Recently updated: June 24th, 2024
Having a strong presence in local search results is important for businesses that depend on customers from the nearby region.
According to a survey by Go Gulf, 46% of people search for something on Google looking specifically for local businesses that can serve their needs. This means almost half of the searches have ‘local intent’ behind them.
If you have a local business, there is a good chance that people will find you through local searches on search engines and apps. You need to optimize your online presence to show up prominently when someone searches for terms related to your products or services along with a local area name.
Local SEO audit is an important part of managing your local business presence properly in your local area. An audit means thoroughly checking and analyzing various aspects like website content, online listings, customer reviews, and comparing with competitors.
This will reveal the issues that are pulling your local rankings and traffic down. By fixing these gaps, you can improve your local search engine visibility and attract more customers.
This blog post guides you step-by-step on how to properly audit website elements to enhance local search performance.
Why Local SEO Audit Efforts Is Important?
Conducting periodic audits to analyze the effectiveness of your local SEO strategies is crucial for several reasons. Optimizing for voice search and local intent is important for multi-location brands to drive conversions. Partnering with a white-label SEO agency can provide specialized expertise in tailoring these strategies to meet specific local market needs, enhancing overall performance.
Let us look at some key reasons why regular local SEO auditing is necessary:
Identify Gaps in Your Strategy
The primary benefit of a local SEO audit is that it brings the flaws and gaps in your strategies to the surface. An audit involves:
- Checking if website pages targeting various locations follow optimization best practices.
- Assessing local citations and online listings.
- Monitoring reviews and social signals.
- Benchmarking against location-based competitors.
Doing this reveals opportunities where you are failing to adhere to Google’s requirements for ranking higher locally. It highlights areas in the workflow that will generate urgent attention.
A site SEO audit could uncover inadequate use of local keywords, a lack of location pages, duplicate GMB listings, and insufficient local links as some hindering factors.
Track Your Progress Over Time
SEO is an ever-evolving arena, and local SEO also sees frequent algorithm updates. So it is not an appropriate step to set and forget your campaigns. You need to audit how much your rankings and traffic metrics have or haven’t progressed periodically.
Comparing historical and present audit reports will depict the health status of your local SEO program. Growth in organic conversions driven by locations could validate that your efforts are moving the needle. A shifted expansion may indicate coming hurdles.
Auditing provides critical visibility into measurable improvements over time. It enables accurate predictions about future volatility.
Align with the Latest Google Requirements
Google keeps testing and introducing new standards for local SEO excellence regularly. For instance, increasing focus on elements like click-to-call, Get Directions button, and messaging integration.
The essential checklist for SEO Audit examines how closely your activities adhere to the guidelines for positive indicators mandated in Google’s Local Search Rater document. Like social media signals, the area served prominent data fields.
By auditing your website, you can realign efforts to match Google’s current local priorities and expectations.
Auditing local SEO happenings at fixed periods is non-negotiable for enduring growth. It powers data-backed decisions, fuels continuous improvement, and prepares businesses for location-based queries.
Outperform Competitors
You can analyze the local SEO game of top-ranking competitors through audits. This allows you to replicate their winning tactics.
Conducting regular audits of your local SEO strategies is crucial for staying ahead of competitors. An audit reveals optimization gaps and opportunities that competitors may be leveraging already.
Identifying areas needing improvement ensures your website and online presence continue ranking higher than others in local search results. Regular reviews reveal changing trends in your industry for quickly adapting your strategy.
Checklist to Do Site Local SEO Audits
Local SEO audits examine how optimized a website is to attract searchers looking for local businesses. It ensures your locations or branches gain maximum visibility when people search with the intent to visit stores nearby.
Conducting regular local SEO audits is crucial for identifying areas that need work. This drives higher local rankings, traffic, and revenue.
Follow this comprehensive 10-step checklist to audit the website’s local SEO effectively:
Step 1: Define Local SEO Goals and KPIs (Key Performance Indicators)
Begin the audit by clearly defining your specific goals and key performance indicators (KPIs) for local SEO efforts. Outline the target rankings, traffic increases, and lead conversion rates you aim to reach in the next 6 months.
Track relevant metrics like several location pages ranked, organic visits driven by local searches, Google My Business actions, etc. to monitor overall progress. Setting these quantifiable local objectives and metrics lays the groundwork for a structured SEO audit.
It enables focusing efforts only on website elements and external factors that impact these business goals.
Step 2: List Down Location Pages and GMB (Google My Business) Listings
An important initial step for auditing a website’s local SEO must be to comprehensively list down all pages on the site targeting specific neighboring cities, zip codes, or any other local geographic area.
Make a spreadsheet listing the URLs of every business location or branch page with information like page title, focus keywords, and ranking position for tracking.
Additionally, collate details of all the Google My Business listings created to represent each physical store location accurately on Google searches and maps. Note down key fields like names, addresses, categories, and unique landing page links from GMB to check for consistency.
This location page and GMB listing compilation provide visibility into the entire site structure optimized for local SEO. It also helps quickly identify any issues, like
- Duplicate location pages with the same details.
- Mismatches in business details across location webpages and listings.
- Pages lacking in relevant structured or schema data were marked up about the area covered.
Accordingly, suitable changes to align details, consolidate duplicates, and strengthen on-page optimization can be initiated.
Step 3: Evaluate Page Speed and Mobile-Friendliness
The technical components of page speed and mobile optimization carry tremendous influence on local search visibility. Evaluate the website’s overall performance metrics for these two elements.
Use Google PageSpeed Insights to generate vital web performance stats like page load speeds, time to interact, total page size, etc. Check scores for both desktop and mobile to uncover issues disturbing the user experience.
Additionally, test the website’s mobile-friendliness using the different test tools. It will assess the responsiveness of pages on handheld devices, the readability of content, and the accessibility of tap targets.
For location-based searches intent on visiting or calling businesses, slow or clunky mobile access severely diminishes conversions and rankings. Address identified technical problems like unoptimized images, inefficient JavaScript, and broken links.
Also, ensure easy access to location-specific features like direction links, click-to-call buttons, booking widgets, etc. on mobile.
Step 4: Audit On-Page Local SEO Elements
The textual and structural elements within a web page themselves carry substantial weight for ranking locally. Hence, auditing the optimization status of on-page local SEO factors is imperative.
Thoroughly review the entire textual content around your locations to gauge the usage of geo-focused terms or nearby area references. Check if titles, headings, and image alt text contain relevant city/neighborhood names.
Examine the proper inclusion of address and contact information schema markup for enriching snippets. Audit site architecture to confirm easy internal accessibility and link flows to location landing pages.
Compare the top-ranking competitor’s page source code for their geo-optimized techniques related to semantics, metadata, or HTML enhancements.
Assessing the on-page optimization fitness as above reveals specific gaps in prominently embedding visual or textual location cues.
Step 5: Scrutinize Link Building Efforts
Backlinks from external websites provide crucial trust signals that influence local search rankings. Scrutinizing your link-building efforts is imperative for location-based SEO audits.
Prepare a spreadsheet tracking all acquired backlinks pointing to your key landing pages targeting people. Capture metrics like the type of linking sites, anchor texts used with geo-keywords, and do-follow/no-follow nature.
Compare the domain authority and relevance of these external linking pages. Analyze if competitors have more citations or links from niche local business directories in your category.
Seeking additional high-quality links with geo-optimized anchors like “best pizza downtown NYC” from relevant sites boosts local SERP presence.
Step 6: Review Google My Business Health
Carefully auditing Google My Business listings claimed for different locations to verify consistency in the use of the business name, address, categories, and other details.
Cross-check if key data fields like open timings, specialities, photos, and posts showcase the latest, location-specific offerings to searchers.
Monitor metrics like views, actions, and messaging response rate. GMB profile managers must showcase customized experiences for each branch location to attract local traffic.
Step 7: Check Online Review Generation
User-generated online reviews and recommendations profoundly influence the buying decisions of local searchers. Hence, analyzing your review generation sources and volume is imperative in a local SEO audit.
Prepare a spreadsheet of all prominent review and rating platforms like Google, Facebook, and Yelp that are relevant to your industry. Track the number of reviews by location on these channels.
Compare statistics like average ratings and the number of 5-star reviews against your high-ranking competitors on these sites. This reveals potential gaps where rivals are leading in perception based on user reviews.
Check if negative remarks about certain branches exist that require reputation management. Examine if competitors have more reviews cited locally complimenting nearby-specific services.
Step 8: Compare With High-Ranking Competitors
One of the most effective local SEO auditing techniques is benchmarking your strategies and rankings against competitors outperforming you.
Identify the top 3–5 players in your niche who rank higher locally for the target keywords across neighborhoods. Thoroughly assess their location pages for elements like optimized meta titles and structured data.
Compare the quality of reviews and links acquired for matching branches using data aggregators like Moz and Semrush. Contrast their social media community strength targeting various localities.
Inspect what impactful customizations competitors have in Google My Business listings for attracting that area’s searchers. Analyze why their location content or offerings seem more enticing.
Pinpoint what cutting-edge location-based tactics they have deployed that your strategies presently lack. E.g., expanded keyword buckets and localized paid campaigns.
Step 9: Identify Common Local Ranking Roadblocks
While auditing, experience reveals certain recurring fundamental roadblocks that hinder local SEO performance. Proactively identifying these hindrances is key.
- Look for issues like consolidating the same details into multiple location pages, which often leads to one page eventually ranking better by suppressing others. Stored site architecture with broken internal links restricts crawl accessibility to store pages.
- Duplicate or outdated business listings across directories sow confusion about NAP consistency. Lacking geo-modified external links fails to convince search bots about hyperlocal relevance.
- Insufficient location-oriented schemas for areas covered or media embedding. Comparatively lower positive online ratings and review presence than competitors.
- Finite optimization of website copy or pages for wider, high-potential location keywords targeting metro cities neighboring your stores.
Pinpointing these hindrances to local rankings progress is critical. It allows action planning targeted techniques as corrective enhancers, like creating optimized unique content for each branch, enriching geo-schema, and local link building.
Step 10: Re-evaluate and Retest Post-Gap Fixing
The local SEO audit process remains incomplete without validating if your optimization efforts delivered actual improvements after changes were implemented.
Once you have fixed the major issues identified initially around location pages, Google My Business listings, citations, reviews, etc. over 1-2 months, re-evaluate the metrics.
Check if your website now ranks higher for critical local search terms like “furniture stores near me” or “plumbers in New York.” See if traffic has increased to key location webpages.
Compare numbers against past figures for stats like overall organic users, phone/form leads, and store visits from the website. Calculate the growth percentage.
Check if rankings have become more consistent across target search results for all branches. See if additional 5-star online ratings and reviews were acquired after encouraging customers.
Analyzing these numbers after corrective efforts and testing confirms that your audit plan worked. Helps identify any remaining gaps needing attention for bigger local SEO success.
Regular re-evaluation ensures continual progress on core objectives.
Wrapping It Up
Auditing your website’s local search engine presence at regular intervals is invaluable for staying ahead in local SEO. It brings hidden gaps in efforts to light while revealing areas needing additional focus.
Using the structured audit checklist outlined in this post will enable you to enhance local search rankings and gain more revenue-driving foot traffic.
Remember to capture important benchmark metrics before each audit cycle. Comparing these before and after metrics would demonstrate the business growth driven by your audit for local SEO improvements.
Carefully following each step surfaces problem zones while revealing problems in SEO and content strategies.
