- Local SEO has two halves; this is the website half. The profile decides whether you appear in the pack (GBP guide), the site decides whether Google understands your service area and whether organic results and AI surfaces send you anyone.
- The stack that matters: crawlable pages, honest titles and headings, one NAP everywhere, LocalBusiness schema, mobile-first speed, clean indexing.
- Location pages: only with genuinely unique content per location — otherwise you’re building doorway pages, which Google’s spam policies name explicitly.
- Monthly hygiene beats annual heroics: sitemap current, no soft-404s, redirects intact.
Why the site half matters
When Google evaluates “plumber near me,” your Business Profile carries the local signals — but your website carries the relevance and authority signals for the organic results beneath the pack, for research queries (“how much does repiping cost”), for map-pack expansion beyond your radius, and increasingly for AI-generated answers that cite sources. A local business with a great profile and a broken website caps its own ceiling.
The good news: site-side fundamentals are durable, well-documented, and mostly one-time work. This guide is that work, in audit order.
1. Foundational on-page honesty
Titles and H1s that say what and where you are. The homepage title pattern that works for single-location businesses: Bob's Plumbing | Plumber in East Austin, TX. One H1 per page, matching intent. Don’t stuff every suburb into the title — that’s what honestly-built location/service pages are for (§5).
Content that a customer could actually use. Services described in the language customers search; pricing approaches or ranges where honest; photos of real work; FAQs answering real questions. The “practitioner smell test”: would a working editor sign this page?
One canonical NAP on every page (footer is fine), matching your Google Business Profile and citations exactly — same phone, same address format.
2. Site structure for a local business
Keep it boring and shallow:
/ Home — who, what, where
/services/ Service hub
/services/drains/ One page per major service
/about/ Trust layer: team, photos, history
/reviews/ /contact/ Conversion surfaces
Add /locations/{city}/ only where each page is real (§5) and a /blog/ or guides section only if you’ll genuinely maintain it. Every page should be reachable in ≤3 clicks from home, linked contextually, never orphaned.
3. Schema markup
Mark up what’s true; validate everything:
- LocalBusiness (or a specific subtype — Dentist, Lawyer, Restaurant, etc.) with your real NAP,
openingHoursSpecification,geo,url,sameAspointing at your actual social profiles. On the homepage, at minimum. - Organization sitewide.
- Service pages can carry Service schema; FAQs can carry FAQPage where genuinely Q&A-shaped.
- Never: aggregateRating on your own business pages (self-serving review markup is prohibited — reviews guide), or schema describing locations you don’t have.
Validate with Google’s Rich Results Test and schema validators before and after template changes. Bad schema is worse than no schema: it misrepresents you to the machines reading it.
4. Mobile-first performance
Most local traffic is mobile and high-intent — someone standing on a street deciding. The budgets worth enforcing:
| Metric | Target | Local-specific note |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | ≤ 2.0s (aim 1.8) | Real hero images, compressed, width/height set |
| CLS | ~0 | Reserve space for images and any embeds |
| INP | Fast | Minimal JS; most local sites need almost none |
| Page weight | < 1MB first view | The usual culprits: 4MB hero photos, chat widgets, five fonts |
Server-side rendering or static HTML, one CSS file, system or self-hosted fonts, lazy-load below-fold images. Test on a mid-range Android over 4G, not your office connection. None of this is local-specific — but local conversion tolerance for slow pages is the lowest in the business.
5. Location pages: the doorway line
Google’s spam policies name doorway pages explicitly: pages mass-produced for query variants that funnel visitors to the same destination. The local flavor is the classic “Plumber in [Suburb]” template stamped 40 times with a swapped city name.
The compliant-and-effective version flips the test: does this page exist because this location genuinely exists? If you have a real staffed location there — unique staff, hours, photos, parking info, local proof (jobs done in that area, that chamber membership, those local reviews referenced) — the page is real and valuable. If the only difference between pages is the city name, you’re building doorways; consolidate into a strong service-area page instead. Multiple genuine locations get their own treatment in the multi-location guide.
6. Indexing and crawl hygiene
- Google Search Console + Bing Webmaster Tools verified; sitemap submitted; both checked monthly (this is also where penalties and manual actions surface, in writing).
- Sitemap contains canonical, indexable URLs only;
lastmodreflects real changes. - Redirects: 301s for every moved URL, chained once (never redirect-to-redirect-to-redirect), permanent on launch, and a redirect map kept for every migration. Post-migration ranking loss is usually self-inflicted redirect rot.
- Canonicals self-referencing on parameter/UTM variants of your pages.
- No orphan pages; no soft-404s (GSC’s Page Indexing report names both).
- robots.txt doesn’t block CSS/JS Google needs to render; staging copies are noindexed or auth-gated, not just unlinked.
The pre-launch (or rescue) sequence
Run in this order, fixing before proceeding: ① crawl/renders clean → ② titles/H1s/NAP honest → ③ schema validated → ④ mobile speed budget met → ⑤ GSC indexing clean → ⑥ location pages pass the doorway test. Then maintain monthly (§6 + the review cadence from the GBP guide).
Sections 5–7 of the audit checklist are the tick-box version of this entire guide.
Sources and evidence notes
- Doorway pages, structured data policies, page experience: Google Search Central (spam policies; structured data docs) — primary.
- LocalBusiness schema: schema.org + Google’s LocalBusiness documentation — primary.
- Performance budgets: Core Web Vitals documentation — primary for metrics; local conversion sensitivity is practitioner experience, strong consensus.