What to ask your agency about local SEO

It comes up on almost every project, usually later than it should. If you are briefing an agency or a freelancer on local SEO, these questions are worth asking early.

Technical fixes remove obstacles; content earns the position. Both are needed and they are not interchangeable. If two people in the business would answer this differently, that gap is the actual problem.

Questions worth asking

• Who will actually do this work, and have they done it before?
• How will we know afterwards whether it worked?
• What happens if it needs changing in a year?
• What are you assuming that we have not confirmed?

What a good answer sounds like

Consistent name, address, and phone details across the web matter. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. Write the reasoning down alongside the decision, because the reasoning is what changes first.

Reviews influence both ranking and the decision to call. In practice this is a scheduling problem more than a technical one. If it only works because one person remembers to do something, it does not work yet.

The short version

Search engines are trying to answer a question, so the pages that answer questions clearly tend to do well. Three things worth confirming about local SEO before you move on:

• Someone can say what the current setup is without going to look
• Reviews influence both ranking and the decision to call — and you know whether that is true here
• There is a way to tell whether the last change to this helped

None of this needs a rewrite. Most of it is a morning's work once someone decides to do it.