What a Local SEO Audit Actually Checks

Most businesses who ask me for an audit have had one before. Usually it was a PDF with a traffic light chart, a score out of 100, and a recommendation to book a call. That is a sales document, not an audit.

A real local SEO audit answers one question: why is a specific competitor ranking above you for a specific search. Everything below feeds into that answer.

The Google Business Profile checks

This is where most local ranking problems live, and it is the fastest part to fix.

The primary category is the single most common failure. Google weighs it heavily, and businesses routinely pick something broader than what they do. A hair salon set to Beauty Salon, a roofing contractor set to Contractor, a personal injury firm set to Law Firm. Each of those is competing in a larger pool than it needs to be.

After that, the audit should check: whether secondary categories are set at all, whether services are listed with real descriptions rather than left empty, whether the business hours are accurate including holiday hours, whether there is a booking or appointment link, how complete the profile is as a percentage, and whether the description uses the words customers actually search.

It should also check what your competitors have set, because the category that wins is a relative question, not an absolute one.

The citation checks

A citation is any place on the web that lists your business name, address and phone number. Google cross-checks these to decide how confident it is that your business is real and that its details are correct.

The audit should count how many directories list you, and more importantly how many list you inconsistently. Suite 200 on one and Ste 200 on another is an inconsistency. A phone number from before you switched providers is an inconsistency. An old address from a previous office is the worst kind, because it actively contradicts your profile.

The roofing contractor I worked with in San Jose had 31 inconsistencies across 23 directories. He had no idea. Nobody does, because there is no reason to go looking.

One thing worth knowing: the directories that matter differ by country. UK businesses need Yell, Thomson Local, FreeIndex and the relevant trade bodies. An audit that checks a US directory list against a UK business is checking nothing useful.

The on-page checks

This is standard SEO, applied to local intent.

• Does each page have one H1, and does it contain the phrase that page is meant to rank for
• Are title tags under about 60 characters and unique across the site
• Does every page have a meta description, and is it written rather than auto-generated from whatever text the page starts with
• Is there a page for each service you want more of, or one page listing them all in a bulleted block
• Is the business name, address and phone number on the site, in text, matching the profile exactly
• Is LocalBusiness or Service schema present, and does it match what is visible on the page

That last one catches people out. Schema that claims things the page does not show is worse than no schema at all.

The technical checks

Less glamorous, and usually less broken than people expect on a modern site. The audit should still confirm the basics: that pages return 200 rather than redirecting through two hops, that the sitemap exists and lists the pages you actually want indexed, that robots.txt is not blocking something important, that canonical tags point where they should, and that the site loads in a reasonable time on a phone on mobile data rather than on a laptop on fibre.

It should also check whether AI crawlers are allowed. A lot of sites block GPTBot, ClaudeBot and PerplexityBot by accident through a default plugin setting, and then wonder why they never appear in AI answers.

The competitor checks

An audit that only looks at your business is half an audit. Ranking is relative.

For the three businesses currently above you in the map pack, the audit should record: their primary category, their review count and how recently those reviews arrived, whether the owner replies to reviews, how complete their profile is, and how far they are from the centre of the search area.

That last figure explains a lot of apparently unfair results. Proximity is a real ranking factor and you cannot change your address. Knowing that a competitor is winning on distance rather than quality saves you from spending months trying to out-optimise something that was never the problem.

What an audit cannot tell you

It cannot promise a position. Anyone who puts a guaranteed ranking in an audit is selling, not diagnosing.

It cannot tell you exactly how long the fixes will take, because that depends on how competitive your category is locally and how much work your competitors continue to do. A realistic audit gives you a range and says what it depends on.

It cannot see your conversion rate. Ranking first and converting nobody is a different problem, and an SEO audit will not find it.

What to do with the findings

Work in this order, because it is the order Google weighs things.

• Fix the primary category first. It is one click and it can move you the same day.
• List your services on the profile with descriptions. Twenty minutes, and almost nobody does it.
• Add a booking or contact link to the profile.
• Clean the citation inconsistencies, starting with any that contradict your address.
• Then, and only then, start on content and links.

The first three cost nothing and take under an hour combined. If an audit recommends a content retainer before it recommends fixing your category, read it again.

How much a local SEO audit should cost

Mine is free and you get the written findings whether or not you work with me, because everything in it is publicly visible information that I gathered and organised. There is no reason to charge for that.

Paid audits in the market run from about 300 to 1,500 dollars. What you should expect at that price is a document naming your specific competitors, your specific inconsistencies and a specific order of work. What you often get is a generic checklist with your domain name at the top.

Either way, the test is the same: does the audit tell you why a named competitor is above you for a named search. If it does not, it has not audited anything.