Local search rewards maintenance more than brilliance. This is the quarterly list we work through for every multi-location client, in the order we work through it.
Data layer
- Verify name, address and phone number are byte-identical across the website, business profiles and the top twenty citation sources.
- Check for duplicate or unclaimed profiles, including ones created by aggregators.
- Confirm the primary category still matches how customers describe the service, and test one secondary category per quarter.
- Review service-area definitions against where jobs are actually being booked.
- Audit opening hours, including holiday exceptions for the coming quarter.
- Confirm the profile's website link points at the relevant location page, not the homepage.
On-site
- Each location page carries unique body copy of at least 600 words, written about that location.
- Embedded map, local phone number and address rendered in HTML, not inside an image.
- LocalBusiness structured data present and validating, with matching NAP.
- Location pages linked from a discoverable index page, not orphaned in the footer alone.
- Staff, project photography or genuine local references on each page. Stock imagery only will not carry a competitive market.
- Internal links from relevant service pages to the location pages that serve them.
Reputation
- Review velocity compared against the three nearest map-pack competitors.
- Every review from the quarter responded to, including the positive ones.
- Review request workflow tested end to end — we submit a test job through it ourselves.
- Photo uploads refreshed; profiles with recent imagery consistently outperform stale ones.
Signals and monitoring
- Grid-based rank tracking from multiple points across the service area, not a single centroid.
- Profile insights compared to last quarter: calls, direction requests, website clicks.
- Spam audit of the local pack — fake addresses and keyword-stuffed business names reported.
- Call tracking numbers checked for consistency rules so they do not corrupt NAP data.
- Bing Places listing verified and synchronised; it is neglected far more often than the alternative and it is free traffic.
- Landing page speed on mobile measured from field data, not lab scores.
None of these twenty-two items is clever. Doing all of them, every quarter, without skipping the boring ones, is what separates the businesses holding map-pack positions from the ones wondering why they slipped.
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