The Local SEO Checklist: 21 Things Your Small Business Website Needs to Get Found

"We have a website. Nobody finds it."

I hear that on almost every first call with a local business owner. Plumber, dentist, CPA, med spa — doesn't matter. They paid for a site, it went live, and the phone didn't change.

Here's the real story: the site isn't broken. It's missing most of what Google needs to show it to the right person at the right moment — the person in your city, typing your service into their phone, ready to call somebody today.

This checklist is the 21 things I fix, in order, when I take over a local site. Work through it and you'll know exactly why you're invisible — and what to do about it.

Why most small business websites can't get found

Most small-business sites are one page trying to sell five things.

Roofing, gutters, siding, windows, painting — all on the homepage, each with two sentences and a stock photo.

One page cannot rank for five services. Google matches a search to a page, and a page about everything is a page about nothing. So the one-page site sits on page four for "roof repair," page six for "gutter installation," and nowhere at all for "window replacement."

Everything on this checklist follows from that one idea: one service, one page, one city, real proof, and a way to call you. It maps to the six steps of the Business in a Box Playbook — Own, Build, Get Found, Earn Trust, Amplify, Measure and Repeat. Ads (Amplify) get their own post. The other five steps are below.

Own: the 3 things you must control before anything else

Nothing else on this list matters if you don't hold the keys.

1. Your domain is registered in your name. Log in to the registrar (GoDaddy, Namecheap, wherever) with your own email. Auto-renew is on. The card on file is yours. If your web guy "handles that," you don't own your domain — he does.

2. You have admin access to the website and hosting. Not "editor." Not "we'll send you a login if you need it." Full admin, saved in your password manager today.

3. Your Google accounts are yours. Google Business Profile, Search Console, Analytics, Google Ads — all created under a Google account you control. Agencies get added as managers. They never get to be the owner.

I learned how much this matters through a client. A DFW commercial services company hired an agency, the agency went out of business, and the login went with it. One-page site, no access, no way to change a phone number. We got it back, but it took weeks of working with the hosting provider. More on that below.

Build: 7 things every page on the site needs

4. One page per service. Roof repair gets a page. Roof replacement gets a page. Gutters get a page. Each with 400-plus words of specifics: what's included, how long it takes, what it costs (a range is fine), and photos of you doing it.

5. The service and the city in the title tag and H1. "Roof Repair in Round Rock, TX" beats "Services" every time. Title tag under 60 characters, service and city near the front.

6. A click-to-call phone number on every page. Top right on desktop, sticky bar on mobile, wired as a tel: link so a tap dials. Most of your traffic is on a phone. Make the phone do phone things.

7. A short form on every page. Name, phone, what do you need. Three fields. Every field you add costs you leads.

8. Real photos. Your trucks, your team, your lobby, your work. Phone photos beat stock photos. Nobody has ever hired a roofer because of a smiling stock-photo family.

9. Fast on mobile. Under three seconds. Compress the images (that's usually the whole fix), and test it on your own phone on cellular data, not office Wi-Fi.

10. Name, address, phone in the footer — identical everywhere. Same spelling, same suite number, same phone number as your Google Business Profile, Yelp, and everywhere else. Google treats mismatches as doubt.

Get Found: 7 local SEO for small businesses essentials

11. Claim and verify your Google Business Profile. This is the highest-leverage free asset a local business has. The map pack — those three businesses with the stars at the top of the results — is where most local searches end. If you're not verified, you're not in the game. I wrote a 30-minute setup for it here.

12. Pick the right primary category. "Roofing contractor," not "Contractor." "Cosmetic dentist," not "Dentist," if cosmetic is what you want to sell. Primary category is the single biggest ranking lever in the profile. Add secondaries for everything else you do.

13. Match your profile's services list to your service pages. Every service on the site is a service in the profile, with the same name. Google connects the two.

14. Service-area pages for the cities you actually drive to. If you're in Austin and work Round Rock, Cedar Park, and Pflugerville, each gets a page: service plus city, with jobs you've done there. Ten thin pages that say "we serve [city]" and nothing else don't count. Five real ones do.

15. LocalBusiness schema markup. Code in the page header that tells Google your name, address, phone, hours, and service area in a format it reads without guessing. Your developer can add it in an hour.

16. Consistent listings on the directories that matter. Apple Maps, Bing Places, Yelp, BBB, and the two or three directories specific to your industry (Angi, Healthgrades, Avvo, whatever applies). Same name, address, phone as item 10.

17. One useful piece of content a month. "How much does a roof replacement cost in Austin?" "What to expect at your first Invisalign appointment." Answer the questions people ask you on the phone. Each one is another door into the site.

Earn Trust: 3 things that turn visitors into callers

18. A review system, not a review hope. Ask every happy customer, same day, by text, with your Google review link. Respond to every review, including the bad ones. A business with 80 reviews and a 4.7 beats one with 12 reviews and a 5.0 — in the map pack and in the customer's head.

19. Proof on the service pages. Testimonials, before-and-afters, and job photos on the roof repair page, not buried on a "Testimonials" page nobody visits. People decide on the page they land on.

20. An About page with real people. Owner's name and photo, years in business, license numbers, insurance, the trucks. Local customers are hiring a person, not a logo.

Measure: the one thing that makes the other 20 pay off

21. Track every call and form to its source. Call tracking on the site number, form tracking in GA4, Search Console connected. At the end of the month you should be able to say: "14 calls from Google search, 9 from the map pack, 6 from ads, 3 from Facebook." If you can't, you're guessing — and guessing is how you end up paying for things that don't work.

Vanity metrics don't count. Impressions, followers, "traffic up 40%" — none of that pays the crew. Calls and forms do.

Take Action: Print this list. Go down it with your own site open on your phone, and put an X next to everything you're missing. Most owners I do this with score between 5 and 8 out of 21. Now sort your Xs: items 1-3 today, 4-10 this month, the rest over the next 90 days.

What happens when you check all 21 boxes

Back to that DFW commercial services company.

When we got access back, they had a one-page site, no working Google Business Profile, and no tracking. We rebuilt it as a multi-page site with a page for each of its five service lines, set up the profile, wired the tracking, and added monthly content. (We ran Google and Meta ads on top, but the foundation was this checklist.)

Year one:

• Visitors up 306.8%
• 92 conversions at a 4.62% conversion rate
• In the final 30 days of the year, 16 form submissions at a 12.61% conversion rate
• New enterprise clients, including a city government, a large energy provider, and a large restaurant chain

They now have more business than they can handle. The full story is in the case study.

None of it was clever. It was 21 boring things done in the right order.

FAQ

How long does local SEO take to work? Google Business Profile changes can move you in the map pack within two to four weeks. New service pages typically take two to three months to rank, longer in a crowded market like Austin or Dallas. Reviews compound the whole time. Expect a noticeable difference in calls by month three and a real one by month six.

Can I do this local SEO checklist myself? Items 1-3, 11-13, 16, and 18 you can do this week with no technical help. Items 4-10, 14, 15, and 21 need someone who can build pages and wire tracking. If your site is a one-pager on a DIY builder, it's usually faster to rebuild it right than to patch it.

What's the most important item on the list? Own your accounts (1-3), then Google Business Profile (11). Ownership protects everything else you'll build, and the profile is the fastest path to calls. If you only did those four items, you'd be ahead of most competitors.

Stop guessing and get the phone ringing

You have three options:

1. Keep the one-page site and keep wondering why nobody calls.
2. Work this checklist yourself — everything you need is above, and the full system is in the Business in a Box Playbook.
3. Have me do it.

Business in a Box is all 21 items, built for you: a site with a page per service, click-to-call and a form on every page, Google Business Profile set up, tracking wired, usually live within a week. $1,000 to set up, $200 a month for hosting, updates, and upkeep. You own the domain, the site, the profile, and every account — if we part ways, everything stays with you.

It starts with one 30-minute phone call. Book it here, or read more about how I work with small businesses in Austin and across Texas.