How to Do a Local SEO Audit Yourself (Free, in 30 Minutes)

Most local SEO advice tells you what good looks like. That is useful once you know what is wrong with yours, and not before. This is the other thing: a diagnostic, run on your own business, that ends with a short list of what is actually broken and the order to fix it in.

Thirty minutes, one phone, one laptop. Nothing to buy and nothing to install. Set a timer if it helps, because the point is to finish it rather than fall down a rabbit hole in step two.

Have a piece of paper. You are going to write down six things.

Minutes 0 to 5: find out where you actually rank

Not at your desk. Your desk is the one place in the world that flatters you, because how close the searcher is to you is one of the things Google weighs most heavily in map results. Searching from inside your own shop is the single most misleading measurement available, and it is the one nearly everyone uses.

So do this instead. Open a private or incognito window on your phone and search your main service plus your town. Write down where you appear. Then do the same search again the next time you are two or three kilometres away, on the same phone.

Write down both numbers. That pair is the most useful thing you will learn today, and almost no business owner has it. If you rank well at your premises and badly across town, you have the most common problem in local search, and it is explained in full in why your ranking collapses a few streets away. For a more thorough way to measure this, see how to check your local rankings properly.

Minutes 5 to 10: study the three businesses above you

Search your main service and town again, and open each of the three businesses in the map box. You are not looking at their website. You are looking at four things on the listing itself.

• Their primary category. Google shows it in plain text under the business name.
• Their review count.
• Their star rating.
• The date of their most recent review.

Write those down next to your own. This is the honest measure of the distance you have to cover, and it is usually more informative than your position. If all three share a category that you do not have, stop the audit and go and read the category guide, because you have already found your biggest problem.

Minutes 10 to 15: your profile fields

Open your Google Business Profile. You are checking five things, quickly, without redesigning anything.

• Primary category. Is it the most specific true description of what earns you the most money? "Medical clinic" when you are a physiotherapist is the classic and expensive version of this mistake.
• Hours. Do they match what you actually do? Being open when somebody searches is rated by local search professionals as one of the strongest map ranking factors, and being wrong here is invisible because you never see the searches you were filtered out of.
• Holiday hours. Are they set? If not, your listing says "Hours might differ" on exactly the days people are at home searching.
• Services. How many are listed? Most businesses have none or two. Ten to twenty, named the way a customer would say them, is the target.
• Who has access. Settings, then people with access. If a former agency, web designer or ex-employee is still an owner, that is urgent. More on why in the agency article.

Write down how many of those five are wrong.

Minutes 15 to 20: your reviews

Three numbers, and only one of them is the one you already know.

The date of your newest review. Not your total. The date. Around three quarters of consumers look specifically for reviews from the last three months, so if your most recent is older than that, most of the people checking you out are discounting every review you have. This is covered properly in why your newest review matters more than your total.

How many you have received in the last ninety days. This is the number to run your business on, because unlike your total it can fall, which means it can warn you.

How many reviews have no reply. Then look at the replies that do exist. If any two of them could be swapped without anybody noticing, they are templates, and templated replies are measurably worse than saying nothing.

Write down all three.

Minutes 20 to 25: your website, first screen only

Load your own homepage on your phone, on mobile data rather than office wifi. Read only what fits before you scroll.

• Does the biggest heading name your service and your town in plain words? "Emergency Plumber in Norwich", not "Welcome" or "Quality You Can Trust".
• Is your phone number tappable, so one touch starts the call?
• Is there one obvious next step visible without scrolling?
• Are your name, address and phone in the footer, matching your Google profile exactly?
• Does the browser say "Not secure"?

Write down how many failed. The four-second test is the honest version of this: show the page to somebody who does not know your business, take it away after four seconds, and ask what you sell and what town you are in. If they cannot say, Google is reading the same page they did.

Minutes 25 to 30: write the verdict

You now have six things on paper. Turn them into a priority order using this.

What you found	Priority	Time to fix
Somebody else owns your listing	Do it today	Varies, start now
Primary category broader than the top three	Do it today	90 seconds
Hours wrong, or holiday hours unset	This week	15 minutes
No review in the last 90 days	This week	Ongoing, start now
Unanswered or templated replies	This week	An hour
Homepage heading does not name service and town	This month	5 minutes
Fewer than ten services listed	This month	An hour
Rank fine at your door, poor across town	Ongoing	Months, not weeks

Work top down. Do not start at the bottom because it feels more like real marketing, which is the usual mistake.

What this audit deliberately skips

You will notice several popular items missing. That is on purpose, because they are either dead or were never alive.

• Geotagging your photos. Google strips metadata from uploaded images.
• Directory submissions. A handful matter. Three hundred do not.
• FAQ schema for rankings. FAQ rich results stopped appearing in Google Search on 7 May 2026.
• Google Q&A seeding. The feature was discontinued on 3 November 2025.

If an audit you paid for recommended any of these in 2026, that tells you something about the rest of it.

When to run it again

Every quarter is enough. Categories change, Google adds new ones, competitors move, and your review recency drifts without anybody deciding to let it. Re-running this every three months takes half an hour and catches almost everything before it becomes a problem.

Once you have your list, the full checklist covers how to actually fix each item, and the free tools guide covers what to use.