An SEO Checklist for Local Business Owners

Most local businesses do not need an expensive retainer to start showing up in search. They need the basics done properly and consistently. Here is the list we give clients before we quote them anything.

Run a site audit

An audit surfaces the discoverability and crawlability problems on your site and tells you how to fix them. Look at on-page content, meta tags, duplicate data, image sizes and page load speed. Every additional second a page takes to load costs you roughly 20% of your traffic, so speed is not a nice-to-have.

Fix crawlability

If you are on a CMS like WordPress, a plugin will get the right tags onto your pages. Set a unique meta-title and meta-description for every page — without them, search engines treat your pages as duplicate content and rank them accordingly.

Earn backlinks

Backlinks are links from other sites to yours, and search engines read them as votes of confidence. The number matters less than the quality of the sites the links come from. Publish something genuinely useful, share it, and links follow.

Write to a content strategy

Ranking your homepage for one keyword is a start. Ranking additional pages for adjacent search terms is how you grow. A content strategy is just a written agreement with yourself about what you publish, who it is for, and how often.

Create and submit a sitemap

A sitemap tells search engines which pages exist. Generate one, then submit it through each search engine’s webmaster tools so your pages get indexed rather than discovered by accident.

Sign up for webmaster tools

Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools are free, and they show you impressions, clicks and where you currently rank for a given keyword. You cannot improve what you are not measuring.

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Working through this list will get you most of the way there. If you would rather spend that time running your business, get in touch — this is what we do.