owners pick the category that describes the company. Customers type the words for the job, and the two rarely match.
2. Search your own trade plus your town from a private window. Each of the three businesses in the map block shows a short label under its name. That's its primary category.
3. Change the primary if all three hold a category you skipped. Make that one change, then leave the field alone for a few weeks so you can tell what it did on its own.
4. Draw the service areas by name. List every town your crew actually drives to. A town left off is a town your listing works from a standing start in.

Give this forty minutes. Both fields usually sit exactly as they were the day the profile was claimed.

Fill In the Rest of the Profile While You're Already There

You're logged in, so keep going. Each of these takes a minute or two, and a half-finished profile reads to a customer as a business that might have closed.

• Business name. Match what's on the sign, the truck, and the paperwork. Nothing appended.
• Hours, plus the holiday hours. A locked door on a listing that says open costs you the customer and the review.
• One phone number, the one somebody picks up. The second line comes out of every field it's in.
• Website link pointed at the page matching the listing, usually the town page for a multi-town business.
• Services, entered one at a time. Customers search for a single job, and a summary of everything you do sits outside those searches.
• Description in customer words, covering what you do, where, and what somebody should call about.
• Photographs of your own work. Crew, equipment, shop, finished jobs. Ten real ones beat forty stock images.
• Two short updates about work you finished this month.
• The questions section, seeded with the question you answer daily. Any Google user can post there, so leaving it empty hands the first answer to a stranger.

Ask for One Review Before the Afternoon Ends

Reviews carry real weight in the map block, and how lately they arrived counts alongside the star average. This part costs nothing but nerve.

1. Copy the short review link out of your profile and save it in your phone. Asking gets easier once the link is one tap away.
2. Text it to the last three customers you finished for. Say what you did for them, then ask.
3. Pick your ask moment and keep it. The best one is whenever the customer is looking at the result and saying thank you: the cleared yard, the finished room, the water running hot again.
4. Reply to every review you already have, the old ones and the sour ones included. The next person shopping you reads that reply, and it's the only word you get.

Two things to stay away from. Buying reviews puts the whole listing at risk, and filtering so only happy customers get the link breaks Google's rules even when every review is real.

Make Your Name, Address, and Phone Agree Everywhere It Appears

Google reconciles your listing against a long tail of other records, and disagreement between them reads as an unsettled business. Fixing it is tedious, quiet, and free.

Treat the profile as the master copy. Write the business name, the address format, and the phone number down in one exact form, then make the rest of the world match it.

• Your own website footer first, since that's the record Google trusts most next to the profile itself.
• Apple Maps, Bing Places, and Facebook, the three most people forget they ever filled out.
• The trade and community records: the chamber directory, your supplier's dealer locator, the association pages, a sponsor list.
• Anything carrying a retired phone number or a pre-rebrand name, since those records keep pulling a duplicate listing back into existence.

Work down the list once and it becomes a yearly spot check. When a wrong record turns out to be a whole second listing, the fix is a merge, and merging duplicate profiles walks that path start to finish.

Read Your Own Website the Way a Customer Meets It

Open the site on your own phone, on cell data, from the parking lot. That's how most of your visitors arrive, and it surfaces problems a desktop review hides.

• Time the load. If you have time to look up before the page paints, it's too slow.
• Find the phone number without scrolling. Tappable, in the top band of the screen.
• Count your service pages. One page listing nine services competes weakly for all nine. Nine pages compete properly.
• Count your town pages. Six towns worked from one contact page reaches about as far as your own address does.
• Read the browser tab text on your three most important pages. The service and the town belong in there, in words a person would say.
• Check that the headlines are real text. A headline baked into an image is invisible to a search engine and to a screen reader.
• Connect Google Search Console. It's the only place you can read the searches your pages are turning up on.

Build the Pages Your Profile Can Point At

Honesty beats momentum here. This part takes weeks, and it's the half that raises the ceiling the profile keeps running into.

• A page per service you sell, written for somebody who needs that one job today.
• A page per town you work, with the town in the page title and details that apply to that town alone. Generic pages with a name swapped in fool nobody and rank accordingly.
• The questions customers ask before booking. What it runs, how long it takes, whether you pull the permit. Every one is a search somebody ran this week.
• Photo galleries with real captions, naming the job and the town.
• Local links you can earn. A chamber listing, a supplier page, a sponsorship, a story in the county paper. Slow, and worth more than anything for sale.

Build for the services that pay best in the towns you already reach, then extend outward. Where a profile gets its words covers why the pages and the listing need to name the same things.

Write Down Where You Rank in Every Town You Work

An unmeasured checklist is a to-do list. Measuring turns the work into something you can hold next month against.

Pick four or five searches a customer would actually run, the kind pairing a service with a town. Run each one, note whether your listing shows in the map block and where, then note where the website lands underneath. Do that from each town you serve, or with the search location set to that town. Date it and keep it where you'll find it. That's your baseline.

Rerun it monthly. Positions drift on their own, so what you're watching for is a direction that holds across a few months.

This is also where most owners hand the work off, because the measuring, the review asking, and the page building all keep coming back. Published rates for single-town map pack work run $300 to $1,500+ a month, and local SEO pricing covers what changes as towns get added. If you want to see what a worked list looks like a year in, the positions we hold for client accounts are published anonymously, town by town, on our results page.