A local SEO audit checklist a trade can run in an hour

A local SEO audit checklist for a trade covers six things, in this order: where you actually rank, your Google Business Profile, your reviews against the three businesses above you, your name, address and phone across the web, your website, and whether you can count the calls. Each check is a pass or a fail you can see for yourself. A plumber or electrician can run the whole list in about an hour, as long as the hour goes on looking, not fixing.

That last part is the rule that makes this work. Every owner we sit down with wants to fix the first problem they find, and an hour later they have repaired one thing and still do not know what else is broken. Write the fails down. Decide the order afterwards.

How to run this checklist without fooling yourself

Three habits keep a self-audit honest.

• Search like a customer, not like the owner. Use a private window, logged out, and type what a customer types: roofer collingwood, not your business name. Google shows an owner a friendlier picture than it shows a stranger.
• Check from where your customers are. The Map Pack changes with where the searcher stands. If you work out of Wasaga Beach but most of your jobs are in Collingwood and Blue Mountain, the result on your kitchen table is not the one that pays.
• Mark a fail as a fail. “Mostly filled in” is a fail. “We used to ask for reviews” is a fail. The point of the list is to find what is quietly costing you calls, and the answer is usually something you already half knew.

The local SEO audit checklist

1. Where you actually rank

Search your top three money phrases, trade plus town, one at a time. Write down whether you appear in the Map Pack (the three map results) and where you sit in the plain results below it.

• Pass: you are in the Map Pack for at least one phrase that brings in paying work.
• Fail: you only appear when someone searches your business name.

What to record for each search

Record the three businesses in the pack, in order. You need their names for check 3. Do not skip this. Plenty of owners have never looked at who is beating them for their own trade in their own town, and the names are often a surprise.

2. Your Google Business Profile

Open the profile the way a customer sees it, then open it in the owner dashboard.

• Primary category: it names your core service as specifically as Google allows. “Electrician”, not “Contractor”. Get this one wrong and nothing else on the profile can lift you past it. The GBP categories guide for Collingwood trades names the correct choice for each trade.
• Secondary categories: 4 to 8 of them, each a service you really do.
• Service area: set to the towns you actually take work in, not left blank.
• Hours: correct, including holiday hours. A profile that says “open” on a day you do not answer the phone loses the customer twice.
• Photos: real job photos, recent ones. Count them. Under 20 is a fail, and so is a gallery where the newest shot is older than 6 months.
• Services and description: filled in, in plain words, naming the towns you work in.

Google Business Profile audit: two quiet fails

A wrong primary category and a stale photo set both sit high on the list of what we find on real audits. Both take minutes to fix, and both are invisible to an owner who only ever looks at the dashboard.

3. Reviews against the pack

Go back to the three businesses you wrote down in check 1. For each one, note the review count, the star average and the date of the newest review. Then do the same for yourself.

• Pass: your count is within reach of the third-place business, and you have a review from the last month or two.
• Fail: the newest review is more than 90 days old, whatever your total is. Google reads an empty recent window as a sign the business may have gone quiet.

Compare yourself to the third-place business, not the leader. For context, the median Collingwood service business holds 15 reviews, so a trade with a steady ask is often closer to the pack than the leader’s count makes it feel. The trade-by-trade maths is in how many Google reviews it takes to rank in Collingwood.

Replies count too

Open your last ten reviews. If none of them has a reply from you, mark it. I have not measured a reply moving rank on its own, but a profile with a silent owner reads as unattended to the customer choosing between you and the next name.

4. Name, address and phone across the web

Your business name, address and phone number (NAP) should match everywhere Google looks: the profile, your website footer, Facebook, Bing, Apple Maps and the main Canadian directories.

• Pass: the same name, the same address and the same phone number on every source you check.
• Fail: a second phone number anywhere. An old cell number on a directory from years ago, a tracking number on the website, a different street spelling that changes the address.

The fastest honest version of this check is to paste your profile, your footer and one directory into the free NAP consistency checker. It tells a cosmetic difference apart from a real mismatch. If it finds real ones, the fix order is in the NAP consistency guide for Collingwood trades.

Local SEO audit for a business with two locations

If you run two addresses, check each profile separately, and search for your business name plus each town. A second listing you did not create is its own problem, and it splits your reviews between two records.

5. Your website

Open your site on your phone, not your desktop.

• The phone number is visible without scrolling and starts a call when you tap it.
• The page for your main town exists as its own page, with real local detail, not the homepage with the town name added.
• The page titles name the trade and the town. Look at the tab or the search result; “Home” is a fail.
• The contact form asks only for what you need to call back.

The phone test is the one we care about most. A site that ranks and cannot be tapped into a call is a ranking with no way to capture the job. Our write-up on websites that turn visits into calls for Collingwood trades goes through the fixes one at a time.

Local SEO audit checklist for contractors with one page

If your whole site is one page, mark check 5 as a fail and move on. That is not a criticism of the page; it means Google has nothing to rank for any town beyond the one in your address.

6. Whether you can count the calls

This is the check nobody runs, and it decides whether any of the other five are worth fixing.

• Pass: you can say how many calls came from Google last month, from the profile’s own call count, a tracking number, or a tag on the website.
• Fail: the honest answer is “a lot of people say they found us on Google”.

Without this you cannot tell next quarter whether the fixes worked. On one account we took over, the phone call event had stopped firing after a site update, and nobody had noticed because nobody was counting.

Your score, and what to do with it

Check	What a pass looks like	Fix first if it fails?
1. Where you rank	In the Map Pack for one money phrase	No, it is the result, not the cause
2. Google Business Profile	Right primary category, recent photos, hours right	Yes
3. Reviews	A review in the last 90 days, within reach of third place	Yes, the ask starts now
4. NAP	One phone number everywhere	Yes, if a second number exists
5. Website	Tap-to-call works, one real town page	After 2 to 4
6. Counting calls	A number for last month	Before you spend money

Check 1 is the scoreboard. Checks 2 to 6 are the causes. If check 1 fails and everything else passes, the gap is usually competition and time, not a broken setup. If check 1 fails and three or more of the others fail too, you have found the work. The order to run that work in, week by week, is the local SEO blueprint for Georgian Bay trades.

What a DIY audit cannot tell you

A self-audit tells you what is broken on your side. It is weak on two things, and I would rather say so than pretend otherwise.

The first is the competitors. You can see the three businesses above you, but not what their profiles and pages are doing that yours is not. The second is priority. An owner who runs this list honestly can end up with a page of fails and no sense of which one is costing the most calls.

That is what our audits add. The free local SEO audit of your own market shows where you rank for the searches that bring in jobs, who is beating you and why, and a short list of fixes, and most come back within one business day. The paid version, $499 on the local SEO pricing page for Ontario, goes deeper: a full profile audit with screenshots, an on-page scan of your top 5 pages, a Map Pack snapshot against competitors for your top 3 service keywords, a 30-day action plan you can run yourself, and a 60-minute walkthrough call. You can run either one after this checklist; it makes the conversation shorter.

If the checklist comes back clean and you still are not in the pack, that is worth knowing too. It usually means the fix is time and reviews, not a retainer, and we will tell you that.

Frequently asked questions

How often should a trade run a local SEO audit? Audit your SEO once when you start, then every few months, and again after anything changes: a new phone number, a move, a new town you want work in, or a website rebuild. A rebuild is the one that catches people, because it is the usual moment call tracking and page titles quietly break.

What is the difference between this checklist and a paid local SEO audit? The checklist finds what is broken on your side. A paid audit adds the competitor side, what the businesses above you are doing, and puts the fixes in the order that moves calls first. If you pass every check and still do not rank, the paid audit is where the answer is.

Do I need any tools to run a local SEO audit checklist? No. A phone, a private browser window and your Google Business Profile login cover checks 1 to 5. The NAP checker linked above is free. Check 6 needs whatever call count you already have, which for most trades is the call figure inside the profile itself.

Which fail should I fix first? Fix the profile first, primary category above everything, then a second phone number if one exists, then start asking every customer for a review. Website changes come after those, because a better page on a weak profile ranks no better.