Local SEO checklist for UK businesses

This is the list I work through when I check how a local business shows up in Google Maps and the local results, from who controls the Google Business Profile to how the enquiries it brings in are counted. It is written for UK businesses that serve customers in a particular town, borough or region, whether those customers come to you or you go to them.

Each line is a check, not a lesson. If you want the reasoning behind a step, or you are starting from nothing and need to know what to do first, my step-by-step local SEO guide for UK businesses sets out the order of work. This page is for confirming nothing has been missed.

How to use this checklist

• Go through it in order the first time. Ownership and eligibility come first because a profile you do not control, or one Google decides is ineligible, can disappear along with every photo and review attached to it.
• Keep a dated note of what you change. When calls rise or fall two months later, the note tells you whether a new category, a fixed address or a run of reviews lines up with it.
• Space out the big edits. Changing the name, address and categories on the same afternoon can prompt Google to ask you to verify the business again, and you will not know which edit triggered it.
• Expect the menus to move. You can edit the profile from Google Search, from Google Maps and from Business Profile Manager, and Google renames things often. If a label here does not match your screen, look for the setting that does the same job.

1. Ownership and access

• The business owns the profile. The primary owner should be a Google account the business controls, tied to a company email address. Not a former employee’s personal Gmail, and not the account of whichever web designer set it up years ago.
• There is a second owner. Add a director or partner as another owner, so one forgotten password or one person leaving does not lock the business out.
• Everyone else is a manager. Staff, freelancers and agencies, me included, need manager access to do the work. None of us needs to own it. Remove anyone who no longer works with you.
• The profile is verified. An unverified profile can be edited but may not appear to the public. Google often asks for a short video as proof, showing things like your signage, the inside of your premises, or the tools and branded van you work from, so think about what you will film before you start.
• There is only one profile for this business at this address. Search Maps for your business name, your phone number and your postcode. A duplicate listing left by a previous owner or an old trading name splits your reviews and confuses customers, so ask Google to remove or merge it.

2. Eligibility and your address

Google’s address rules cause more lost profiles than anything else on this list, and a few of them catch UK businesses in particular.

• You have a real base. A profile needs a physical place the business operates from, or from which you travel to customers. A PO box, a mail-forwarding address or a virtual office does not qualify unless your business has staff there during the hours you list.
• The address is where you trade, not just your registered office. Plenty of limited companies use their accountant’s or formation agent’s address as the registered office at Companies House. That address belongs in your website’s legal details, not on your profile, unless you actually work from it.
• The address is hidden if customers never visit. If you go to customers and nobody comes to you, you are a service-area business: remove the address from public view and set a service area instead. A business that does both, such as a locksmith with a shop counter, shows the address and adds a service area as well.
• The service area describes where you really work. Add the towns, cities or postcode districts you cover, up to Google’s limit of 20. Google advises keeping the area within roughly two hours’ drive of your base. Listing every London borough will not put a Croydon plumber in the results for all of them, because Google still weighs the distance from your base.
• The address is written one way everywhere. Use the Royal Mail version of your address with the full postcode, and keep the unit, floor or building name in the same form on your profile, website and listings.
• The map pin is on your door. Check the marker on Maps sits at your entrance, not in the middle of a business park or on the next street. Shared buildings, railway arches and new-build developments are often wrong.

3. Profile details

• The name is your real-world name. Use the name on your signage, invoices and website. Adding services or places, as in “Smith & Sons Emergency Plumber Lewisham”, breaks Google’s guidelines and is a common reason profiles get suspended.
• The primary category is the most specific one that fits. It does more than any other field to decide which searches you appear for. Pick the closest match to your main line of work, such as “Plumber” rather than “Contractor”.
• Additional categories cover real services only. You can add up to nine. Each should describe something you do and want to be found for, not something a competitor ranks for.
• Opening hours are right, including special hours. Set them ahead of every bank holiday and the Christmas period. Scotland and Northern Ireland have bank holidays that England and Wales do not, so a business with branches in more than one nation needs different special hours per branch.
• The phone number is answered in the hours you list. A London 020 number or a mobile both work; what matters is that someone picks up and that it matches your website. If you use a call-tracking number, Google allows it as the primary number as long as your main number is added as an additional phone.
• The website link goes to the right page. A single-site business usually links to its home page. A branch should link to its own location page.
• The description says what you do, for whom and where. You have 750 characters. Leave out links, prices that will date and lists of keywords, and put the most useful sentence first.
• Services or products are filled in using the words customers use, with a short line on each.
• Attributes are set where they are true. Step-free entrance, accessible toilet, appointment required, online appointments and similar answer practical questions before anyone has to ring.

4. Photos and updates

• A logo and cover photo are uploaded. Google may still pick a different image to show first, which is one more reason to add plenty of good ones.
• Photos are real. The front of the premises as a customer would approach it, the inside, the people and finished work. If you are round the back, up a flight of stairs or above a shop, show the entrance clearly. Stock images tell a customer nothing about you.
• Photos are added through the year, not in one batch at setup. New jobs, a refit, seasonal stock and new staff all count.
• Updates are posted when there is something worth saying: an offer, an event, a seasonal service or a change to opening times. I treat posts as a way to persuade people who are already looking at the profile, not as a ranking lever.
• Offers follow UK advertising rules. A post is an advert, so prices and “from” claims fall under the CAP Code like any other, and prices aimed at consumers should include VAT.

5. Reviews

• Every customer is asked, at the same point. Build the request into the job: the invoice email, the follow-up text, a card on the counter. The review link or QR code from your profile takes people straight to the form.
• You ask everyone, not only the happy ones. Sending satisfied customers to Google and steering unhappy ones elsewhere is review gating, and Google’s policy forbids it.
• No incentives and no fake reviews. Discounts, freebies or prize draws in exchange for reviews break Google’s rules. In the UK, the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 has, since April 2025, also made it unlawful to commission or publish fake reviews or to present incentivised reviews without saying so, and the Competition and Markets Authority can now fine businesses directly.
• Every review gets a reply. Thank people briefly and specifically. For a negative review, acknowledge the problem, give your side once and calmly, and offer a way to talk it through privately.
• Replies never confirm personal details. A clinic, dentist, solicitor or accountant should not confirm that someone was a patient or client, or mention their case. That is personal data under UK GDPR, even when the reviewer raised it first.
• Policy-breaking reviews are reported, not argued with. Spam, reviews from competitors or ex-staff, and offensive content can be reported from the profile. A review you simply disagree with will stay.

6. Your website

• Name, address and phone number are on every page as text, usually in the footer, written exactly as on the profile. Not only inside an image or a map embed.
• Each main service has its own page. A plumber who does boiler repairs, bathroom fitting and blocked drains needs a page for each. A single “Services” page listing all three gives Google, and the customer, little to go on.
• Pages name the place naturally. The title tag, the main heading and the opening copy say where you work, as in “Boiler repairs in Croydon”, once each and written for a person.
• Area pages exist only where there is something distinct to say. A page per borough with only the name swapped counts as a doorway page under Google’s spam policies. Write one when the service, travel time, prices, parking or access arrangements, or the work you do there genuinely differ.
• The contact page helps people arrive. A map, the nearest station or bus stop, parking notes and step-free access details.
• The site works on a phone. Numbers are tap-to-call, the contact form has been tested in the last month with a real message, and you have checked the key pages on your own phone over mobile data rather than the office Wi-Fi.

7. Citations and consistency

A citation is any listing of your business name, address and phone number on another website. In my view they carry less weight than they once did, but wrong ones still send customers to old addresses and give Google conflicting signals. The aim is NAP consistency: the same name, address and phone number, written the same way, wherever they appear.

• The core listings are claimed and correct: Bing Places (which can import your Google profile), Apple Business Connect (which controls how you appear in Apple Maps), your Facebook page, Yell and Thomson Local.
• The platforms your customers use are covered. See the table below. Some charge a membership fee; judge those on the enquiries they send, not on their value as a citation.
• Old details are tracked down. Search for your previous address, old phone numbers and former trading names, then correct or close each listing that still shows them.
• Logins are kept in one place the business owns, with a list of every listing, so the next move or rebrand takes an afternoon rather than a month.

8. Structured data and technical basics

• LocalBusiness schema is on the home page or each location page, using the most specific type available (Dentist, Plumber, LegalService and so on), with the business name, address including the postcode and “GB” as the country, phone number, opening hours, website and links to your official profiles.
• Service-area businesses use areaServed. If your address is hidden on the profile and the website, list the areas you cover in the markup and leave the street address out of it.
• The markup matches the page and the profile. Hours, phone number and address must agree in all three places. Test it with Google’s Rich Results Test and the Schema Markup Validator.
• Location and service pages can be indexed. Not blocked in robots.txt, no noindex tag, listed in the XML sitemap and linked from the menu or a locations page. Google Search Console’s URL Inspection tool confirms each one.
• Old URLs redirect. If you have moved premises, closed a branch or rebuilt the site, old location pages should send visitors and Google to the right new page with a 301 redirect.

9. If you have more than one location

• One profile per staffed premises. Not one per town you cover. A service-area business with one base has one profile, however wide its area.
• Each branch has its own page with its own address, phone number, hours, directions and the people who work there, and its profile links to that page rather than the home page.
• Branch names follow the signage. Use the brand as customers see it on the shop front. Add the area only if it is part of that name.
• Profiles sit in one business group in Business Profile Manager, so access is managed centrally and nobody owns a branch from a personal account.
• Bulk verification is used where it applies. Google offers it to businesses with ten or more locations, which saves verifying each branch by hand.
• Franchise ownership is agreed in writing. Decide whether the franchisor or the franchisee owns each profile, and what happens to it if a franchise ends.

Branch structure, location pages and franchise arrangements are a project of their own; my multi-location and franchise SEO service covers them in more depth.

10. Measuring what changes

• The profile’s own figures are written down every month: calls, direction requests, website clicks, bookings and the searches that showed the profile. A spreadsheet with one row per month is enough to give you a baseline.
• The website link on the profile is tagged. Add UTM parameters, for example source “google”, medium “organic” and campaign “gbp”, so GA4 reports visits from the profile separately instead of mixing them into all Google organic traffic. My UTM link builder puts the link together for you.
• Enquiries are recorded as key events in GA4: form submissions, taps on the phone number and online bookings.
• The consent gap is expected. Under PECR, GA4 should only run for visitors who accept analytics cookies, so GA4 will show fewer visits from the profile than the profile’s own click count. That difference is normal, not a broken tag.
• Rankings are checked across the area, not from your desk. Map results change from street to street, so one search from your office tells you little. A grid-based rank tracker shows where you appear across the area you serve.
• Search Console is filtered by place names to see which town, borough and “near me” searches bring your pages up.
• New customers are asked how they found you, and the answer is recorded. It catches the phone calls and walk-ins that no report will show.

Where local SEO usually goes wrong

When a UK business with a decent website still does not appear in the map results, the cause is usually an item above that was never ticked: an owner nobody can reach, a name with extra keywords, area pages that copy each other. Three other patterns are easy to miss because each item looks fine on its own.

• The business moved and the old address lives on in directories, on the website footer or in the schema, while the registered office at Companies House adds a third version.
• Reviews arrive in a burst, then stop. A steady trickle from real customers reads better to people than forty in one month two years ago.
• The goal ignores distance. A business in Ealing is unlikely to appear in the map results for searchers in Greenwich, however good the profile. Plan around the areas where you are genuinely close to customers, and use your website and paid ads to reach further.

If you would rather have this done than do it yourself, I run local SEO for UK businesses covering the profile, the website and the listings together. If the problem is the profile alone, such as a suspension, a failed verification or the wrong categories, Google Business Profile optimisation is the narrower piece of work. Either way, a free SEO audit is the quickest way to find out which items on this list are costing you enquiries.

Updated 6 October 2026