SEO audit for local businesses: found by the people nearby
Most local SEO is done off your website. The rest is on it, and it is usually broken.
For a local business the website has one job: convince someone nearby, on a phone, in under a minute. Almost everything an audit finds on these sites falls into two groups — things that stop you being found, and things that lose the person once they arrive.
Google Business Profile does the heavy lifting for local ranking. What your site contributes is consistency, speed and structured information, and that is what this checks.
What goes wrong on Local business sites
Contact details that disagree with each other
The footer says one phone number, the contact page another, and the Google Business Profile a third. Search engines use consistency as a confidence signal, and every inconsistency is a reason to trust a competitor's listing more.
No LocalBusiness structured data
Name, address, phone, opening hours and service area in machine-readable form is the cheapest thing on this list and the most often missing. It is what lets a search engine — and increasingly an AI assistant — answer "are they open now" correctly.
Location pages that are the same page
Multi-location businesses generate one page per town with the name swapped in. Google treats that exactly as it looks. Each location page needs something real: the actual address, the staff, the parking, what that branch does differently.
Opening hours only in an image
Hours in a graphic are invisible to every machine that would otherwise repeat them. So are menus, price lists and addresses in a PDF.
Slow on a phone, on mobile data
Local searches happen outdoors on bad connections. A homepage carrying a video background and four web fonts loses people before it renders, and no amount of ranking fixes that.
No obvious way to call
A phone number that is not a tel: link, buried below three sections, on a site whose main conversion is a phone call. It is not a ranking problem, but it is why the ranking isn't paying.
What an AuditOpti crawl looks for
- LocalBusiness structured data: present, valid, and matching the site
- Contact details across every page, and whether they agree
- Location pages: how similar they are to each other
- Mobile Core Web Vitals, measured the way a phone on mobile data would see it
- Content locked in images or PDFs where nothing can read it
- Titles and descriptions on service pages, which are usually templated
Check part of it right now, free
These read a live page and tell you what a search engine sees. No signup, no email.
Schema markup checker
See the structured data on your page, and whether it is machine-readable at all.
SEO score checker
Score one page against the checks that actually move rankings.
Meta tag checker
Every tag in the head of your page, read back to you the way a crawler sees it.
The issues behind this
Each has a full entry in the issue library: what it is, what it costs a business, and step-by-step fixes for WordPress, Shopify, Webflow and custom builds.
Missing or invalid structured data
No machine-readable description of the business or page.
Thin content
The page has too little text to be useful.
Slow largest contentful paint
The main content takes too long to appear.
Missing meta description
No summary text for the search result snippet.
Questions
Related
Restaurant
Someone is deciding where to eat in the next twenty minutes, on a phone.
Real estate
Your inventory changes weekly. Your URL structure shouldn't.
Wix
Wix has improved enormously. The remaining problems are specific, and mostly settings.
Crawl the site and check every location page, phone number and schema block at once
The free audit crawls the site, groups every finding, and returns the five things worth fixing this month in plain English. No card, no call.
Run a free audit