Quick answer: A local SEO audit is a structured check of everything that decides whether nearby customers find you on Google: your Business Profile, reviews, directory listings, website and tracking. Below is the 20-point checklist we use on real client audits - work through it in a couple of hours, or score yourself in two minutes.
Checked July 2026 against Google's own documentation, CMA guidance and the sources at the end of this guide.
In this guide:
- All 20 checks, graded Critical, Important or Advanced, with how to run each in two minutes.
- An on-page scorecard that turns your ticks into a score and a fix-first list. No sign-up.
- What free audit tools can and can't tell you, and when the £397 done-for-you audit earns its fee.
Written for UK business owners and managers who want to know why the phone isn't ringing from Google - no SEO background needed.
Search for a local SEO checklist and you'll find two kinds of page: American mega-lists with up to 191 steps that arrive by email after you hand over your address, and sixty-second "free audit" tools that score whatever a crawler can see and then book you onto a sales call.
Neither tells you the thing you actually want to know: is my local presence healthy, and if not, what do I fix first?
So here's the third kind of page. These 20 checks cover the same ground a senior specialist works through in our £397 local SEO audit - your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your citations, your website and your measurement. They're written so you can run every one yourself, free, this afternoon.
And unlike every list we could find, each check carries a severity grade, so a failed check tells you how much to care.
Work through the lot, or tick your way down the scorecard and let it order your gaps for you.
The 20 points at a glance
Here's the whole audit on one screen. Every check is explained in full further down - the numbers link straight to the detail - and each carries a severity grade. Critical is fix-this-week territory: a failure there suppresses everything else. Important is fix-this-month: the leaks that quietly cost visibility. Advanced is the compounding work that comes after the foundations - later in the queue, not lower in impact.
| # | The check | Severity |
|---|---|---|
| Pillar 1 - Google Business Profile | ||
| 1 | Claimed, verified and only one of you | Critical |
| 2 | Categories right and specific | Important |
| 3 | Every field complete and current | Critical |
| 4 | Alive, not just listed | Important |
| Pillar 2 - Reviews & reputation | ||
| 5 | Volume and rating vs your real competitors | Important |
| 6 | Velocity and recency | Important |
| 7 | Response rate and quality | Critical |
| 8 | A legal, working review pipeline | Critical |
| Pillar 3 - Citations & directories | ||
| 9 | The UK core set exists | Important |
| 10 | NAP consistency, exact-match everywhere | Critical |
| 11 | Duplicates and zombies cleaned up | Important |
| 12 | Sector and local directories that matter | Advanced |
| Pillar 4 - Website & technical | ||
| 13 | Location signals on the site | Important |
| 14 | LocalBusiness schema | Advanced |
| 15 | Mobile experience and speed | Critical |
| 16 | Crawl, index and on-page health | Important |
| Pillar 5 - Content, links & measurement | ||
| 17 | Where you actually rank | Important |
| 18 | Content that answers local demand | Important |
| 19 | Local links and mentions | Advanced |
| 20 | Measurement and AI visibility | Advanced |
What is a local SEO audit?
A local SEO audit is a systematic health check of your visibility in local search results - the map pack, the localised organic results underneath it and, increasingly, the AI answers above both. It finds what's broken, what's missing and what to fix first.
Google is open about how local ranking works: results are ordered on relevance (how well you match what was searched), distance (how far you are from the searcher) and prominence (how well known and well reviewed you are). You can't move your premises, but almost everything else on those three dials is auditable - and most of it is under your control.
Why bother, if things seem fine? Because local SEO decays quietly. Hours change and one directory keeps the old ones. A public "suggest an edit" alters your categories without telling you. Reviews dry up for a quarter. A competitor opens two streets away and starts collecting five-star reviews weekly. None of these announces itself - your phone just rings a little less. An audit is how you notice while the fix is still cheap.
On cost: most agencies treat the audit as a way to open a sales conversation, so almost nobody publishes a price. Ours is £397 with a 90-day roadmap included - and the checklist below is the DIY version of the same ground, free. For the wider picture of what local SEO costs month to month, our UK SEO pricing guide covers the market rates.
Before you start: what you need
15 minutes of gathering saves an hour of hunting. Five things:
- Access to your Google Business Profile. Log in at business.google.com and check you're an owner or manager, not a viewer - and that access doesn't live solely with an ex-employee or an old agency.
- Google Search Console. Free, and the source of truth for how Google sees your website. If it's not set up, that's finding number one.
- Your master NAP record. Write down your exact business name, address and phone number, character for character, as they should appear everywhere. Every consistency check below compares against this.
- An incognito browser window. Your normal browser knows who you are and where you've been, and personalises what it shows you. Audit logged out.
- Your top three search phrases. The service-plus-place searches that should bring you customers: "emergency plumber exeter", "accountant taunton", "dog groomer near me". You'll test these repeatedly.
One rule before you begin: if you can't verify a check, count it as a gap. "I think the old agency set that up" is not a pass. The whole value of an audit is replacing assumptions with evidence.
The scorecard: rate your local SEO in two minutes
Tick each check you know is in place and healthy. The scorecard grades your presence, names your weakest pillar and orders your gaps so the critical ones surface first. It runs entirely on this page: no sign-up, no email address, nothing sent to your inbox - which, having surveyed what else ranks for this search, makes it rarer than it should be.
Local SEO audit scorecard
Your local SEO health
Tick what you have to see your score
Most businesses we audit pass the basics and fail the same handful of checks: review responses, NAP consistency and anything under the bonnet of the website. The severity grades below tell you which failures matter most.
Your gaps, worst first:
20 out of 20 - genuinely rare. The job now is keeping it that way: reviews weekly, profile edits monthly, the full audit twice a year. If you'd rather someone else kept it that way, that's precisely what a monthly local SEO plan is for.
The done-for-you version
£397 audit + 90-day roadmap
A senior specialist runs these checks on your business - plus the competitor benchmarking no checklist can - and writes your 90-day plan.
How we worked this out
The 20 checks are the same areas a senior specialist works through in our £397 local SEO audit, written up so you can run them yourself. The severity grades are editorial judgement from running these audits, sanity-checked against Google's documentation and the industry ranking-factor surveys in the sources: Critical means a failure suppresses everything else, Advanced means it compounds a healthy presence.
The score is a simple count of your ticks - it's a prioritisation aid, not a scored risk model. The prices are our actual published prices, ex VAT, the same ones on our local SEO page, where both the audit and the plan can be bought online.
The interactive scorecard didn't load, but you don't need it: every check is written out in full below - work down the list and let the severity grades set your order.
Pillar 1: your Google Business Profile (points 1-4)
Your Google Business Profile is the listing that appears in the map pack and on the right of brand searches - and for most local businesses it gets seen far more than the website does. Profile signals are the single biggest block of map-pack ranking factors in the industry's 2026 survey, and the profile is the main thing Google's AI answers quote when someone asks for a recommendation. Four checks.
1. Claimed, verified and only one of you Critical
Unclaimed means anyone can suggest edits and nobody is steering. Unverified means your changes may not show. And duplicates - an old listing from a previous address, a second profile a well-meaning employee created - split your reviews between listings and feed customers stale details.
How to check (2 minutes): search your exact business name in Google and Google Maps. Confirm you can edit the profile from business.google.com with an account you control. Search your old addresses and phone numbers too - duplicates hide there.
Pass looks like: one verified profile (Google's guidelines allow exactly one per business), owner access in your own Google account, no "Claim this business" link and no reappeared "Get verified" button - Google's help pages say that button coming back means it couldn't completely verify you. If you see a suspension notice, stop the audit and deal with that first - nothing else matters until it's resolved.
2. Categories right and specific Important
The primary category is the strongest single signal you control on the profile: it decides which searches you're even eligible for. "Plumber" and "heating contractor" surface for different searches, and the generic pick loses to the specific one.
How to check (2 minutes): open your profile's edit view and read your primary category, then your additional categories. Now search your top three phrases in an incognito window and note the categories the top-three map results use (shown on their profiles).
Pass looks like: your primary category is the most specific one that describes the work you most want, and your additional categories cover real secondary services - Google's own instruction is to choose the fewest categories it takes to describe your core business, not the most. If the businesses beating you all share a primary category you don't have, you've probably found a finding.
3. Every field complete and current Critical
Completeness is compound interest: Google's own guidance is that complete, accurate profiles are easier to match to searches and rank accordingly.
Wrong information is worse than missing information - customers who arrive at a shut door don't come back, and BrightLocal's Local Business Discovery and Trust research (2023) put the share who'd simply avoid a business over incorrect listing details at 62%.
How to check (2 minutes): read your live profile as a customer. NAP against your master record. Opening hours - including the holiday hours Google prompts for; practitioners tracking the 2026 ranking survey singled hours out as one of the year's movers. Description, services, attributes, website link, booking link if you take bookings.
Pass looks like: nothing blank, nothing stale, hours true for the current season - and the business name field carrying your real-world name only. An honest aside: the 2026 ranking survey finds keyword-stuffed business names still move map-pack rankings, and Google's guidelines still ban them. Stuffing works until a competitor reports it or Google suspends the profile - the audit pass is the name on your signage, nothing more.
4. Alive, not just listed Important
A profile last touched in 2024 reads as a business that might not answer the phone. Activity signals - fresh photos, posts, answered questions - tell Google and customers someone's home.
How to check (2 minutes): look at your photos tab: when was your last upload, and do customer-added photos embarrass you? Check your posts. Open the Q&A section - are there unanswered questions from strangers?
Pass looks like: owner photos within the last quarter (real work, real premises, real people), a post cadence of roughly monthly, no unanswered questions and the performance stats glanced at often enough that a sudden drop would be noticed. One currency note: don't build your process on features Google has removed - profile chat and call history went in July 2024, and the free profile-made websites went the same year. Posts and Q&A remain live at the time of writing. This is the easiest check of the twenty to fix: 10 minutes a month of housekeeping.
If several of these fail and you've never set the profile up properly, don't re-invent it from this audit - our local SEO guide for small businesses walks through the full setup step by step. Come back and re-score when it's done.
Pillar 2: reviews & reputation (points 5-8)
Reviews are prominence you can't fake - legally, at least, and since April 2025 the "at least" has teeth. They're the fastest-rising block of map-pack ranking signals (20% in the 2026 industry survey, up from 16% in 2023), they move customers and they're the part of this audit where most businesses find their biggest gap.
5. Volume and rating vs your real competitors Important
Your review count means nothing in isolation - 40 reviews is dominant in a market where rivals have a dozen and weak where they have 300. Google's guidance names review count and score among the factors in local ranking, and customers compare before they call.
How to check (2 minutes): search your top phrase in incognito and note the count and star rating of every business in the map pack. Put yours beside them.
Pass looks like: you're in the same league as the pack on count and within touching distance on rating. If you're miles behind, points 7 and 8 are where the fix lives - not in buying your way level, which is now a fast route to a fine.
6. Velocity and recency Important
A 4.8 built entirely in 2023 with silence since reads - to customers and to ranking systems - as a business in decline. Steady beats spectacular: a review or two a month, every month, outperforms a burst after a push and then nothing.
How to check (2 minutes): sort your reviews by newest. When was the last one? Scroll the dates - are there dead months? Any suspicious clumps (five reviews in one week from accounts with no other activity looks like exactly what it is)?
Pass looks like: recent reviews in the last month, no long gaps and organic-looking spacing. A sudden drop in count is also a finding - Google removes reviews it deems policy-breaking, sometimes wrongly, and drops are worth investigating rather than shrugging at.
7. Response rate and quality Critical
Responses are the most under-priced asset in local SEO: free, entirely under your control and read by every future customer sizing you up. Google encourages responding as part of managing your presence - and an ignored one-star review, visible for years, answers a question no customer asked out loud: "what happens if something goes wrong?"
How to check (2 minutes): count your last ten reviews. How many have replies? Read your replies to any negative reviews as a stranger would.
Pass looks like: every review answered within days - positives with specifics rather than a pasted thank-you (Google's own reply guidance: personal, prompt, professional and conversational, never promotional), negatives calmly, factually and without relitigating the job in public. Replies feed the AI layer too - review signals are the second-biggest factor group for AI-search visibility in the 2026 survey. If your response rate is under half, this is the highest-return fix in the entire audit.
8. A legal, working review pipeline Critical
Reviews don't accumulate by themselves - happy customers forget, unhappy ones don't. You need a working way of asking. You also need a legal one: since 6th April 2025 the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act (the DMCC) bans fake reviews and buying, incentivising or concealing paid-for reviews outright, with Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) fines of up to the higher of £300,000 or 10% of worldwide turnover.
Review gating - selectively steering happy customers to Google while diverting unhappy ones - breaches both the law's misleading-publication rules and Google's own review policies, which prohibit selectively soliciting positive reviews in so many words.
This stopped being theoretical in March 2026, when the CMA opened investigations into five named businesses over how reviews are gathered and displayed - one of them for allegedly offering discounts on future orders in exchange for five-star reviews without disclosing it. That's not an exotic scam; it's the sort of scheme a well-meaning manager invents on a quiet Tuesday. Asking real customers for honest reviews, with no incentive attached, remains completely legal - and is all this check needs.
How to check (2 minutes): can you say, specifically, how a customer gets asked for a review - a link in the final invoice, a QR card on the counter, a follow-up text? Is anyone paid, discounted or gifted for reviewing? Are only happy customers asked?
Pass looks like: a named, routine ask process (the direct review link from your profile makes this a 10-minute setup), asked of every customer, incentivising nobody. That's both compliant and - conveniently - the thing that actually fixes points 5 and 6.
Reviews are usually where the audit gets uncomfortable
If points 5 to 8 came back red, you're not unusual - reputation is the pillar we most often find neglected, and the one that moves rankings and customers fastest when fixed. Our £500/month Local plan builds the compliant review process, the responses and the profile housekeeping into a monthly rhythm - or the £397 audit gives you the full prioritised picture first.
Pillar 3: citations & directories (points 9-12)
A citation is any place your business name, address and phone number appear online. Honest audits admit their direct ranking weight has fallen to the bottom third of the map-pack factors - but 2026 gave citations a second life: in the industry survey's new AI-visibility category they're joint-third, because language models cross-reference the wider web before recommending anyone. Wrong details anywhere now cost you twice.
9. The UK core set exists Important
Beyond Google there's a short list of places a UK business should simply exist: Bing Places (Microsoft relaunched the portal in late 2025, and it's what ChatGPT's live lookups lean on), Apple Business - formerly Apple Business Connect, renamed when Apple merged its business tools in April 2026 - for Apple Maps and Siri, Yell's free listing and your Facebook page. Not because each drives floods of traffic - because absence anywhere your customers and their AI assistants look is a soft leak.
How to check (2 minutes): search your business name on Bing Maps, Apple Maps and Yell. Claimed? Yours? Details right?
Pass looks like: a claimed, accurate listing on each of the core set. Bing's relaunched portal imports your Google profile - faster and more faithful than the old flow, per Microsoft's own announcement - which makes that one a 10-minute job. On Yell: the free listing is worth having for the citation; treat its paid products as a separate commercial decision entirely.
10. NAP consistency, exact-match everywhere Critical
NAP is name, address, phone. Consistency means character-for-character agreement with your master record, everywhere: "St" against "Street" counts, as does the old landline on a directory you forgot exists.
Why it's graded Critical, in honest order: wrong details actively lose customers who ring a dead number or drive to an old address; AI assistants cross-reference sources and quietly drop businesses whose details disagree; and there's still a modest - and declining - direct ranking contribution. The first two are the ones that should worry you.
How to check (2 minutes to start): search "your business name + your town" and open every listing on page one. Compare each against your master NAP record. Then search your old phone number and address - that's where the skeletons live.
Pass looks like: exact agreement everywhere that matters, and a short to-fix list for everywhere that doesn't. This is tedious rather than difficult - which is exactly why it's so commonly failed.
11. Duplicates and zombies cleaned up Important
Businesses accumulate listings the way lofts accumulate boxes: a directory signup from 2019, a listing at the old premises, a profile a former marketing agency created and took the login with them. Each zombie splits reviews, leaks wrong details and occasionally outranks the real thing. The UK directory layer is genuinely littered with them - one 2026 spot-check found 29% of sampled UK directory listings failing a basic Companies House check: dissolved, renamed or never-registered businesses still listed as live.
How to check (2 minutes): the searches from point 10 will have surfaced most of them. For each: is it yours, is it current, can you edit it?
Pass looks like: one listing per platform, each one yours. Duplicates merged or removed (directories have processes for this; Google's is in the profile help), and logins recovered or listings re-claimed where an old agency holds the keys.
12. Sector and local directories that matter Advanced
Past the core set, chase relevance rather than volume: the platforms your actual customers check. For trades that might be Checkatrade or similar vetting platforms; for hospitality, TripAdvisor; for professional services, your professional body's register. Add your Chamber of Commerce and any genuinely local directory people in your area use.
How to check (2 minutes): ask where your last five customers found you, and search your trade + your town - which directories rank on that page? Are you on them, and are the details right?
Pass looks like: present and accurate on the handful that matter for your sector and area, absent from nothing your competitors all share. Fifty half-dead directory listings help nobody; this is a quality check, not a quantity drive.
Pillar 4: website & technical (points 13-16)
The profile gets you into the map; the website converts the click and carries the localised organic rankings underneath it. These four checks are about whether your site helps or quietly hinders.
13. Location signals on the site Important
Google reads your website to understand your profile - its guidance on relevance is, in essence, "say what you do and where, plainly". A surprising number of local sites never quite say either.
How to check (2 minutes): is your full NAP in the footer or on a contact page, matching your master record? Is there an embedded map? Does each key service area you serve have a genuine page - unique content, real local detail - rather than a find-and-replace of the town name?
Pass looks like: NAP on-site and exact, a contact page a human would trust and an area page only where you can say something true and specific about working there. 20 templated town pages is doorway-page territory under Google's spam policies - fewer, better pages win.
14. LocalBusiness schema Advanced
Schema is machine-readable labelling that removes ambiguity: this is a business, of this type, at this address, with these hours. It won't rescue a weak site, but it sharpens a good one - and unambiguous data is exactly what search engines and AI assistants prefer to cite.
How to check (2 minutes): run your homepage through Google's Rich Results Test or the schema.org validator. Is LocalBusiness (or your specific subtype - Plumber, Dentist, Restaurant) present and error-free?
Pass looks like: valid LocalBusiness markup with the right subtype, NAP matching your master record exactly, no errors - and no self-serving review stars. That last one trips plenty of SMEs: Google's guidelines make pages that mark up reviews the business controls (including embedded Google or Facebook review widgets) ineligible for star snippets, and some SEO plugins switch exactly that on by default. If your site runs on WordPress, the audit is checking the markup is on, right and not breaking that rule.
15. Mobile experience and speed Critical
A local search is usually a phone in a hand, often at the moment of need. A site that takes six seconds to load, or whose phone number isn't tappable, loses the customer the map just handed you.
Google no longer treats mobile as optional, either: it finished the move to mobile-first indexing with a plain warning that content not accessible on a mobile device will no longer be indexable at all.
How to check (2 minutes): open your site on your own phone, on mobile data. Time it honestly. Tap the phone number - does it dial? Then run PageSpeed Insights for the measured version, and note the Core Web Vitals verdict.
Pass looks like: loads fast on 4G, readable without zooming, tap-to-call works, forms usable with thumbs and Core Web Vitals passing. If PageSpeed's diagnosis reads like another language, that's a job for whoever built the site - our technical SEO guide explains what the fixes involve.
16. Crawl, index and on-page health Important
A page Google can't crawl, or has quietly deindexed, can't rank at any quality. Search Console tells you the truth here, which is why it was on the gather list.
How to check (2 minutes): in Search Console: any manual actions? Any security issues? In the page indexing report, are your money pages indexed? Then spot-check on-page basics: do your key pages put the service and the place in the title tag and main heading, and is the site on HTTPS throughout?
Pass looks like: no manual actions, key pages indexed, titles that say "Emergency Plumber in Exeter | Yourname" rather than "Home" and internal links that connect your area pages to your service pages. Nothing exotic - just nothing broken.
Pillar 5: content, links & measurement (points 17-20)
The final pillar is where a functioning presence becomes a compounding one: knowing where you stand, publishing what local customers actually ask, earning mentions - and checking the new front door, AI answers.
17. Where you actually rank Important
Most owners "check their rankings" by searching from their own logged-in browser, at their premises - which shows a personalised, location-flattered picture. The audit needs the clean one.
How to check (2 minutes): incognito window, your top three phrases: note your map pack position and your organic position for each. Search Console's performance report then shows the queries you rank for that you'd never have guessed. (Serious multi-area tracking uses grid tools - Whitespark's ranking grids and Local Falcon are the known names - but incognito spot-checks are enough for a first audit. AI answers, note, vary per user; treat any single AI check as a sample, not a position.)
Pass looks like: you know your positions, this week, for the phrases that pay - and you've spotted the quick wins: phrases ranking 4th to 10th, where the distance to the visible top three is one focused fix rather than a campaign.
18. Content that answers local demand Important
Localised organic results rank pages, and pages need something to say. The businesses that win the space under the map pack are the ones whose sites answer the questions customers actually type: prices, timescales, "do you cover X", "emergency Y".
How to check (2 minutes): list the five questions customers ask you every week. Does your site answer each, findably? Do your service pages say what the service costs, roughly, and where you do it?
Pass looks like: a page or section per real question, written plainly, with the place names you serve appearing naturally. This is also precisely the material AI assistants quote - which makes point 20 easier.
19. Local links and mentions Advanced
Be clear about the weight here: Google's own definition of prominence names links first, and links outrank citations in every category of the 2026 industry survey. This check sits in Advanced because it's the highest-effort item on the list and belongs after the foundations - not because it matters less.
Links and mentions from local news, the Chamber, sponsorships, suppliers and community sites are prominence Google can verify, and unlinked mentions count for AI visibility too - assistants read the local web, not just your site.
How to check (2 minutes): search your business name in quotes, minus your own site. Who mentions you? Anything from local press, associations or organisations you sponsor? Any obviously spammy links you don't recognise?
Pass looks like: a handful of genuine local mentions, growing occasionally - a sponsored junior football kit with a club-site mention does more here than fifty directory submissions. Nothing toxic; no bought links.
20. Measurement and AI visibility Advanced
Without a baseline you can't tell improvement from weather. And in 2026 the baseline includes a new question: when someone asks an AI assistant for a recommendation, do you exist? The demand is real - BrightLocal's 2026 consumer survey (a US panel, but the direction of travel is the point) found 45% of people had asked an AI tool for a local business recommendation in the past year, up from 6% the year before - while a 350,000-location study of large US brands found ChatGPT recommending just 1.2% of their locations. Almost everyone is invisible there. Are you?
How to check (2 minutes): is GA4 (or any analytics) live on the site? Do you glance at your profile's performance stats - views, calls, direction requests, website clicks - monthly? Then run the AI test, logged out: the four prompts in the AI search section below, starting with asking ChatGPT "I need a [trade] in [town] - who would you recommend and why?" and searching Google for "who is a reliable [service] in [town]" to see whether an AI Overview appears and whether you're in it.
Pass looks like: analytics collecting, profile stats glanced at monthly, call volumes roughly attributable - and your business appearing in at least some AI answers for your core service. If it doesn't, the fix is rarely mystical: AI assistants lean on the same profile, reviews and mentions the previous 19 points just audited.
Your score: what to fix first
The scorecard above orders your specific gaps. If you worked through on paper instead, here's the triage - and it isn't "start at point 1 and proceed".
- Critical failures first, in this order: point 1, then 3, then 10, then 15, then 7 and 8. Ownership and accuracy before everything (a suspended or wrong profile suppresses every other fix), then the review engine. These six checks are where a failure actively costs you customers this week.
- Important failures second (points 2, 4, 5, 6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 17, 18). Each is a visibility leak: worth fixing within the month, unlikely to be an emergency on its own.
- Advanced failures last (points 12, 14, 19, 20). These compound a healthy presence. Fixing your schema while your reviews go unanswered is polishing the brass on a leaking boat.
Two findings that shouldn't wait for a to-do list
A suspension notice on your profile, or evidence of a spam attack (rivals' edits, fake negative review waves, a competitor keyword-stuffing their name), are get-help-now findings rather than fix-it-Saturday ones. Both have formal processes, both punish DIY mistakes and both get worse while ignored. That's a "ring someone today" - us or anyone competent - not a checklist item.
Want the prioritised plan done for you?
The £397 audit is these checks run by a senior specialist, plus the competitor benchmarking a checklist can't do, written up as a 90-day roadmap you keep either way - delivered within 10 working days, with £200 credited against your first month if you join the Local plan within 30 days.
What free automated audit tools catch (and what they can't)
Search this topic and you'll trip over "free local SEO audit" tools promising a score in sixty seconds. They're not useless - but it's worth being clear-eyed about what a crawler can and cannot know.
What they genuinely catch: missing profile fields, NAP mismatches across the big directories, listing presence counts, basic site checks (speed, titles, schema present or absent). That's real - it overlaps with points 3, 9, 10 and parts of 13 to 16, and a free scan is a quick way to surface the mechanical gaps.
What no crawler can score: whether your categories match the work you actually want more of. Whether your reviews look genuine, and whether the way you gather them is legal. Whether your service-area pages read as real or templated. Whether your content answers what local customers ask. Whether the businesses beating you are beatable, and on what. Every judgement call in this audit - which is to say, most of the value.
Worth knowing about the business model, too: most of these tools exist to open a sales conversation - several deliver the "free" score by email, cap runs without an account and follow up with a pitch - and even the candid ones state plainly that results don't guarantee anything about rankings. Use them as a starting point by all means. Just don't mistake a completeness scan for an audit.
Local SEO for AI search: the 2026 layer
A growing share of "who should I use?" questions never reach a results page: they're answered by Google's AI Overviews (in the UK since August 2024), AI Mode (here since July 2025), ChatGPT or Copilot. The good news is that AI recommendations aren't a new discipline to master - they're a stress test of the fundamentals this audit just checked.
Google says so itself: its documentation on AI features states there are no additional technical requirements - a page that's indexed and eligible for a normal snippet is eligible for AI answers, and its listed best practices include keeping your Business Profile up to date. The former Google director responsible for Business Profiles has described watching Google's AI features repeat listing content back near-verbatim for local queries. ChatGPT's live lookups run on Bing's index, cross-referencing your website, your profile footprint and review platforms - which is why the Bing Places listing and your Facebook reviews from point 9 quietly matter more than they have in years.
Four test prompts, run logged out (answers vary per user - treat each as a sample, not a ranking):
- ChatGPT, with web search on: "I need an emergency [trade] in [town]. Who would you recommend and why?" - check whether you're named and which sources it leans on.
- Google's AI Mode: "Best [service] near [town] for [a specific need]" - check who's named, and whether your profile's hours, reviews and services are being quoted.
- A normal Google search: "who is a reliable [service] in [town]" - does an AI Overview appear, are you in it and which pages does it cite?
- The reputation probe, any assistant: "Is [your business name] in [town] any good?" - surfaces what the AI believes about you, including stale details and old negative themes.
Absence is a finding, not a verdict: it almost always traces back to the profile, review, consistency or mention gaps the earlier points found. We've written more about how AI assistants choose what to cite in our answer engine optimisation guide - but for a local business the honest summary is: win the 20 points above and you've done most of the AI work without noticing.
DIY vs automated vs professional: an honest comparison
Three ways to audit the same business. We sell one of them, so read this table knowing that - the prices are published and you can check every claim.
| This checklist (DIY) | Free automated tools | Professional audit | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cost | Free | Free (your email address, usually) | Rarely published; ours is £397 ex VAT |
| Time | ~2 hours | ~1 minute | Delivered within 10 working days |
| Catches | All 20 points, at your level of judgement | Mechanical gaps: fields, NAP, counts | All 20 points, plus competitor benchmarking and the why behind each gap |
| Misses | How you compare with rivals; what to do about the hard findings | Every judgement call: review legality, content quality, category strategy | Honestly? Not much - that's what the fee buys |
| Output | Your score and gap list from the scorecard above | A score, by email, and a follow-up sales sequence | A written 90-day roadmap, yours to keep - with us or without us |
Our honest recommendation: run the DIY audit first, today, free. If it comes back mostly green, keep it that way and spend your £397 on something else. If it comes back red in places you don't know how to fix - or you'd rather a specialist held the pen - that's what the audit is for.
And before you hire anyone - us included - our guide to choosing a local SEO provider gives you the eight questions that separate the good from the glossy, and our breakdown of what professional SEO services actually deliver covers the wider picture beyond local.
How often should you re-audit?
Local SEO isn't a fix-once job - details drift, rivals move and Google changes the furniture. The rhythm that works:
- Weekly, two minutes: new reviews (respond) and anything odd on the profile.
- Monthly, ten minutes: a fresh photo or post, profile stats glanced at, Q&A checked, hours still true.
- Quarterly, half an hour: spot-check the core listings against your master NAP; re-run your top-three ranking checks.
- Every six months, or after any change of address, name or number: the full 20 points again.
If that rhythm sounds like precisely the sort of thing that won't survive contact with your actual workload - that's the honest case for a monthly plan, where the housekeeping, reviews and reporting happen whether or not you remember them.
Sources
- Google Business Profile Help - How to improve your local ranking on Google (support.google.com/business/answer/7091, accessed July 2026)
- Google Business Profile Help - Guidelines for representing your business on Google (support.google.com/business/answer/3038177)
- Google Business Profile Help - Verify your business; Tips to get more reviews; Performance and insights; Changes to chat and call history (July 2024)
- Google Maps user-generated content policy - review solicitation and fake engagement rules (support.google.com/contributionpolicy/answer/7400114)
- Google Search Central - AI features documentation; LocalBusiness and review snippet structured data; spam policies (doorway pages, updated May 2026); mobile-first indexing completion (June 2024)
- Competition and Markets Authority - Unfair commercial practices guidance CMA207 and fake reviews guidance CMA208 (gov.uk, April 2025; provisions in force 6th April 2025)
- gov.uk press release - Fake and misleading reviews: 5 businesses under CMA investigation (27th March 2026)
- Whitespark - Local Search Ranking Factors 2026 (published 6th November 2025); Guide to Google's AI Mode; ChatGPT review-sources research (September 2025)
- BrightLocal - Local Consumer Review Survey 2026 (US panel); Local Business Discovery and Trust Report 2023; Local Search Ranking Factors 2026 summary
- SOCi - 2026 Local Visibility Index (around 350,000 business locations)
- Bing Search Blog - Introducing the New Bing Places for Business (October 2025)
- TechCrunch and PPC Land - Apple Business launch and Apple Business Connect merger (March-April 2026)
- Google - AI Mode now available on Google Search in the UK (blog.google, 28th July 2025); AI Overviews UK launch (15th August 2024)
- web.dev - Core Web Vitals thresholds, Interaction to Next Paint (updated September 2025)
Run the audit, or have it run for you
The scorecard above is free and takes two minutes. The £397 version is a senior specialist running all 20 checks on your business, benchmarking you against the competitors actually beating you and writing your 90-day roadmap - delivered within 10 working days, £200 credited if you continue into the Local plan.
Frequently asked questions
A local SEO audit is a structured check of everything that decides whether nearby customers find you on Google: your Google Business Profile, your reviews, your directory listings, your website's local signals and how you measure results. The output is a list of what's broken, what's missing and what to fix first.
Five areas: your Google Business Profile (ownership, categories, completeness, activity), reviews and reputation (volume, recency, responses, a legal way of asking), citations and directories (consistency across Yell, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and the rest), your website's local signals (location pages, schema, mobile speed) and content, links and measurement. That's the 20-point structure this guide works through.
Budget about two hours to work through all 20 checks properly, or two minutes to score yourself with the checklist above and see where the gaps are. Free automated tools promise results in sixty seconds, but they only check what a crawler can see. A professional audit takes days because it adds competitor benchmarking and a prioritised plan.
Very few providers publish a price. UK market rates for a one-off local SEO audit or project run from a few hundred pounds to £1,500 or more, and full-scope agency audits reach several thousand. Ours is £397 ex VAT: a senior specialist audits your Google Business Profile, local visibility, citations and site, then writes a 90-day roadmap, delivered within 10 working days - with £200 credited against your first month if you join our Local plan within 30 days. The DIY version is this checklist, free.
Yes - most of the 20 checks need nothing more than your Google Business Profile login, Search Console and an incognito browser window. That's exactly what this checklist is for. Where a professional earns their fee is judgement and prioritisation: benchmarking you against the businesses actually beating you and turning the findings into a plan.
They're accurate at what they can see: missing fields, mismatched name-address-phone data, listing counts. They can't judge whether your categories fit your best work, whether your reviews look genuine, whether your content answers real questions or whether your review-collection process is legal in the UK. Treat a free scan as a starting point, not a verdict - most exist to start a sales conversation.
Google says local results are ranked on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. In practice the biggest levers you control are a complete, active Google Business Profile and a steady flow of genuine reviews with responses. That's why they're the first two pillars of this audit - if they're weak, fixing everything else moves little.
NAP is your business name, address and phone number. Consistency means they're identical everywhere they appear - Google, Yell, Bing, your site footer, your socials. Even small differences ("St" against "Street", an old number on one directory) make it harder for Google to be confident the listings are the same business, and confidence is what rankings are built on.
Start with the core set: your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business (formerly Apple Business Connect), Yell's free listing and your Facebook page. Then add the ones your customers actually use: Checkatrade or similar for trades, TripAdvisor for hospitality, your Chamber of Commerce and genuinely local directories. A handful of accurate, maintained listings beats fifty half-dead ones.
Yes. Since 6th April 2025, under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, fake reviews and buying, incentivising or concealing paid-for reviews are banned outright - and the CMA can fine businesses up to the higher of £300,000 or 10% of worldwide turnover. It opened investigations into five named businesses in March 2026. Asking real customers for honest reviews, with no incentive attached, remains completely legal.
The usual suspects, in order: a suspension or pending verification on your profile, an unnoticed edit (Google lets the public suggest changes), a rival overtaking you on reviews or activity, a lost review batch or a change in how Google draws the map area. Points 1, 5 and 6 of this checklist find which one it is.
Only where there's real demand and you can say something genuinely specific - work you've done there, areas covered, local details. A page per key service area with unique content helps you rank in those towns. 20 near-identical pages with the town name swapped is doorway-page territory, which Google's spam policies target.
Run the full 20 points every six months, or after anything that changes your details: a move, a rebrand, a new phone number. In between, keep a lighter rhythm - glance at reviews weekly, check your profile for unapproved edits and post something monthly and spot-check your main listings quarterly. Local SEO decays quietly; the audit is how you notice.
Ask them what a customer would ask, logged out: "who would you recommend for [your trade] in [your town], and why?". Try Google (watch for the AI Overview), Google's AI Mode, ChatGPT and Copilot. If you're absent, the fix is unglamorous: a complete Google Business Profile, genuine reviews, a claimed Bing Places listing (ChatGPT looks things up on Bing's index) and mentions on the local web - the same sources this audit checks.
