The local SEO audit I run before touching anything else

Every few months a client sends me a screenshot of their Google Business Profile and asks why they’re invisible in the map pack while a competitor with worse reviews sits at number one. The answer is almost never a single missing keyword. It’s usually four or five small consistency problems stacked on top of each other.

Here’s the audit I run before I touch anything else.

1. Check the primary category before anything else

Your primary category is the single highest-leverage field in the whole profile, and it’s the one most businesses get lazily wrong. A “dentist” and a “cosmetic dentist” compete in different pools. Pick the category that matches the query you actually want to win, then add secondary categories for everything else you legitimately do.

Look at the top three ranking competitors for your target query and check which primary category they use. If all three share one and you’re using something different, that gap alone can explain the ranking.

2. Make NAP boringly identical everywhere

Name, address, phone. Google cross-references these across directories, and small variations — “Suite 4” versus “#4”, a tracking phone number on the website that doesn’t match the profile — quietly erode confidence in the listing.

Pick one canonical format. Write it in a document. Use that exact string on the website footer, the contact page, the profile, and every directory you can find.

3. Give the profile something to index

An empty profile ranks like an empty profile. The fields that consistently earn their keep:

• Services — list them individually with real descriptions, not a single catch-all entry.
• Products — even for service businesses, these render as cards and take up search real estate.
• Photos — geotagged, recent, and showing the actual premises and staff rather than stock imagery.
• Q&A — seed it yourself with the questions you already answer on the phone ten times a week.

4. Build a review habit, not a review campaign

Twenty reviews earned steadily over six months beats forty that arrive in one suspicious burst. What moves rankings is velocity and recency, not just total count.

Attach the ask to a moment that already exists in your process — invoice sent, job completed, order delivered — so nobody has to remember to do it. And reply to every review, including the good ones. Responses are indexed text, and they signal an actively managed listing.

5. Build the landing page the profile points at

Most profiles link to the homepage. If you serve several neighbourhoods or offer several distinct services, that’s a wasted signal. Point each profile at a page that names the location and service in the title, the H1 and the body copy, and that carries embedded map and LocalBusiness structured data.

What to expect

Category and NAP fixes can move things within two or three weeks. Review velocity and landing page work take a quarter to show up properly. Neither is glamorous, and both outperform almost anything else you could do with the same hours.