Local SEO
Local SEO Audits
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Key takeaways
- The legal entity in the name field earns nothing; a registered trading name that matches the search earns a lot.
- Review velocity, not total count, is what tells Google something has changed about your business.
- Listings that win the suburbs have 30 to 60 service-plus-suburb pages behind them, not one services page.
- Fixing just one of the five usually doubles inbound calls inside 60 days.
Two plumbers in the same suburb. Same vans, same crews, same services. One pulls about $5,000 a month out of their Google listing, the other closer to $50,000. It is not luck and it is not that one of them is better at plumbing.
Five specific things separate them, and you can check all five on your own profile in about ten minutes. The full comparison is in the video.
The maths is why it matters. At a 20 to 30% net margin, the gap between those two listings is $10,000 to $15,000 a month in profit going to the competitor with the identical setup.
1. The business name
The quiet listing carries the legal entity: ABC Plumbing Limited. Clean, professional, and invisible to someone searching for a plumber in their suburb. The busy one has the service and the location in the registered trading name, so it sits in both pools of intent at once.
To diagnose it: search your primary service and city, and look at the three pins. If at least two of the three carry the location or the service in the name, you need a DBA to compete on equal terms. The change usually shows within 24 to 72 hours of updating the profile.
2. Review velocity
Look at the dates on your five most recent reviews. The quiet listing has reviews spread over six months, with the total creeping up a few percent a year. The busy one has reviews inside the last fortnight, a total north of 250 or at least 70% of the top competitor, and they arrive in clusters rather than a trickle.
Google reads three things: count, quality and velocity. A profile that goes from one review a fortnight to fifteen in a week is telling the algorithm something has changed and it should look again.
The fix is a structured outreach push: 6 to 12 months of past customers, filtered, through a 14 day email and SMS sequence, asking them to mention the service and the suburb so the review reads "had a hot water cylinder replaced in Hornsby" rather than "great service".
3. The page network behind the listing
Count the pages on your website. The quiet version has three to five: home, services, about, contact. The busy one has 30 to 60 or more, with a page for each service in each suburb it wants work from.
Each of those pages might only get ten or twenty searches a month, which is exactly why they are winnable. "Plumber Dallas" has thousands of searches and every plumber in the city fighting for it. Stack 30, 60 or 90 of the smaller ones and you are in front of hundreds of buyers a month with almost no competition.
4 and 5: the rest of the listing
The last two factors are covered in the second half of the video, including what a complete profile looks like next to a half-finished one, and how the businesses winning the map pack handle categories, services and photos.
Which one is your bottleneck?
Almost no listing has all five running, which is why fixing one usually doubles inbound calls inside 60 days. Compare yourself with the top ranked business in your suburb on each factor and be honest about where the gap is widest.
If you would rather have it diagnosed properly, that is what a local SEO audit is: where you rank across your whole service area, what the businesses above you are doing differently, and what to fix first.
