Signs it is time to revisit local SEO

Teams tend to reach for this after something has already gone wrong. A few signals that local SEO is due some attention.

Search work compounds slowly, which is why it gets abandoned about two months before it would have paid off. The practical test is whether someone new to the project could tell, in a minute, that it had been handled.

The signals

• Nobody can say when it was last reviewed
• The answer depends on who you ask
• Consistent name, address, and phone details across the web matter
• Local intent searches convert far better than national ones

How to approach it

Reviews influence both ranking and the decision to call. There is a version of this that is over-engineered, and it is worth avoiding. It is worth deciding this deliberately rather than inheriting whatever the last person set up.

In practice

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

If you want a second opinion on how yours is set up, ask.