Local SEO has a lot of moving parts. Most businesses miss not because they ignore it, but because they patch it piecemeal and lose track of what’s done, what’s half-done, and what they’ve never touched. This checklist organises every core task into six sections you can work through in order, come back to on a schedule, and actually tick off.
Use it alongside the full local SEO guide for context on why each item matters. For each section below, there’s a link to the deeper guide so you can go further when something needs more than a checkbox.
Google Business Profile
Your Google Business Profile (GBP) is the single most important asset in local SEO. A complete, accurate, and active profile directly affects relevance and prominence, two of the three factors Google uses to rank local results. Get this right before touching anything else. See the full GBP optimisation guide for step-by-step detail.
- Claim and verify your profile. An unverified profile can’t be fully controlled and may show incorrect information from third parties.
- Choose the right primary category. Pick the most specific category that describes your core service. “Plumber” beats “Home Services.” Wrong category is one of the most common ranking killers.
- Add all relevant secondary categories. Secondary categories expand which searches you can appear for. A plumber who also does gas fitting should add “Gas Installation Service.”
- Fill in every field: name, address, phone, website, hours. Incomplete profiles rank lower. Google says businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show in local results.
- Use your real business name, no keyword stuffing. Adding “Best Plumber Sydney” to your listing name violates Google’s guidelines and can get your profile suspended.
- Write a clear business description. Describe what you do, who you serve, and where. Two to three sentences. No keyword lists.
- List every service or product you offer. Google uses this to match your profile to relevant searches. More detail means more relevance signals.
- Add all attributes (accessibility, payment methods, etc.). Attributes appear in the knowledge panel and filter results for users who care about them.
- Upload photos: exterior, interior, team, work samples. Profiles with photos get significantly more engagement. Add new ones regularly rather than uploading a batch once and forgetting.
- Update special hours for public holidays. Stale hours damage trust. Customers who show up when you’re closed leave negative reviews.
- Publish a GBP post at least twice a month. Posts signal an active business to both Google and customers. Use them for offers, completed work, tips, and updates.
Reviews
Reviews drive prominence, and prominence is the ranking factor you have most control over. Google’s local ranking documentation explicitly links more reviews and positive ratings to better local ranking. BrightLocal’s 2026 Local Consumer Review Survey found two in five consumers read reviews every time they look for a local business, with expectations increasingly around 4.5 stars and above, and recency matters. See the Google reviews guide for request templates and response strategy.
- Ask every satisfied customer for a review. Ask after delivery, when goodwill is highest. A plumber who just fixed a burst pipe has earned the ask.
- Send a direct review link. Fewer clicks means more completions. Get your Google review short URL from your GBP dashboard and send it via SMS or email.
- Never incentivise reviews. Google’s policies prohibit it. Caught doing this risks suspension.
- Respond to every review, positive and negative. Google says responses show you value feedback. For negatives: acknowledge, offer to resolve offline, keep it professional.
- Monitor for new reviews weekly. Slow responses to negative reviews look worse than slow responses to positive ones. Set a weekly reminder.
- Flag and report fake reviews. Competitors sometimes post fake negatives. Use the “Report review” option in GBP and document your case.
Citations and NAP
Citations are any mention of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) online. Consistent NAP signals to Google that your business information is trustworthy. Inconsistencies confuse the algorithm and can suppress your rankings. See the local citations guide for a full list of directories worth targeting.
- Audit your existing citations. Search your business name plus each variation of your address. Find inconsistencies before you build more.
- Standardise your NAP format. Decide on one format (e.g. “St” vs “Street”, “+61” vs “04” for mobile) and use it everywhere.
- Claim and update your Apple Maps listing. Apple Maps feeds Siri and is the default on all Apple devices. Many businesses ignore it.
- Claim your Bing Places listing. Bing powers some AI assistants and a meaningful share of desktop searches.
- List on core national directories. Yellow Pages, True Local, Yelp. For Australian businesses, HiPages, HealthEngine, and industry directories matter too.
- Check and update social profile NAP. Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn pages need to match your GBP exactly.
- Fix any duplicate listings. Duplicates split citation signals and confuse users. Merge or remove them.
| Platform | Why it matters |
|---|---|
| Google Business Profile | Primary local ranking signal |
| Apple Maps | Default on all iOS devices |
| Bing Places | Powers Copilot and desktop Bing searches |
| High domain authority; often ranks near your business name | |
| Industry directories | Relevance signals for your specific category |
On-page and website
Your website works alongside your GBP, not independently of it. Organic local rankings come from your site. The Local Pack comes from GBP. Both matter, and they reinforce each other. A strong site with location-specific pages gives Google more confidence in your relevance for local queries.
- Include your city or region in your homepage title tag. “Plumber in Melbourne” outranks “Plumber” for Melbourne searches. Keep it natural.
- Create a dedicated contact page with your full NAP. Google matches your site’s address data against your GBP. They should be identical.
- Embed a Google Map on your contact page. Helps users and gives Google a geographic anchor for your site.
- Create a location page for each suburb or city you serve. Don’t duplicate content. Each page should have genuine information: local team, service examples, area-specific details.
- Add your city or suburb to your service pages where natural. “Bathroom renovations in Brisbane” gives you a shot at appearing for that search. Stuffing it everywhere looks spammy.
- Check your site loads fast on mobile. Most local searches happen on phones. A slow site loses clicks even when you rank. Run a Lighthouse check.
- Make your phone number click-to-call on mobile. A number that can’t be tapped is a conversion leak.
- Link to your GBP from your website footer. Small reinforcement signal; also useful for customers.
Schema markup
LocalBusiness schema tells search engines (and AI systems) exactly what your business is, where it operates, and how to contact it. It doesn’t directly boost rankings, but it makes your information unambiguous and dramatically increases the chance of appearing in structured results and AI answers. See the local schema markup guide for full implementation details and valid JSON-LD examples.
- Add LocalBusiness JSON-LD to your homepage. At minimum:
@type,name,address(withPostalAddress),telephone,url,openingHoursSpecification. - Use the most specific
@typeavailable.PlumberbeatsLocalBusiness.DentistbeatsMedicalBusiness. The full list is at schema.org. - Add
geocoordinates. Latitude and longitude remove any ambiguity about your location. - Include
sameAslinks to your GBP, social profiles, and directory listings. These tell Google that all these references point to the same entity. - Add
aggregateRatingif you have legitimate reviews. Only include real review data. Fabricating ratings violates Google’s guidelines. - Validate your schema with Google’s Rich Results Test. Broken JSON-LD is worse than none because it can cause errors in how your site is parsed.
- Add schema to location pages if you have multiple locations. Each page should have its own
LocalBusinessblock with the address for that location.
AI visibility and tracking
AI tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, and Google’s AI Overviews increasingly answer “best [service] in [city]” queries directly, naming specific businesses. Showing up in these answers requires the same signals that drive local SEO, but recency and citation quality matter more because AI models weight what they find cited consistently across the web. See AI-SEO fundamentals for the full picture.
- Check whether you appear in AI answers for your target queries. Search “best [service] in [city]” in ChatGPT and Perplexity. Note which businesses are named and whether you appear.
- Identify gaps between your GBP ranking and AI mentions. Many businesses rank in the map pack but never appear in AI answers because they lack citations on the sources AI models draw from.
- Build citations on sources AI models frequently cite. Industry publications, review platforms with strong authority (Yelp, TripAdvisor, Healthgrades), and local business associations tend to get pulled into AI answers.
- Make your website content directly answerable. Short, specific paragraphs that answer “who, what, where, how much” questions are more likely to get extracted by AI than long blocks of marketing copy.
- Track your AI visibility on a schedule. Manual checks get missed. Tools like Fokal run target queries across ChatGPT, Perplexity, and AI Overviews on a schedule and track your citation rate over time, so you can see whether your work is moving the needle.
- Run a local SEO audit quarterly. Rankings, citations, and reviews change. An audit catches drift before it compounds into a real ranking drop.
Turning this into a quarterly routine
This checklist works best as a recurring habit, not a one-time project. Here’s how to structure it across a quarter.
Month 1: Foundations. Work through GBP, citations, and on-page in full. These items need to be correct before anything else produces results.
Month 2: Reviews and content. Focus on review generation and any location pages or content gaps you identified in month 1.
Month 3: Schema and AI tracking. Implement or audit your schema, run AI visibility checks, and note what’s changed since month 1.
Each quarter: Pull your Google Business Profile insights, check your top local keywords in Google Search Console, run a fresh round of AI visibility queries, and compare your citation count against key competitors. Update your GBP posts, check for new duplicate listings, and respond to any unanswered reviews.
The businesses that consistently win local search aren’t doing anything exotic. They’re just doing the fundamentals thoroughly and repeatedly. This checklist is the map. Work through it once, then set a reminder to come back in ninety days.