Local SEO checklist for a small business: what to do first

You run a shop, a clinic, a trade or a small agency from one address, and the business down the road comes up on the map when someone searches for what you both sell. You do not. There is no marketing budget to speak of, and about one free evening a week. This local SEO checklist for a small business is written for that position: six things to do, in the order this guide thinks pays off soonest for the effort, with what each one settles and roughly how long to set aside for it.

It is a checklist, so it is short on theory. The evidence on whether reviews move local rankings is in do reviews help SEO, and the free ways to be noticed beyond search are in how to promote your business locally for free. This page is the order of work.

What Google says local ranking is based on

Google's own help page on local ranking names three factors: relevance (how well your profile matches what someone searched for), distance (how far your business is from the searcher, or from the place they typed) and prominence (how well known your business is, online and off). The same page says this, word for word: "There's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google."

That sentence is why the checklist looks the way it does. Distance you cannot change. Relevance and prominence you can, and the work splits into what you tell Google yourself (your profile and your website) and what other people say about you (reviews and mentions). The order below starts with the cheapest fix you control fully and moves toward the ones that carry on for as long as you trade.

The local SEO checklist for a small business, in order

The order and the time estimates are this guide's. They assume one location, a website you can edit yourself or through someone who can, and no software beyond a browser.

1. Claim your Business Profile and fill in every field

Google's help page lists what it wants from a profile: verify it (so Google knows you are allowed to represent the business), keep the information complete and accurate, keep your hours right including special hours, add photos and videos, reply to reviews and, for a shop, list the products you stock. The page says a business with complete and accurate information is more likely to show in local results.

Do it in this order, because the first item decides the searches you can match at all:

1. Primary category. Pick the one thing you are. A bakery that also does coffee is a bakery. Add secondary categories only for things you actually sell.
2. Name, address, phone, website. Your name as it is on your sign and your invoices. Resist adding the town or a service to it; this guide would not risk a profile for a word Google may read as an edit to your real name.
3. Hours, then the holiday hours for the next three months. A closed sign on a day the profile says "open" is a quick way to earn a one-star review.
4. Description and services. Plain words for what you do and for whom. If you quote prices, put them here too.
5. Photos. The front of the building, the inside, the people, the work. One of each to start; add one a month from then on (step 6).
6. The website link to the page that matches the category, which for a one-location business is the home page.

Budget about two hours the first time. Nothing else on the list pays back faster, because the profile is what the map results are built from.

2. Make your name, address and phone match on your site and on the listings that matter

Local SEO guides call this NAP: your name, address and phone number written the same way everywhere. Choose one written form (the same abbreviation of "Street", the same phone format) and apply it to your website's footer and contact page, your profile, and the directories your customers use.

Which directories? A few that matter beat hundreds: the map apps people navigate with, the review sites your trade is judged on, your trade association's member list and the local chamber or council directory. An old listing with a previous address or a dead number does more harm than no listing, so claim it and correct it rather than leaving it. If your trade has a dozen directories and you cannot face them all, the ones a customer would plausibly open come first.

Budget an afternoon, much of it spent finding the old listings you forgot you had.

3. One page for each service, and one for each area you serve

This step is the guide's judgement, and it is where a website starts to do work. A home page that says "plumbing, heating and bathrooms in and around the county" competes for everything and wins nothing specific. One page per service you want to be found for, with the town in the page title and the first paragraph, competes for the search a customer types.

A worked example (invented for this guide): a plumber in a town of 40,000 builds four pages: boiler repair, bathroom fitting, emergency call-outs and landlord gas checks. Each page carries the service and the town in its title ("Boiler repair in Thornbury"), two paragraphs on what the job involves and how to book it, a note on how pricing works (a call-out fee, a fixed quote, an hourly rate), a photo of a real job and the phone number as text. For the villages the van covers, one area page each: what you do there, how far you travel, how to book. The guide's advice is to write six real pages before you write a seventh; ten pages that swap only the town name are thin, and a reader can tell.

Budget a few evenings of writing, and expect to revise the pages after a month when you see which ones get calls.

4. Ask for reviews, reply to every one, and do not buy or gate them

Google's help on getting reviews gives three tips: remind customers to leave one by sending a Google link or showing a QR code, reply to reviews, and value all of them, since honest and balanced reviews help a potential customer decide. Google's local ranking help page adds this sentence: "More reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking." So reviews count twice, once for the searcher reading them and once for where you appear.

The rules are as firm as the tip. Google's help on getting reviews says that offering incentives such as free or discounted goods or services in exchange for posting, changing or removing a review is treated as fake and misleading content and is prohibited. Gating is banned in the same place: Google's content policy for Maps lists, under rating manipulation, "Discourage or prohibit negative reviews, or selectively solicit positive reviews from customers" among the things a business must not do. In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission's press release of 14 August 2024 announcing its rule on fake reviews says: "The final rule prohibits businesses from providing compensation or other incentives conditioned on the writing of consumer reviews expressing a particular sentiment, either positive or negative." On suppression it says: "The final rule prohibits a business from using unfounded or groundless legal threats, physical threats, intimidation, or certain false public accusations to prevent or remove a negative consumer review." The release said the rule would take effect 60 days after its publication in the Federal Register. This is a summary of a published US rule and is not legal advice; other countries have rules of their own.

What that leaves you is the honest version, which this guide recommends: ask every customer the same way, at the moment the job is done, with a link or a QR code; reply to each review within the week, the critical ones first; and change what the critical ones keep saying. The ask itself is set out step by step in how to get more reviews, and the counter card and the link in a QR code for reviews.

Budget ten minutes a week, for as long as you are in business.

5. Fix the basics on your website

None of this needs a developer. Check five things on your own site:

• The home page title (the text in the browser tab) says what you do and where: "Thornbury Dental Practice, dentist in Thornbury" beats "Home".
• Each page has one main heading that says what the page is about, in the words a customer would use.
• Your phone number and address are text on every page, in the footer, so a phone can tap the number and a search engine can read it. A number inside an image cannot be tapped, and this guide's advice is to assume a search engine cannot read it either.
• The contact page has a map embedded, and the opening hours written out.
• The site loads on a phone over mobile data in a few seconds. Open it on your own phone outside the shop's wifi; if a page crawls, run it through Google's free PageSpeed Insights and send the top two items to whoever built the site.

Budget an afternoon, or an hour of a freelancer's time if the site was built by someone else.

6. A 30-minute check every month

The first five steps are a project. This one is the habit that keeps the project from decaying, and it is this guide's suggestion rather than anything Google asks for. Put a recurring half hour in the calendar:

• 5 minutes: search your business name, then your main service plus your town, in a private browser window. Note where you appear.
• 5 minutes: open your profile. Confirm the hours, look for suggested edits you did not make, answer any question a customer has left.
• 10 minutes: reply to every review left since last month.
• 5 minutes: add one or two photos from the month's work.
• 5 minutes: write the month's calls and direction requests from the profile's own reporting into a sheet, next to last month's.

The sheet is the point. After three months you can see whether the service pages moved the calls, and after six you know which step to spend the next evening on.

What local SEO costs, and when it is worth paying someone

In money, the six steps above cost nothing beyond what you already pay for your website: the profile and the listings it names are claimed by the business itself, and the pages are your own time. In time, adding up the estimates, the first month is about three working days spread over evenings, then the ten minutes a week for reviews and the half hour a month. That is the honest cost for one location, and it is also the answer to "is local SEO worth it for a small business": if your customers search for your kind of business near them (dentists, trades, restaurants, accountants, salons, vets), a free listing that decides whether you appear on the map is worth three days. If your customers are not local (a software company selling nationally, a consultancy with clients in three countries), this is the wrong checklist; general SEO is the one you want, and the SEO tools listing is where that starts.

"Local SEO services" sold by a freelancer or an agency are mostly the six steps done for you, plus reporting. Before paying, ask which of the six they will do, what they will write, and whether the profile and the listings stay in your name (they should; a listing an agency owns leaves with the agency). The three ways to do it compare like this:

No price appears here because none is sourced; ask three for a written scope and compare the scopes before you compare the fees. The guide's test for when to pay: you have done steps 1 to 6, kept the sheet for three months, and your main service plus your town still does not show your profile in your own town. At that point an hour of someone's diagnosis is cheaper than a fourth month of guessing.

What local SEO will not do

It will not rank a thin business above a well-known one. Prominence is one of Google's three factors, and a business with ten years of reviews, press and links has it; your six steps make you findable, and the ranking above an established rival comes, if it comes, from being better over time. It will not fix a service people dislike: the reviews in step 4 report what happens in the shop, and asking for more of them when the experience is poor produces more of the same. It is not quick; this guide would give a new profile weeks before judging it, and the sheet in step 6 is how you judge. And it does not replace being open when the profile says you are.

Where to start this week

Step 1, tonight: claim the profile, set the primary category, write the hours out to the next holiday and add one photo of the front door. Then put the half-hour check in the calendar for a month from now. The reviews habit in step 4 is the one that keeps paying, so when the profile is done, read how to get more reviews and set up the ask before the next customer leaves.