Local SEO has a nasty habit of feeling like a black box. You know a competitor keeps beating you in the map pack, but you can't see why. You could hire an agency, or you could spend ten minutes learning what they'd actually check — because most local audits are just a handful of questions in a specific order, and you can run them yourself.
Here's the audit, from someone who has run plenty, in the order that counts.
1. Your Google Business Profile is the foundation
Start here, because it's the difference between existing and being found. The audit questions:
- Is it complete? Every field filled — services, categories, hours, description. Gaps are gifts to competitors.
- Is it accurate? Does the name match your real-world signage? Does the address match everywhere else online? Inconsistency is the single most common local killer.
- Does it have posts and photos — and recent activity? An active profile signals a real, operating business.
If your profile is incomplete, inconsistent, or stale, every other factor is wasted.
2. Your reviews are your prominence
Reviews are central to local prominence, so audit them coldly:
- Volume: how many do you have versus the map pack leaders? Volume is a visible differentiator.
- Sentiment: are there clusters of unresolved negatives? Unanswered reviews are an easy mark.
- Freshness: is anything trickling in, or has it gone quiet? Stagnation reads as a dead business.
Reviews aren't a vanity metric — they're a ranking input and the social proof that decides the click.
3. Your citations must be consistent
Business listings scattered across the web are supposed to agree with each other and with Google. The audit:
- Search your business name and address. Do the results say the same thing everywhere?
- Wrong phone numbers, old addresses, and duplicated listings quietly erode trust. Fix the inconsistencies; you don't need hundreds of listings, just correct ones.
4. Your site and links back it up
Google still weighs your actual website. The audit:
- Is your business name, address, and phone (NAP) on the site, consistent and crawlable?
- Do you have a local landing page per location with real, relevant content — not just an address line?
- Do you have any links at all from local organizations, directories, or press? Local relevance needs a few local votes of confidence.
5. Look across at the winner
Finally, the most useful move: pull up whoever's beating you and answer these about them:
- Is their profile more complete or more active than yours?
- Do they have far more reviews or a better rating?
- Do they have stronger local links or a leaner, faster local site?
Whatever they have that you don't is your priority list, stated in plain terms.
The honest outcome
Most businesses that think they're losing on "the algorithm" are actually losing on a checkbox: an incomplete profile, an inconsistent NAP, a review drought, or no local landing page. Fix those and you don't need to reverse-engineer a black box — the gap closes on its own.
If you'd rather not do it alone, we run this exact audit for local businesses every week. Book a free website teardown and we'll give you the same ordered list: what's hurting you, what's helping your competitor, and what to fix first.