A local SEO audit is an essential activity for companies intending to get noticed locally. This involves assessing the previous and current website performance to plan further improvements.
According to Curate Lab, more than 2 billion websites are available online. Nearly 200 million websites are actively maintained regularly. Moreover, around 250000 websites are created online regularly.
Businesses that carry out comprehensive Local SEO audits will attract more local customers, increase foot traffic, and gain trustworthiness as well as credibility.
So, what steps should you follow for a local SEO audit in 2024? Don’t go anywhere. Read more to rank your website locally!
What Is Local SEO Audit?
Local SEO audit is an assessment by which you can review your website’s past and present situation. Moreover, you can make a future plan for your website by conducting a local SEO audit. This is a strategy that helps businesses find local search results on search engines.
By focusing on local SEO, companies can attract more local customers, and it will increase foot traffic, build trust and credibility, and stay competitive in their area. Therefore, in this process, you need to go through some processes, which are below.
How Does Local SEO Work?
Local SEO works by optimizing a business’s online presence to attract more customers from relevant local searches. With the rise in the number of people searching for local businesses, Google has adapted its algorithm to prioritize local results.
This implies that Google automatically considers users’ locations whenever they search for a product or service. Substituting “near me” or “nearby” into a search query is now unnecessary.
For example, if you type “dentist office” or “Italian pizza delivery” into Google, it will show results for businesses near your current location. This convenience has become increasingly important with the surge in mobile device usage.
People are frequently using their smartphones to find local services while on the go, making local SEO crucial for businesses wanting to improve their visibility to mobile customers.
Local SEO involves various strategies to enhance a business’s local presence. These include optimizing the website for local keywords, ensuring the business is listed correctly on Google My Business, collecting positive customer reviews, and building local backlinks.
Using these strategies, businesses may increase their visibility in the highly competitive Google Map Pack, where a large percentage of local search hits go.
Overall, local SEO helps both small and large businesses increase their exposure and sales by making it easier for potential customers to find them based on their location.
As more companies recognize the importance of catering to the growing number of mobile customers, investing in local SEO has become a vital component of any comprehensive digital marketing strategy.
How to Perform a Local SEO Audit?
Performing a Local SEO audit is essential for ensuring that your business is optimized to attract local customers through search engines. Here’s a comprehensive guide on how to perform a Local SEO audit effectively:
1. Perform Proper Keyword Research
Performing keyword research is the first step in a local SEO audit. It involves identifying relevant search terms that potential customers use to find businesses like yours in your locality.
Looking at topic growth, competition, and importance can reveal a lot about what your target audience is looking for.
If you want to improve your chances of ranking higher in local search engine results pages (SERPs), optimize the content on your website to match the purpose of local searchers.
An effective keyword study is the first step in creating a local SEO plan that will attract local visitors and improve your online exposure.
2. Technical Analysis of Websites
To begin a regional SEO audit, you must first perform a thorough technical audit. This means checking out the technical aspects of your website to make sure it is optimized for both search engines and user experiences.
Test Website Speed and Performance: Start by ascertaining your website’s loading speed across various devices and browsers. Use tools such as Google PageSpeed Insights or GTmetrix to diagnose any problems that may be slowing down the site. Optimize images, exploit browser caching, and reduce JavaScript and CSS files (Stylesheets) to enhance performance.
Test Mobile-Friendliness: Ensure that your site is entirely responsive and offers a seamless user experience on mobile platforms. The majority of internet searches are now done through mobile, so Google prioritizes mobile-friendly websites in its rankings. Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test tool to verify this for your site.
Check Indexing Problems: Make sure search engines are crawling all essential pages on your website. Using Google Search Console, check index status and identify any page that could be blocked from indexing due to robots.txt directives or meta tags.
Evaluate Your URL Structure and Site Architecture: Check if your website’s URL structure is clean, descriptive, and good for users and search engines. Organize your site architecture logically using clear navigation and internal links so that search engines can crawl and index content efficiently.
Examine HTTPS Security: Security is increasingly crucial for both user confidence and search engine ranking factors. Make sure your website is served over HTTPS so that it encrypts user data, thereby making it more secure online. Check SSL certificate configuration issues using tools like SSL Labs.
Correct Crawl Errors/Broken Links: Find crawl errors/broken links on your site, then fix them immediately; broken links will affect SEO rankings badly since they will ruin user experience. Use tools such as Screaming Frog or Google Search Console to find and solve these problems in time.
Assess Schema Markup Usage: Using schema markup can enhance your website’s visibility on the search engine results pages (SERPs) by providing structured data that assist search engines in understanding content better. Evaluate how you’ve implemented schema markup across your website and make sure they fit within the local SEO goals of your business.
3. Perfectly Set Up Your Google Business Profile
A local SEO audit is only complete if you create a Google Business Profile that is properly set up. Your first step is to claim and verify your Google My Business (GMB) listing if it’s not done yet.
Your business information should be correct and current–business name, address, phone number (NAP), and working hours. Select the most relevant business categories and add a detailed service description rich in keywords.
Great photos of your products, firm, or even services can improve the profile, making more customers visit your website. Regularly update posts, offers, and events and keep the profile alive by networking with people on different platforms.
Also, encourage satisfied customers to leave positive reviews and respond promptly to each review to show that you are engaged in customer care activities.
Optimizing your GMB profile completely not only affects local SEO ranking but also increases your visibility online and makes you look credible to potential clients.
4. Analyzing the Customer/Client Review
When performing a Local SEO Audit, the analysis of customer reviews is vital. New customers are attracted through reviews, which improves local search rankings. According to a BrightLocal study in 2022, 85% of people who are looking for new businesses think reviews matter. Assess your reviews to spot any trends, whether they are mostly positive or negative, and make it a point to respond quickly as a sign of active participation.
When you engage with reviews, Google sees that your business is responsive and customer-centered, which might improve your local search ranking. Encourage more feedback through incentives like special offers or discounts for individuals who provide online feedback.
This not only builds up the count of your reviews but also boosts your online reputation as well as visibility on local searches. For an ideal online presence, monitor and manage client feedback regularly while attracting the locals effectively.
5. Examine the Citation for Your Local Business
Citations are any online mentions of your business’s name, address, and phone number (NAP). They can be found in various local listings, such as the Yellow Pages, the local chamber of commerce, or various directory sites.
First, create a compilation of all places where your business is mentioned on the internet. There are platforms, for instance, Moz Local, BrightLocal, or Yext, which may help to identify these citations and then audit them for accuracy.
Therefore, your NAP information will be consistent and accurate across all listings. Business credibility could be affected by inconsistent or outdated citations, making it hard for search engines to trust what you say. This will have negative impacts on your search engine rankings.
Confirm that your company name, address, and telephone number match across every platform. If your business has moved, changed its name, or even updated its phone number, ensure these changes appear in each citation. Deal with any differences immediately.
Additionally, search for duplicate listings – removing them makes it easier for search engines and potential customers to navigate through information about your business.
Not only do correct citations enhance local SEO rankings, but they also aid future clients in tracing and putting confidence in dealings with such businesses.
So, this thorough examination of local citations is an essential part of maintaining a robust online presence with integrity so as to increase more traffic locally towards your firm.
6. Analyze the Competitors
Evaluate how they are doing with regard to those keywords. Look at their Google Business Profile (GBP), reviews, social media activity, and local listings. This will help you understand where they are, strong and weak. Use tools like Ahrefs to identify which other search terms your rivals have aimed at that can be employed in your strategy.
Understanding what other companies do readily reveals opportunities for improvement and areas for differentiation. Monitoring the competition regularly keeps you ahead of the SEO efforts done locally.
This all-encompassing approach is important in refining local SEO campaigns and boosting online visibility. Sources such as HubSpot’s marketing blog provide more detailed information about conducting audits for local SEOs.
7. Google Analytics Review
To do a local SEO audit, it is important to review your website’s performance through Google Analytics. This instrument offers invaluable data on how your web pages are doing and helps you to learn which areas may need some tweaking for better performance.
Firstly, examine the most popular pages of your website and evaluate their visibility and optimization. Confirm if these pages are delivering customers’ needs as expected. Study organic search traffic in order to understand what search queries and keywords bring people to you.
Then, assess page speed since slow loading can negatively impact user experience and search rankings. Use Google Analytics to see the average time it takes for your pages to load; let this be an indicator of whether there is any need to speed up some of them.
Check out how users behave on your site from the steps they take before buying or converting. This is a good basis for evaluating navigation effectiveness and conversion funnels.
Besides, see if other websites link back to yours through a review on your backlink profile. Receiving quality backlinks from reputable, relevant sites can greatly improve your search engine rankings.
Conversely, links from dubious or unrelated websites can injure SEO strategy. Ahrefs or Moz tools will help get insights into the quality of incoming links that might eventually be converted into high-quality ones.
Keeping track of such statistics using Google Analytics guarantees that you do not lose your online presence and can further enhance local SEO.
Benefits Of Local SEO Audit
Local search audits are an essential tool that is necessary for businesses targeting their local customers. Here are some eight reasons why conducting a local SEO audit is important:
Clients Engagement throughout
A local SEO audit ensures your company’s visibility throughout the entire customer journey. With strong local SEO strategies, clients will always be engaged from the time someone puts in an initial search to making the final purchase.
Given that almost half of Google’s 8.5 billion daily searches are for local companies, enterprises have a unique chance to reach a vast audience with little trouble at all.
Local search optimization keeps prospective consumers engaged from awareness to consideration to conversion.
Get Your Business Noticed Online
It cannot be underestimated how much search engines dominate web traffic. Organic and local searches account for 69% of all Internet traffic, which shows how critical it is to have a strong online presence.
Through local SEO audits, companies can improve their search ranking positions, leading to improved visibility and brand recognition online.
By ensuring that your website is optimized for local search queries, you can attract more visitors and establish a stronger online footprint.
Increase Sales by Increasing the Average Rating of Reviews
Positive reviews significantly influence consumers’ decisions. When people look at local firms, 76 percent check internet reviews every time without fail.
A local SEO audit helps you handle your online reviews better and enhance them by finding areas that need improvement, as well as encouraging positive feedback from happy customers.
Higher average ratings not only attract more customers but also boost sales by building trust and credibility with potential clients.
Improve Credibility And Revenue
Credibility plays a crucial role in the success of any business entity, and local SEO’s contribution facilitates its development.
In fact, nearly half of people who conduct a local search will visit or contact the store on the same day. This statistic demonstrates the importance of appearing credible and trustworthy in local search results.
A local SEO audit can improve your website’s content, structure, and user experience to encourage customers to select your business over competitors. Thus, an improved credibility means more revenue.
Utilize Google Reviews for Credibility and Customer Attraction
Google reviews are crucial tools that businesses use to boost their credibility and attract customers. In fact, 87% of all shoppers used Google to find local establishments in 2022.
A local SEO audit will enable you to better utilize Google reviews by making sure your business is well-listed and encouraging happy clients to leave reviews for you.
Additionally, responding to feedback can positively affect your ranking. This way, you can improve the way people perceive your brand and generate more leads.
Build Profitable Alliances through Referrals
A comprehensive local SEO audit could expose areas where one can form profitable alliances through referrals. By optimizing your business for local search, you can connect with complementary businesses and establish mutually beneficial referral partnerships.
This can lead to increased visibility, a broader customer base, and enhanced credibility. Moreover, links from trusted local businesses may be able to drive high-quality traffic to your site, thereby boosting sales and revenue.
Share Knowledge and Build Credibility
To build credibility, it is strategic to share valuable content and knowledge with your audience. Dependency on the Internet has reached a peak, with 98% of consumers researching local businesses through the Web in 2022.
By conducting a local SEO audit, one can come up with the best content strategies to address the issues and concerns of the target group.
Your business may establish itself as a go-to resource for local searchers by publishing helpful blogs, articles, guides, and tools. This, in turn, attracts more customers and helps you gain their trust.
Advantage in Emergence of Hyper-Local Shopping
Hyper-local shopping trends offer businesses an upper hand over competitors who need to follow recent market changes. The Google Map Pack is irresistible as it captures 42% of all clicks for local searches.
It is possible to ensure that your business appears prominently on the Google Map Pack by having a local SEO audit done, thus making it easier for customers in your locality to discover you easily.
Optimizing for hyperlocal search queries helps businesses attract more foot traffic and increase conversions.
It also gives them a competitive edge by staying ahead of competitors who may not be as finely tuned to local SEO nuances.
Top Tools For Local SEO Audit
For a comprehensive list of top tools to employ in order to conduct a local SEO audit, here are nine very effective tools that businesses can use to optimize their online presence and enhance their local search rankings:
Google My Business
This is vital for local SEO since it affects how businesses appear in Google Maps and other local search results.
It helps businesses manage their online presence on Google, including their business information, reviews, and photos.
For your local SEO plan to work best, you need to know how people find and connect with your business online.
When companies know this, they can change their online presence to meet customer needs better and show up higher in local search results.
Moz Local
Moz Local is a powerful tool for managing and optimizing local business listings. Local SEO helps businesses ensure that their information is the same across all of their online sites and tools.
Additionally, Moz Local provides insights into local search rankings, reviews, and competitor analysis, making it easier to identify areas for improvement or track progress over time.
BrightLocal
BrightLocal combines a suite of tools designed specifically to aid in conducting an audit and managing your local SEO.
It has tools for building citations locally, reputation management, and reporting on our performance against competitors.
BrightLocal’s audit tool allows businesses to scan their digital presence, identifying inconsistencies in business information across various platforms. It also monitors their rankings at different stages of appearance.
SEMrush
SEMrush is an all-in-one SEO platform featuring elements of localized assessment.
This toolkit empowers marketers with specialized tools for conducting location-specific keyword research. SEMRush enables them to analyze competitors’ regional SEO strategies, identifying strengths and opportunities.
Additionally, marketers can monitor SERP rankings of competitors who have achieved higher visibility in targeted locations, providing valuable insights for optimizing their local SEO efforts.
It also offers analysis regarding search volume in a given area, helping marketing executives develop content meant only for PPC ads and targeting people living within proximity.
Yext
Yext enables companies to update their digital knowledge, such as listings, reviews, and local SEO. It ensures that information is consistent and accurate by allowing businesses to update their data across multiple sites and platforms from a single dashboard.
On the other hand, Yext helps in analytics and offers insights into how customers interact with your business listings, which can help optimize your local SEO efforts.
Whitespark
Whitespark focuses on local SEO tools, especially for citation building and tracking local search rankings.
They have a citation finder tool that assists businesses in finding new citation opportunities while ensuring consistency in terms of NAP (Name, Address, Phone Number) across directories.
Whitespark’s local rank tracker allows monitoring of their positions at a given place within the search results page (SERP).
Ahrefs
Ahrefs is best known for its backlink analysis tools, but it also provides features for localized assessment.
Keyword research can be done using Ahrefs for any given location market; competitor studies can be made based on where others have ranked higher than us in SERPs after considering regional SEO strategies adopted by these players.
Ahrefs’ Site Audit tool enables companies to identify technical SEO problems that may affect their visibility in localized searches, such as broken links or missing meta tags.
Screaming Frog
Screaming Frog is a website crawler that can be used for technical SEO audits, including local SEO.
It crawls websites looking for issues such as broken links, duplicate content, and missing meta tags, which could impact rankings locally.
The Screaming Frog Search Engine Optimization Spider Tool provides extensive information about a website’s structure and areas for optimization.
This tool is necessary to do thorough studies that aim to boost success in targeted results. Businesses can improve their local SEO strategies by figuring out what problems might come up and what improvements can be made.
Local SEO Checklist
The Local SEO Checklist is a free instrument that features a detailed list of things to do for local search engine optimization.
It comprises Google My Business optimization, building local citations, customer reviews, and on-page SEO as key areas.
Local businesses could utilize the Local SEO Checklist to ensure that they adopt some of the best practices and improve their appearance in terms of local search results.
How To Measure The Success Of Local SEO Audit?
Monitoring a variety of key metrics is necessary for evaluating local SEO success. You can gauge and evaluate your local SEO campaign’s effectiveness by monitoring these indicators:
Backlink Analysis
Backlinks are important to search optimization because they show that your site is credible and authoritative. By keeping track of your backlink profile, you will be able to evaluate the quality and amount of inbound links going to your website.
Using tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush, one can gain insights into new backlinks, acquired and lost links, as well as the overall health of the backlink profile.
You can then get high-quality links from relevant local sites that have the authority to support local SEO.
Conversion Metrics
These metrics measure important business actions such as purchases, email sign-ups, or service subscriptions.
Looking at conversion rates from organic traffic channels will help you understand how well your local SEO activities are, resulting in valuable interactions with your website.
Through Google Analytics conversion tracking feature, businesses can attribute conversions to particular keywords or SEO campaigns.
Keyword Rankings
Keyword rankings denote where a website appears in search engine result pages (SERPs) for specific queries it targets.
To assess visibility and competitiveness within local search results, it is a good idea to keep tracking keyword rankings targeted for locale-specific searches related to the business at hand.
Tracking keywords using tools like Moz or SEMrush enables websites to follow rank fluctuations over time so that content and marketing strategies can be optimized accordingly.
Organic Traffic Metrics
Organic traffic shows how many people come to the website through search engines in general terms.
An increase in organic traffic means more visibility as well as better targeting of local audiences with quality content plus optimized keywords.
To determine areas that need improvement in your local SEO strategy based on growth opportunities as shown by changes in organic traffic data using Google Analytics, among others.
User Engagement Metrics
User engagement metrics show how visitors interact with a website. Bounce rate, average session duration, pages per session, and social shares are some of the metrics that depict user satisfaction or interest in your content.
By monitoring engagement metrics, you can align your local SEO strategy with popular content, optimize for users, and remove any barriers that may hinder them.
Tips To Make Your Local SEO Audit More Effective
Conducting a successful local SEO audit is crucial for corporations that wish to increase their online presence and attract the local market. Here are six tips to make your local SEO audit more effective:
Google My Business (GMB) Profile Review and Optimization
Your Google My Business profile is critical for local SEO as it directly impacts your appearance in Google Maps and local search results.
Ensure your GMB profile is complete, accurate, and up-to-date. Check to make sure that your name, address, phone number (NAP), and business hours are consistent across every platform you use.
Get some high-quality pictures, select the correct categories, ask customers to leave reviews, and Add posts, offers, or any other updates about your business on a regular basis so as to keep your GMB profile useful.
Perform a Thorough Website Audit
A comprehensive website audit helps identify technical issues that may hinder your local SEO performance.
Use tools such as Screaming Frog SEO Spider or SEMrush to crawl through your website for broken links, duplicate content, slow loading time, mobile friendliness, etc.
Ensure you optimize the website for location-specific landing pages if this site serves multiple areas using locally relevant keywords.
In addition, improve title tags, meta descriptions, and headers with appropriate keywords.
Analyze Local Keyword Strategy
Review your current keyword strategy to ensure it aligns with local search intent. Look for potential high-ranking keywords that relate to your products or services along with their geographic locations.
Check out Google Keyword Planner, Ahrefs, or Moz, which will give you keyword search volumes, competition levels, and trends related to a given audience.
Use natural language inclusions of these phrases in web content, including landing page blog articles and meta-tagging, to enhance the site’s visibility to locally targeted traffic.
Assess Online Reviews and Reputation Management
Online reviews play a significant role in local SEO and consumer trust. Monitor and manage customer reviews across platforms like Google, Yelp, and Facebook to maintain a positive online reputation.
Encourage satisfied customers to leave reviews and promptly respond to both positive and negative feedback.
Address customer concerns professionally and demonstrate your commitment to customer satisfaction. Positive reviews not only increase credibility but also impact local search rankings.
Optimize for Local Citations and Directories
Local citations—mentions of your business name, address, and phone number (NAP) on external websites—are crucial for local SEO.
Ensure your business information is consistent across popular local directories, review sites, and industry-specific platforms. Use tools like BrightLocal or Moz Local to audit existing citations and identify opportunities to build new ones.
Claiming up these pages on Yelp, Yellow Pages, and other industry associations, among others, helps boost local search visibility as well as authority over the same.
Take advantage of the chance to use local content and backlinks.
Create localized content that resonates with your target audience and addresses their specific needs or interests.
Focus blog posts, articles, or guides on things such as local events, news, or community initiatives relating to different sectors through which they are involved.
Surely, quality backlinks from a trustworthy source will give an extra boost when ranking higher in local SERPs.
Finally, How Often Should You Audit For Local SEO?
A regular SEO check is required to maintain and enhance a website’s search engine performance. A comprehensive local SEO audit should be done at least once a year.
However, more frequent audits are recommended in rapidly changing or highly competitive industries, such as every three months, monthly, or even weekly.
Such audits are essential after significant updates to search engine algorithms or when web traffic dramatically changes.
These periodic checks will guarantee that your site adheres to the latest search engine algorithm updates and best practices.
Regular SEO audits provide opportunities for improvement and result in optimal online exposure and performance for clients.
FAQs
How to kick-start a Local SEO Audit?
Start a Local SEO Audit by obtaining information from your Google My Business profile, website analytics, and keyword rankings. Use tools like Google Analytics, Google Search Console, SEMrush, or Moz (SEO software) to get insights on how your site is performing and what areas need improvement.
What should I check in my Google My Business profile during an audit?
Make certain that your Google My Business profile is complete by checking for correct business details (name, address, phone number), current business hours, relevant categories, great images, and customer reviews.
How can I improve my local keyword strategy?
To enhance your local keyword strategy, do some keyword research to identify high-potential local search terms relevant to your business. Integrate these keywords naturally into the content of your website, such as headers, localized landing page titles, meta descriptions, etcetera. Regularly update your content based on seasonal trends and local events.
What are the roles of local citations in Local SEO?
Local citations represent mentions of your company’s name, address, and phone number (NAP) on external websites. They play an important role in improving the credibility and visibility of a business within the locality it operates within through optimizing for location-based searches on engines like Google Maps.
How do I gauge if my efforts toward Local SEO are fruitful?
Track whether or not you are achieving success with Local SEO efforts by monitoring metrics such as organic traffic, conversion rates, user engagement metrics, and local search rankings. Use tools such as Google Analytics and Google Search Console to analyze these metrics, then adjust your strategy based on the insights you gain.
What are some common mistakes to avoid when doing a Local SEO Audit?
Common mistakes include not updating business information, ignoring negative reviews, not optimizing for mobile, and failing to focus on local backlinks. Secure your website to be mobile-friendly, manage customer reviews actively, and seek high-quality local backlinks for improved local SEO performance.
