A comprehensive step-by-step guide to auditing your local SEO presence, featuring strategies to boost your authority, visibility, and conversions across Google, AI search, and map results.
Local SEO involves a series of targeted actions designed to build a business’s relevance and authority within a specific geographic area.
Search engines and large language models (LLMs) such as Google Gemini and ChatGPT rely on numerous data points to decide which businesses appear in various result types, including AI Overviews, Google’s AI Mode, featured snippets, local map packs, image or video carousels, and other emerging search features.
So, how can you determine and prioritize the optimizations most likely to drive high-quality, converting traffic, whether from traditional organic local search or AI-driven results?
In the following sections, we’ll explore each core element of your local search presence, helping you identify the best opportunities to enhance visibility across both organic and AI search platforms.
These tasks are presented in the typical sequence used for a complete audit, though many can be performed simultaneously.
Keyword and Search Intent Evaluation
While AI has transformed the traditional keyword-first approach, the best place to begin a local SEO audit is still within organic and AI-driven search results. Start by identifying the topical keywords, phrases, and AI prompts you want your business to appear for. This will help you understand your current positioning compared to competitors and other relevant content.
This initial research provides insight into areas where your business already has some authority or traction that you can build upon and highlights topics that may not be worth your time or effort.
Because SEO is a long-term investment, no keyword or prompt should be completely ruled out. However, it’s wise to prioritize topics where you have a realistic opportunity to gain visibility and attract meaningful traffic. Pay special attention to the search intent behind each keyword, focusing primarily on those with commercial or transactional intent, since AI summaries increasingly dominate informational search results.
You’ll also need to optimize for conversational search queries, prompts, and voice search, as AI-driven modes increasingly depend on natural language processing (NLP).
Additionally, search behaviors are evolving particularly among younger audiences who often use social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok for local discovery. While optimizing for these platforms involves a separate strategy, monitoring how your business, products, or services appear in these environments can reveal valuable insights into how search intent and discovery are shifting across both traditional and AI-powered channels.
Since people search in diverse ways, it’s crucial to move beyond single-keyword optimization and instead take a topical approach. Consider the full range of phrases, questions, and natural language variations your audience might use when looking for what you offer. This approach is even more critical in AI search, where every user prompt can evolve into a multi-step, conversational experience.
Website Performance and Optimization Audit
You can now conduct full content and technical website audits to ensure your site is optimized for maximum crawlability, indexability, and visibility by search engine and LLM crawlers. A typical audit is designed to analyze the underlying structure, content, and overall site experience.
Here again, there are many site auditing tools to crawl a website and then identify issues and prioritize actions to be taken based on SEO best practices.
A website audit and optimization can be broken down into a few buckets:
On-Page SEO Optimization
Webpage optimization focuses on creating well-structured pages that center on targeted topical keywords while delivering a seamless, positive user experience.
When a search engine crawls a page, it looks for signals that indicate the page’s topic and the questions it can answer. While crawlers assess the entire content, page titles and headings serve as primary indicators of focus. A clear, hierarchical heading structure not only helps search engines and LLMs understand your content but also makes it easier for visitors to scan and engage with your page.
Each webpage should ideally focus on a specific keyword topic and be unique. Keyword variations should be consistently incorporated across titles, URLs, headings, and body content to reinforce relevance.
Another critical area in a local SEO audit is image optimization. All images should have descriptive filenames and alt text, potentially including relevant keywords. This is especially important if images such as product or service photos play a central role in your business, as image carousels often appear in search results. Always ensure that images on your top-ranking pages are properly optimized.
Finally, excessive reliance on JavaScript can hinder visibility in LLM-driven search, since some LLMs do not execute JavaScript. If your site depends heavily on JavaScript, work with your developer to present essential content in raw HTML or via server-side rendering, ensuring it can be fully crawled and indexed.
Internal Linking Structure Review
A link audit helps identify broken or misdirected links that can create a poor user experience and confuse search engines and LLMs.
Links also serve as signals to search engines, showing the structure of your website and how effectively it guides users to authoritative, relevant answers.
During the audit, look for opportunities to crosslink key pages. If one page contains anchor text that naturally references content on another page, add a link but only if it logically guides users to more relevant information or an appropriate conversion point.
External links are equally important. Linking to authoritative sources can enhance credibility. For local businesses, this might include relevant local organizations, partners, or community events.
Schema Markup and Structured Data Check
Schema or structured data helps search engines and LLMs better understand your business, products, and services, improving visibility and the chance for enhanced search features. A thorough local SEO audit should identify pages where schema can be applied.
Local businesses can gain added exposure by:
- Publishing highly authoritative and relevant content.
- Using structured schema markup to tag this content appropriately.
Common local business schema types include Local Business, Product, Service, Review, and FAQPage. All schema markup should be validated using Google’s Rich Results Test or the Schema.org validator to ensure proper implementation.
Mobile-Friendliness Assessment
Since most consumers search for local services on mobile devices, providing a smooth mobile experience is crucial for local businesses. Your website should load quickly, be easy to navigate, and allow for seamless user interaction to keep visitors engaged and improve conversions.
Google provides several free mobile testing and monitoring tools, including Page Experience and Core Web Vitals in Google Search Console, to help assess mobile performance.
For a more detailed analysis of user experience and SEO, tools like Google Lighthouse can be used. However, local business owners will often need a web developer to implement the recommendations and optimizations suggested by this tool.
Duplicate Content Detection
High-quality, authoritative content is inherently original.
To ensure search engines recognize the origin of your content, it’s important to add a canonical tag in the HTML header for any page that contains content you did not create. For most unique pages, this will be a self-referencing canonical.
Failing to implement canonical tags correctly can harm your site’s authority and negatively impact rankings. Most site auditing tools will flag pages with missing or improperly formatted canonical tags.
Google Business Profile Evaluation
A Google Business Profile (GBP) serves as a “secondary” website and is often the most visible point of contact for local businesses. Increasingly, this secondary site is the first interaction consumers have with your business.
Maintaining an accurate and comprehensive GBP is essential for visibility in both organic and AI-driven search results. For example, a recent Propellic study on travel bookings in AI Mode found that GBPs are among the most displayed and engaged-with content for users searching for local accommodations and experiences.
A GBP audit should examine the accuracy and completeness of all profile elements, including:
- Business information and location details
- Correct primary business category
- Hours of operation
- Accurate pin location in Google Maps
- Classification as a physical location or service-area business
- Products and services
- Appointment links, if applicable
- Photos and videos
- Social profiles
- Offers
- Regular updates
- Events
- Informational content
A fully completed profile signals reliability to both users and search engines, increasing the likelihood of prominent placement in search results.
If you have claimed and are authorized to manage your GBP, all information can be accessed and edited directly within Google search results.
Online Reviews Monitoring and Management
Reviews are another critical component of a Google Business Profile.
Customer reviews not only appear on your GBP for others to reference but also play a major role in visibility within the local map pack and increasingly influence placement in Google AI Overviews.
Business owners are notified whenever a review is submitted and should respond promptly to both positive and negative feedback. Regularly analyzing reviews ensures none are overlooked and helps identify recurring customer service or satisfaction issues that need attention.
Additionally, a detailed review analysis can provide valuable content ideas, helping you create resources that directly address your customers’ most common questions and concerns.
Consumers also leave reviews on other platforms, including Facebook, local review sites like Yelp, and industry-specific sites such as TripAdvisor and Houzz. A comprehensive audit should take inventory of reviews across these platforms, as they can appear in search results and impact your online reputation.
Pro tip: Encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and, when appropriate, mention the specific product or service they’re reviewing. Keywords in reviews can contribute positively to search visibility and rankings.
Local Citations and Business Listings Audit
Local business listings and citations help search engines and LLMs verify that a business is both local and reputable within a specific geographic area. Recent studies indicate that unlinked brand mentions and citations play an important role in AI-driven visibility.
Maintaining a presence in reputable local directories, review sites, business directories (e.g., Chambers of Commerce), or local partner sites demonstrates your business’s “localness.”
Depending on your business size and scope, listings and citation audits can be automated or manual. Tools are available to find, monitor, and update primary citations, ensuring your Name, Address, Phone Number (NAP), website, and business description are accurate and consistent.
For businesses with fewer locations, a quick method is to search your business name the first three to four pages of results often reveal most existing listings. It’s also crucial to identify and resolve duplicate listings, which can confuse customers and search engines alike.
Local businesses should also monitor Reddit for mentions of their brand and offerings. Reddit’s community-driven reputation system (“karma”) emphasizes trust, but it also offers opportunities to engage with customers authentically and transparently, without being overtly promotional.
Backlink Profile Analysis
Backlinks (or inbound links) are links from third-party websites pointing to your site, similar to citations but broader in scope.
Backlinks remain a key factor in establishing website authority, particularly when they come from relevant, reputable sources.
For audits, there are many free and paid backlink tools, including the link monitoring feature in Google Search Console, which is an excellent starting point.
An effective backlink audit serves two main purposes:
- Identifying valuable backlink opportunities.
- Building high-quality links that can enhance your ranking and visibility.
For local businesses, backlinks from reputable local sources are especially valuable, reinforcing your geographic relevance.
Potential backlink sources can be researched in several ways:
- Backlink research tools like Ahrefs or Semrush can show domains where competitors have backlinks that you do not.
- Non-competitive sites appearing in organic search results for your primary keywords are good potential sources. Look for directories, blogs, or publications where you can contribute or comment.
- Referral sources in Google Analytics may reveal external sites that already link to you, offering opportunities to gain additional backlinks.
Local Content Review and Enhancement
People search differently depending on where they are in the buying journey, and a strong local web presence should include content tailored to each stage to enhance visibility and awareness.
A content audit ensures you have useful content for each stage your audience may be in:
- Informational content: Educates consumers about your products, services, and differentiators at the start of their journey. This content can be shared on your website, social media, or other channels. Since AI often repurposes informational content, it’s crucial to include your unique perspective and expertise, addressing questions like why, how, and what.
- Transactional content: Targets consumers who know what they want but are deciding where or from whom to buy. This may include reviews, testimonials, and competitive comparisons.
- Navigational content: Ensures visitors who search for your brand land on a page that validates your authority and provides a clear call-to-action, assuming the visitor arrived with a specific goal.
- Commercial content: Focused on consumers with strong purchase intent. Effective local business sites and social profiles should include offers, coupons, discounts, and clear paths to conversion.
By mapping content to each stage of the buying journey, your local business increases the likelihood of being found and chosen at every step of the customer experience.
AI-Optimized Content Strategy
From an AI search and visibility perspective, most AI-driven results respond to long-form questions or prompts from users. Therefore, it’s important to include some content in a direct question-and-answer format.
A quick and effective method is to create FAQ sections on product or service pages. Avoid overloading pages with generic questions each FAQ should be specific and relevant to the page it appears on.
As discussed earlier, structured content enhances crawling, scanning, and comprehension. When auditing your content, look for opportunities to use:
- Defined heading hierarchies
- Tables of contents for long-form pages
- Ordered or bulleted lists
These elements make your content easier for both users and AI/LLM bots to understand and engage with.
Content Diversity and Distribution Check
Quality content is content that your audience wants to consume, engage with, and share. For many businesses, this means exploring formats beyond just text and images.
Video content on platforms like YouTube, Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, and others is often more engaging and easier for audiences to consume, making it a highly effective way to capture attention and drive interaction.
Google Search Console Insights Review
Google Search Console is a powerful free tool that provides data on keyword and content performance, indexing status, schema/rich results validation, mobile and desktop experience, and security/manual actions.
A thorough local SEO audit should include a detailed review and analysis of this data to identify strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats across all areas of your site’s search presence.
Website owners and managers should pay close attention to pages that aren’t being crawled or indexed and any manual actions taken due to questionable practices, as both can severely impact search visibility.
While Google Search Console provides notifications for these issues and regular performance updates, conducting a full audit ensures that no problems are overlooked.
Analytics and Performance Metrics Evaluation
Whether you use Google Analytics or another visitor tracking solution, the data is invaluable for auditing top- and low-performing content, traffic sources, audience profiles, and paths to purchase. Insights from analytics are a cornerstone of a content audit.
As you review your site analytics, consider questions such as:
- Are my most visited pages also my top-ranking pages in search engines?
- Which pages serve as the top entry points from organic and AI search?
- Which LLMs are driving traffic to my site?
- Which pages or content are underperforming in traffic or engagement?
- What is the typical path to purchase, and can it be streamlined or optimized?
- Which domains are my top referrers, and can these sites be leveraged further for backlinks?
Use analytics tools to answer these questions and prioritize your content and keyword optimization efforts effectively.
Competitor Landscape Analysis
A thorough local SEO audit should also evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of your competitors.
Even if you have a general sense of your competition, start by identifying which businesses appear in organic and AI search results for your target keywords. You may discover different competitors across these formats, presenting both threats and opportunities.
These competitors are your true online rivals and offer valuable insights. If their sites or pages rank ahead of yours, analyze what they are doing to gain an edge.
You can apply the same audit steps to competitors as you do for your own site, examining their:
- Keyword optimization
- Content strategy
- Google Business Profile
- Reviews
- Local business listings
- Backlinks
Ultimately, the best way to outperform competitors is to provide a superior overall experience, both online and offline. This includes producing more relevant, unique, high-quality content that thoroughly addresses the questions and needs of your shared audience.
AI Search Optimization for Local Businesses
AI Overviews and AI Mode are increasingly replacing traditional organic search results, as Google aims to provide direct answers within its SERPs. Google’s recent integration of AI Mode into the Chrome address bar underscores its commitment to AI-driven search.
While AI search introduces new optimization considerations, a solid foundation in traditional SEO remains critical for visibility. At the local level, a fully optimized Google Business Profile is especially important, as it continues to appear prominently for searches with commercial intent, as discussed earlier.
AI Mode Strategy Checklist:
- Enhanced GBP Features: Keep up with new Google Business Profile features that enable direct interactions or transactions, as AI Mode will favor businesses leveraging these capabilities.
- Focus on User Intent: Understand the transactional and informational intent behind local searches. AI Mode prioritizes providing immediate solutions, so businesses that facilitate quick answers will have an advantage.
- Voice Search Optimization: With AI Mode becoming more conversational, optimize content for natural language queries and voice search. Ensure your content directly answers questions and uses conversational phrasing.
- Direct Action Integrations: While still emerging, explore opportunities to integrate with Google’s booking or reservation features if applicable. This could provide a direct conversion pathway within AI Mode.
Action Plan and Priority Setting
A full local SEO audit typically generates a substantial list of action items.
While most keyword, site, content, and backlink auditing tools help prioritize tasks, the overall list can still feel overwhelming.
A practical starting point is to focus on keywords, AI prompts, and content where your site has some, but not enough, authority. Address gaps or optimization opportunities here before targeting more competitive keywords or areas where you have little to no visibility. Building authority and trust is a long-term strategy.
Audit items should be reviewed every six to 12 months, depending on the size and scope of your web presence, to maximize your chances of being found by your local target audience.
