An honest audit of your website, Google Business Profile, and local search presence.
Plumber, dentist, restaurant, tradesperson, salon, garage, care provider — most SEO tools were built for e-commerce or SaaS and don’t say anything useful about the signals that actually decide whether local customers can find you. Wise Ranker does. £29.99, one-off, delivered in about an hour.
Local search is decided by different signals
If someone searches "emergency plumber near me" or "dentist Brighton" or "Indian restaurant Clacton", Google’s ranking logic is different from a generic keyword search. The local pack (that map at the top of the page with three business results) is decided mostly by your Google Business Profile, review signals, proximity to the searcher, and category relevance — not by traditional website SEO metrics.
Meanwhile the blue-links section below is decided by whether your website carries the right local schema, mentions the areas you serve, loads fast on mobile, and has the trust signals Google’s quality raters weight for local commercial queries. Most SEO tools grade one or the other. Wise Ranker grades both in the same report, along with the technical and legal fundamentals every website needs.
Everything that matters for local search — in one document
Six areas specific to local businesses, plus every technical / security / legal check every website audit should include. One PDF, plain English, with the developer-ready instructions your web person (or you) can act on.
Google Business Profile
Whether your GBP is claimed, complete, category-correct, hours-current, photo-current, and matching your website’s NAP (Name / Address / Phone). Missing or inconsistent GBP data is the #1 reason local businesses are invisible in Google Maps results.
Local schema markup
Structured data (JSON-LD) that tells Google exactly what your business is, where it’s located, what services it offers, and what hours it operates. Without this, Google guesses — and often guesses wrong.
Areas-served coverage
Whether your website actually mentions the towns, cities, and neighbourhoods you serve — on your homepage, service pages, and location pages if you have them. Local queries reward pages that match the searcher’s geography, not generic "we serve the whole UK" copy.
Mobile experience & page speed
Most local searches are mobile ("takeaway near me" at 6pm on a phone). Core Web Vitals, tap-target sizes, click-to-call links, and mobile navigation all get graded. Google explicitly downweights slow-mobile sites in local packs.
Review signals & trust
Whether your reviews are visible on the site (Review or AggregateRating schema), whether external review platforms link to you, whether trust badges are consistent, and whether contact information is easy to find. Trust signals decide local conversion once you’re visible.
Technical + legal fundamentals
HTTPS, security headers, cookie consent, privacy policy, terms — jurisdiction-detected (UK GDPR / PECR / DMCC 2024 for UK sites; CCPA / COPPA / FTC / DMCA for US-facing). Local businesses get caught out on cookie consent more than any other segment because the compliance burden is often overlooked.
What a real local-business report looks like
An anonymised sketch of the kind of prioritised findings a local business (imagine a family dentist in a UK town) tends to see near the top of their report.
Illustrative Priority Actions — family dentistry practice
Ranked by likely commercial impact. Actual reports have 15–25 items across all dimensions; this is a slice.
- #1 — GBP category mismatch. Business is registered under "Dental clinic" but the primary local query is "dentist near me". Category shift is a 5-minute change that typically lifts local-pack visibility for the query that actually drives bookings.
- #2 — No `LocalBusiness` schema on the homepage. Google is guessing that the business is a health clinic from unstructured text. Adding a JSON-LD block with name, address, phone, hours, price range, and service list gives Google an authoritative source. Developer instructions included.
- #3 — Homepage mobile load speed is 4.8 seconds (target: under 2.5). Real-user Chrome data shows most mobile visitors bounce before the hero image loads. The largest offender is a 2.4MB PNG that could be a 180KB WebP.
- #4 — No areas-served copy. Homepage says "the leading dental practice in the region". Nowhere does it name the town or nearby areas. Local queries with a geographic modifier can’t match this page.
- #5 — Reviews are on Google but not surfaced on the site. Adding a Reviews or AggregateRating schema block with recent verified reviews unlocks star-ratings in organic listings — a proven click-through-rate lift.
- #6 — Cookie consent banner missing. Google Analytics fires before consent, breaching UK PECR. Low legal risk but a documented liability that’s trivially fixable.
Local-business FAQ
I don’t have a fancy website — is this still worth it?
Yes — often more so. A simple site with a handful of pages usually has the biggest gap between "the potential" and "what’s actually there", so the fixes tend to be quick wins rather than complex rebuilds. Half the value is on your Google Business Profile (which sits outside your website altogether), and most local-schema and page-speed fixes are 30-minute jobs your web person can do in a single sitting.
I don’t know anything about SEO. Will I understand the report?
Yes. Every finding has two layers: a plain-English summary of the business impact ("why this matters to bookings") and a developer-ready technical instruction ("this is the exact code change"). You read the summary; if you don’t have a developer, most of the summaries are actionable on their own (updating GBP, rewriting a page’s heading, resizing an image). If you do have a developer or web person, they get the technical block. See a full real sample report to check the language fits.
Should I hire a local SEO agency instead?
Some local businesses genuinely benefit from ongoing agency support — particularly if you’re running paid ads or need someone to manage citations across dozens of directories. What we’d push back on: hiring an agency before knowing what’s actually wrong. A one-off £29.99 Wise Ranker audit gives you an independent view of your site and GBP, so when an agency pitches you a £400/month package, you can tell if they’re proposing to fix the real problems or upselling you on things you don’t need. Some customers use the report to negotiate a smaller, more targeted engagement.
What if my business doesn’t have a Google Business Profile yet?
The audit will flag that as the #1 action — a claimed GBP is the single biggest lever most local businesses have, and creating one is free. If you don’t have one yet, the report will explain how to claim it, what to fill in, and how to make it match your website consistently.
I serve a wide area, not just one town. Does that break the audit?
No — the audit picks that up. Service-area businesses (plumbers, electricians, mobile groomers, home-visit healthcare) have different local-SEO needs from location-fixed businesses (restaurants, shops, clinics). Both patterns are handled. If you serve a wide area, expect recommendations around service-area pages, geographic-modifier coverage in copy, and how to set up your GBP service area correctly.
Is the £29.99 tier really enough, or should I get Premium?
For most local businesses, Standard (£29.99) is the right call. Premium adds interpretation of your own Google Search Console (GSC), Google Analytics (GA4), and Google Ads data — useful if you already run paid ads and want the paid-search audit, or if you have GSC set up and want us to see which queries actually bring you traffic. If you don’t use any of those, Premium won’t give you much extra over Standard. Start with the free automated check to sense-check the value first.