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Hiring Local SEO Help

What Is a Local SEO Audit?

A local SEO audit is a structured review of your Business Profile, reviews, website, listings, and competitors that ends with a prioritized list of fixes. A useful one tells you what to do first and why. A page of automated scores with no plan is not an audit.
By Eric Walker · Last updated October 2026

What it should cover

  • Business Profile: primary category, services, name, address, phone, hours, and whether anything breaks Google’s guidelines.
  • Reviews: rating, number, recency, and how you respond, compared with the businesses ahead of you.
  • Website: a page for each service, titles, contact details that match the profile, mobile layout, and speed.
  • Listings: whether your name, address, and phone match on the directories that matter. See my page on NAP consistency.
  • Competitors: who ranks and what they have that you do not.
  • Rankings: your position for the searches that matter, from several places in your area.
  • Tracking: whether Search Console, analytics, and call tracking are set up so you can measure results.

What you should get back

The deliverable is not a score. It is a short list in priority order: what to fix, why it matters, roughly how much work it is, and who should do it. If you finish reading and still do not know what to do on Monday, the audit has not done its job.

Red flags

  • An automated PDF with a score and no human commentary.
  • A long list of minor warnings that treats a missing meta tag as seriously as a wrong primary category.
  • No mention of your actual competitors.
  • Recommendations that are the same for every business.
  • A free audit that only names categories of problems and gives no specifics from your own profile. A free audit can be good, but it should be specific.

A version you can run yourself

You can do a rough audit in an afternoon with free tools: your Business Profile and its performance report, Google Search Console, PageSpeed Insights, and an incognito search from a few locations. Work through my local SEO checklist as you go and write down every gap. Then sort the gaps by how many calls they might be costing you.

The how-to steps are in how do I check where my business ranks on Google?.

When to pay for one

Pay for an audit when you have been working on it for months without movement, when you are choosing between providers and want an independent view, or when you inherited a profile and site from someone else and do not know what is wrong. Ask what the audit includes before you buy, who does it, and whether the recommendations come with a call to explain them.

What happens after

An audit is only worth the fixes you make afterward. Pick the top three items and finish them before starting new ones. Check back in six to eight weeks to see whether anything moved.

An audit is not ongoing work

An audit tells you what is wrong. It does not fix anything. Some companies fold it into a monthly service and some sell it as a one-time project that you can hand to your own team or a contractor. Either is fine as long as you know which one you are buying. If a quote says audit and the deliverable is a document, expect to do the work yourself or pay for it separately.

Related questions

Want a second pair of eyes on this?

If you would rather have someone look at your own profile and website, I will tell you what is worth fixing first and what can wait.
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