A working local SEO checklist is short and ordered: claim and complete your Google Business Profile, fix your name-address-phone everywhere, build steady reviews, publish service and city pages, earn local citations, add schema, and track which calls come from search. Do them roughly in that order, because the early items are free and fast while the later ones compound over months.
We run a cleaning company and an HVAC company on this exact list, so the order below is not theory — it is what we do when we set up a new market. Most of it you can do yourself; we will flag where DIY is plenty and where it stops paying.
Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. Correct categories, every service listed, real photos, hours, service area. This is the biggest lever and it is free. See profile optimization.
Make your NAP consistent. Same name, address, and phone on your site, profile, and every directory. Inconsistency quietly drags rankings. See NAP consistency.
Build reviews on a system. Ask after every job and space them out. Velocity matters more than total count. See how to ask for reviews.
Publish service and city pages. One honest page per service and per area you cover. Each is a door into your site for "near me" searches.
Earn local citations. Get listed in the directories Google cross-checks, with matching details. See local citations.
Add local schema and track calls. Mark up your business in code and put tracking on your phone and forms so you know which search produced each lead.
Most of this checklist is free time, not money. You may not need to hire anyone if:
Hire out when the page-building and citation work outpaces your hours, or when the lost-job math beats the fee. Below that, the checklist is a weekend project, not a budget line. See how to do local SEO for the deeper walkthrough.
When the checklist outgrows your evenings, our Grow in Google plan at $597/month runs it for you — the monthly content engine that ships service and city pages, profile management, reviews, citations, and lead attribution. The $249/month plan covers the site and AI lead capture so you can catch every call the checklist creates. You own the site and domain, month-to-month.
See SEO for home services, what local SEO costs, or whether it is worth it.
We don't post stock testimonials. On a 15-minute call we screen-share the real dashboards behind our own businesses — live leads, rankings, and the exact page that produced each one. See the proof →
No. The first three — profile, NAP, reviews — carry most small businesses. Pages, citations, and schema add reach in competitive markets. Do them in order and stop where the returns stop justifying the effort.
There is no magic number, but getting past ~20 and then adding a steady trickle matters more than chasing a total. Consistency signals an active, trusted business, which is what the ranking favors.
Yes. AI answer engines pull from the same signals — a complete profile, reviews, and clear pages. The same checklist that ranks you in Google increasingly gets you cited in AI answers. See AI search optimization.
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