The errors we find in almost every audit — and what to do about each one.
The free asset that drives the map pack, sitting half-completed with a 2019 photo and no categories. Fix this before you spend a cent on advertising. See the full playbook.
Reviews drive local rankings and they drive the decision. Yet most businesses simply never ask. A short link, sent by text, right after good work, is the whole system. Never buy them — that's a Google penalty and a Fair Trading Act problem.
Swapping the town name into the same template is a doorway-page pattern, and Google treats it as spam. One genuinely useful page for each area you truly serve beats twenty thin ones.
The opposite failure. If your site never names the suburbs and towns you serve, you cannot appear for them. Plenty of businesses in Hamilton happily drive to Cambridge — and have never told Google so.
One page listing eight services in a bulleted list will not rank for any of them. Each service that matters to your revenue deserves its own page.
An old address on a directory, a different phone number on Facebook, a third on the site. It muddies the signal and it loses you calls.
Local searches are urgent and mobile. If your page takes four seconds to show anything, you've lost people who never saw your offer. Speed is a revenue problem.
If you can't tell which channel produced last month's leads, you're allocating budget by vibes. Fix conversion tracking first.
Ranking first for a term nobody searches, or one that brings tyre-kickers, isn't a win. The goal is profitable enquiries — everything else is a means to that end.
Notice how few of these are technical. Most local SEO failure isn't algorithmic — it's a business not clearly telling people, and search engines, what it does and where it does it.
Book a free session and we'll tell you which of these is costing you the most.
Book a free discovery session. We'll audit what you're running, tell you what's leaking budget, and show you what we'd do differently — no obligation.