Local SEO Checklist: 20 Points for UK Businesses

This local SEO checklist is for businesses that want to appear in the map pack and in "near me" searches. We have grouped twenty points under five headings: profile, consistency, website, reputation and technical foundations. Work through them in order. Whatever is left unticked becomes next month's to-do list.

What to know before you start

In local search, Google weighs three things: relevance, distance and prominence. That framework comes straight from Google's own local ranking tips. Every point below strengthens at least one of those signals.

Do not try to finish the list in one sitting. Complete the profile and consistency points in week one. Move on to the website and reputation points over the following weeks. You may need a developer for the technical items.

Record where you stand before changing anything. Note your profile's search and call numbers, local traffic to your site and your position for the searches that matter. You can only judge the effect of your changes against that baseline.

Google Business Profile points

The profile sits at the centre of local visibility. If these five points are missing, everything else moves slowly:

1. The profile is verified and the owner role sits on a company email address.
2. The primary category is the narrowest description a customer would search for.
3. Every service is listed with a short description.
4. Real photos show the exterior, the interior and examples of your work.
5. Opening hours are current, including bank holidays.

Our Google Business Profile optimisation guide explains how to fill in each of these properly.

NAP consistency points

NAP stands for name, address and phone number. Writing these three details identically everywhere tells Google the business is real and singular. Points to check:

6. The name, address and phone on your website match the profile exactly.
7. Listings on Yelp, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect and trade directories are current.
8. Listings showing an old address or old phone number have been corrected or removed.
9. One address format is used everywhere, with no mix of "Unit", "Flat" and "Suite".

This work feels tedious, but the effect lasts. For businesses that have moved or changed numbers, old listings quietly drag rankings down.

The most practical approach is a simple spreadsheet. Give each platform a row, then add the login details, the date last checked and the listing status. Reviewing the sheet end to end twice a year is enough.

Website and location page points

The profile is not enough on its own; Google also reads your site as a prominence signal. Check these points on your website:

10. Each branch or service area has its own original page.
11. Page titles combine the service and the area.
12. Each location page includes a map, address, phone number and opening hours.
13. Core services have their own pages, and those pages link to each other.

Avoid copying a template when writing location pages. Give each page details specific to the area: the neighbourhoods you cover, transport links, parking, or examples of work you have done nearby. When writing titles and descriptions for location pages, the examples in our guide on how to write meta descriptions help.

Review and reputation points

Reviews affect both rankings and the decision to click. These four points keep your reputation growing steadily:

14. A fixed process sends customers a review link once the job is finished.
15. Every review, including negative ones, gets a reply within a few days.
16. No discounts or gifts are offered in exchange for reviews.
17. Recurring complaints in reviews are noted and fixed inside the business.

Technical foundation points

The final group makes sure search engines read the site correctly. You will often need a developer for these:

18. Location pages carry valid LocalBusiness structured data.
19. The site loads quickly on mobile and Core Web Vitals sit in the good range.
20. Every location page is in the sitemap and indexed.

Google's local business documentation lists the fields your markup should include. For example code and testing steps, see our local business schema guide.

To check the technical points quickly, use our free SEO checker. It shows titles, descriptions, schema, mobile readiness and speed in a single report.

Prioritisation table

Every business has different gaps. This table helps you decide which group to tackle first:

Situation	First focus	Why
No profile, or not verified	Profile points	You cannot appear on Maps without it
Recently moved	NAP points	Old listings split trust
Several branches	Location pages	Each branch needs its own signal
Fewer reviews than competitors	Reputation points	The fastest way to lift prominence
Slow or broken site	Technical points	It weakens every other effort

Mistakes we see during audits

Some mistakes come up again and again when businesses work through this list. Knowing them upfront saves you doing the same job twice.

The first is using different phone numbers on the profile and the site. If you use a separate number for call tracking, add it as an additional number on the profile and keep the main number unchanged.

The second is producing thin pages for every neighbourhood. Twenty pages where only the area name changes look like low-value content to Google and drag down the quality of the whole site. A handful of genuinely useful location pages performs better.

The third is collecting reviews only during a campaign. Fifty reviews in one month followed by months of silence does not look natural. A steady flow of a few reviews a week looks more trustworthy to customers and to Google.

A monthly routine to keep the list alive

Filling in the checklist once and putting it away means drifting back to outdated details within months. Set aside half an hour on the first working day of each month. Log the profile's performance numbers, reply to new reviews and add at least one new photo.

Every quarter, review the NAP spreadsheet and your location pages. When you add a new service, update the profile and the site in the same week. To set up a steady review process, see our guide on how to get more Google reviews.