Local SEO
Local SEO Audit
Different from a general SEO audit. Different signals, different competitors, different fixes — and usually a faster payback.
A local SEO audit examines the Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, local content and competitor position, then returns a prioritised plan. The Nexclick delivers it as a working document you keep, usable whether or not you continue with us. It takes two weeks.
Is this you?
What usually prompts the call
- You are invisible in the map pack and nobody has told you why.
- You are about to hire someone for local SEO and want an independent baseline first.
- You have several branches and no idea which are performing and which are not.
- Your rankings dropped and you cannot tell whether it is the profile, the citations or the site.
What we do
The actual deliverables
Things that appear on an invoice, not adjectives.
- Geo-grid ranking baseline
- Position measured from a grid of points across your target area, so you see your real radius rather than a single average that hides the shape.
- Full profile audit
- Every field checked against the businesses currently outranking you, not against a generic checklist. Categories, services, products, attributes, photos and posting activity.
- Citation and NAP consistency scan
- Every existing listing found and scored, including old addresses and dead numbers you no longer know about.
- Review analysis against competitors
- Volume, average, recency and response rate benchmarked against the specific businesses in your map pack, plus any signs of policy breaches on either side.
- Local content and on-site signals
- Location pages, local schema, embedded maps and NAP consistency between the site, footer and profile.
- Competitor teardown
- The three businesses in the pack, examined field by field. The output is a specific list of differences you can act on, not a general comparison.
- A prioritised action plan
- Every finding scored on impact against effort, with the owner named. This is the deliverable; everything above is the evidence behind it.
Decision tree
Do you need a local SEO audit, or something else?
Audits get sold to businesses that do not need one. Work through these before commissioning anything — from us or anyone else — and you may find the answer is cheaper than you expected.
01Your profile is suspended
Not an audit. You need reinstatement, urgently. An audit of an invisible profile tells you nothing useful until it is back.
02You have no Google Business Profile at all
Not an audit. You need setup and verification. There is nothing to diagnose yet.
03You sell nationally with no premises and no service area
Local SEO is the wrong discipline entirely. A general SEO audit will tell you far more.
04You know exactly what is wrong and just need it fixed
Skip the audit and buy the fix. Paying for a diagnosis you have already made is money wasted, and we will say so on the call.
05You are invisible and do not know why
This is precisely what the audit is for. Expect the cause to be categories, citations or review volume — in roughly that order of frequency.
06You have several branches performing inconsistently
Audit, scoped per location. The variation between branches is usually the most informative thing in the whole report.
07You are considering hiring an agency and want a baseline
Worth it. An independent baseline before someone starts work is the only way to judge what they actually changed.
How it works
Step by step, with timeframes
Timeframes are typical rather than guaranteed, and they assume we get account access and approvals when we ask.
- 01Day 1–3
Access and baseline
Profile access, geo-grid baseline run, and a conversation about which searches and which areas actually matter commercially.
- 02Week 1–2
Audit
Profile, citations, reviews, on-site signals and competitors. The competitor teardown is the slowest part and usually the most useful.
- 03Week 2
Prioritise
Findings ordered by impact against effort. A category correction and a two-year citation cleanup are not the same priority.
- 04Week 2–3
Walkthrough
An hour going through it with whoever will act on it, recorded, plus a fortnight of follow-up questions included.
What you get
Reporting and ownership
- The action plan as an editable document you own, not a locked PDF or a dashboard we can switch off.
- Geo-grid maps establishing a baseline you can measure future work against.
- The full citation spreadsheet, with status and access details for every listing found.
- A recorded walkthrough plus two weeks of follow-up questions.
- An honest verdict on whether ongoing local SEO is worth it for your business at all.
Tools and platforms
- Local Falcon or BrightLocal
- Google Business Profile Manager
- Screaming Frog
- Google Search Console
- Citation tracking tools
- Schema.org validator
Timeline
How long this actually takes
Two weeks from receiving profile access. Multi-location businesses take longer — roughly a day per location. Acting on the findings is the longer part: expect the fix list to represent one to three months of work, with profile corrections showing quickly and citation and review work compounding over three to six months. Where the honest finding is that your area is not competitive enough to justify a retainer, we will say so in the walkthrough. That happens more often than the industry admits, particularly in rural areas with few competitors.
Pricing model
Fixed-price project
Fixed price, scaled by location count. Credited against the first month if you go on to a local SEO retainer within 60 days.
Questions
Local SEO Audit questions
How is this different from a general SEO audit?
Different signals and different competitors. A general audit looks at crawling, content and links for organic results. This one looks at profile completeness, proximity, citations and reviews for the map pack. A business can be excellent at one and invisible in the other, and frequently is.
Do you need access to our Google Business Profile?
Manager access makes the audit substantially better, because insights data — calls, direction requests, search terms — is only visible from inside. We can audit externally without it, and the report will be thinner and we will say which parts are missing.
Can you audit several locations at once?
Yes, and priced per location. Multi-location audits are often the most valuable, because comparing branches with identical processes but different results isolates the variable quickly. The best-performing branch usually explains what the others are missing.
What if the audit finds nothing much wrong?
It happens, and we say so. Sometimes a profile is well set up and the constraint is genuinely proximity or competitor review volume, neither of which an agency can shortcut. That is a legitimate finding and a cheaper one than discovering it after six months of retainer.
Will you tell us what our competitors are doing wrong?
Yes, including where they breach Google guidelines — keyword-stuffed business names, ineligible addresses, suspicious review patterns. Reporting those through the redressal process is legitimate and often more effective than any optimisation on your own profile.
How often should this be repeated?
Annually is plenty for a stable single-location business. More useful is a re-run after any significant change — a move, a rebrand, a new competitor arriving, or a sudden ranking drop. Most local problems are traceable to a specific event rather than to gradual decline.
Last reviewed 28 July 2026.
Tell us what you are trying to fix
A 20-minute call, no pitch deck. The Nexclick will tell you what we would do, roughly what it costs, and whether we are the right people for it.