The local SEO checklist we run on every build

First: the Google Business Profile

If you do one thing from this page, do this one. For any business serving a local area, the Business Profile outranks the website itself for most commercial searches — the map pack sits above the organic results, and the profile is what fills it.

Claim it, verify it, and fill in every field: categories, service area, hours, services with prices, and photos. The primary category matters more than most owners realise and is worth researching against competitors who already rank.

• Set the website URL to your exact canonical address, including the www if you use one
• List services individually rather than as one paragraph
• Add photos and keep adding them — profiles with recent images get materially more engagement
• Fill the hours in, and keep them consistent with the hours on your site

Second: reviews

Reviews are the heaviest single factor in local pack rankings and the one most businesses neglect entirely. Going from zero reviews to five will usually move you further than any technical work on your website.

Ask every satisfied customer, directly, with a link that opens the review form. Do not offer anything in exchange — incentivised reviews violate Google policy and can cost you the profile. Do respond to every review you get, including the bad ones, because that response is read by everyone who comes after.

Third: NAP consistency

Name, Address and Phone need to match exactly everywhere they appear — your website, your Business Profile, and any directory that lists you. Not approximately. "Street" and "St." are different strings, and inconsistency across listings actively suppresses local rankings rather than merely failing to help.

This is tedious and it is worth doing properly once. Write the canonical version down and use it verbatim from then on.

Fourth: the pages themselves

Now the website matters. A page per location or service area, each with genuinely different content — not the same paragraph with the city name swapped, which search engines identify as doorway pages and which can be penalised rather than ignored.

The test is simple: if you could swap the city name in your page and it would still read correctly, the page is not specific enough to rank and probably should not exist.

• One page per place you genuinely serve, not per place you would like to serve
• Write about that market — its industries, its competition, what businesses there actually ask
• Link the pages to each other, so a crawler that finds one finds the rest
• Add LocalBusiness and FAQ structured data

Fifth: technical foundations

These are necessary rather than sufficient. Getting them right will not make you rank; getting them wrong will stop you.

• One canonical domain, with every other variant redirecting to it
• A sitemap that lists only canonical URLs, and a robots.txt that points at it
• Meta descriptions under about 155 characters, because the rest is never shown
• Mobile pages that do not scroll sideways and do not set body text below 12px
• Core Web Vitals in decent shape — in practice this usually means not shipping an enormous hero video

Last, and least: directories

Directory submissions are the most oversold item in local SEO. The genuinely useful ones are few — Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, and the two or three industry directories your customers actually read.

Anything selling bulk directory submissions or "DA 50+ backlinks" is selling you a risk, not a service. For a business whose own product is marketing, being caught buying links is considerably worse than having none.

What this looks like in practice

Local search is a slow instrument. Profile and review work shows up in weeks; page and link work takes months. Anyone promising otherwise is either misinformed or counting on you not checking.

If you want the specifics for your market rather than the general version, the location pages below go through what we see in each one — or just email sales@mander.tech and ask.