Local SEO checklist: 111 checks for your own town

Why a checklist rather than general advice

„Fill in your Google profile and ask for reviews.“ That’s roughly the entire advice you’ll find about local SEO, and it’s why most companies stop halfway.

A filled-in profile isn’t the same as a well-set-up profile. Category, holiday opening hours, service descriptions, photographs, questions and answers, posts — each of those has its own rule, and each gets missed for the same reason: nobody says it exists.

The same goes for the rest. The address on your site has to be written identically to the profile and the directories — down to the comma. A page per location has to carry real content, not a copy with the town name swapped. Those are concrete things, and there are 111 of them.

They’re split into eight areas, in the order the work gets done: profile, site, technicals, directories, reviews, links, measurement, and multiple locations separately.

What one item looks like

Every item has five parts:

• The check itself — one sentence with no jargon. For instance: the name, address and phone number are written identically on the site, in the profile and in the directories.
• Why it matters — the concrete consequence, not theory.
• How to fix it — the steps. Where to click, what to change, what it looks like when done.
• Impact rating (1–3) — how much it changes your visibility in your own area.
• Estimated cost of the fix (1–3) — a one is five minutes in the profile, a three is work that runs for months.

Each item comes with recommended tools, marked free or paid.

You score with four buttons: Good, Could be better, Bad, Not applicable. The last is excluded from the score — if you have one branch, the multiple-locations area doesn’t drag your result down.

The repair plan

Everything scored „Bad“ or „Could be better“ goes into the repair plan, sorted by the formula (impact + cheapness) × urgency.

With local SEO that formula almost always puts Google Business Profile at the top. The reason is simple: the impact is greatest and the cost is smallest — most of those changes are a few minutes of work, without a single line of code.

Links and directories come lower, because they take longer. Not because they don’t matter, but because you pick what’s within arm’s reach first.

The plan exports to PDF and CSV.

What the tool scores instead of you

The automatic check covers around 150 checks and fills in part of the scores by itself.

It takes a sample of pages by type: up to eight products, four categories, two text pages, the basket and the homepage, and takes two to five minutes. For the local part it looks at what can be read from the site code — whether company details exist in structured form, whether the address and phone are visibly present, whether there’s a contact page and pages per location, how the map is embedded.

Manual scores are never touched. Everything filled in automatically is marked as such, and when you check it and agree, you click „accept as manual“.

What the tool can’t see is the Google Business Profile itself, the directories and the reviews — those are other people’s systems, outside your site. You go through those yourself, and that’s the most valuable part of the job.

A real example

A plumbing business in Zemun, two tradesmen, a six-page site. Work comes through referrals; almost nothing from the internet.

The checklist is done in two hours. Result: 34 good, 39 could be better, 30 bad, 8 not applicable.

At the top of the repair plan:

1. The profile has the wrong primary category — set to „construction company“ instead of „plumber“ — impact 3, cost 1.
2. There isn’t a single recent photograph, nor a single post — impact 2, cost 1.
3. The phone number on the site is in a different format than in the profile, and a different number again in the directories — impact 2, cost 1.
4. No page mentions the neighbourhoods they travel out to — impact 3, cost 2.

The first three were done in one morning. The fourth was a week’s work. Reviews, of which there were only four, entered the plan as a standing task — ask for one after every job.

Honestly: local SEO doesn’t solve everything. If thirty companies in your trade in your town each have two hundred reviews, breaking into the top three on the map is a year’s work, not a week’s. The checklist tells you what to do and in what order — it doesn’t promise you a place on the map by the end of the month.