Scan your website for the local signals that decide whether you show up in the Google map pack, and get a prioritised fix list.
JW Digital delivers done-for-you local SEO (GBP, citations, local content and schema) for businesses and trades across the UK.
The scan above reads your page source. That is genuinely useful, because on-page signals are the part most small business sites get wrong and the part you can fix yourself in an afternoon. But local ranking is decided across three surfaces, and only one of them lives on your website. Google's published guidance on local results names three factors: relevance, distance and prominence. Your website mostly influences relevance. Your Google Business Profile influences all three. Everything off-site, reviews, citations and links, feeds prominence.
So treat a green score as the starting line, not the finish. Below is what a real audit looks at next, in the order that usually matters most for a small or single-location business.
No automated page scan can see inside your profile, so open it manually and work through it. The single highest-leverage field is your primary category. It does more to define which searches you are eligible for than any other setting, and picking a vague one is the most common self-inflicted local SEO wound. A tiling company set to Home Improvement Shop rather than Tiling Contractor is competing in the wrong pool entirely.
Also check your profile is not suspended, duplicated or merged with an old listing. Search your business name plus town in an incognito window and see how many versions of you exist. Duplicates split your review count and muddy which entity Google associates with your website. If you want a structured pass over the profile fields themselves, use the Google Business Profile checker.
The tool checks whether an address and phone number exist on your page. It cannot check whether they match everywhere else. Name, address and phone number should be consistent across your website, your Google Business Profile, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, Facebook, and any trade directories you appear on.
The mismatches worth your time are not cosmetic ones like Road versus Rd. They are old addresses from a previous office, a tracking number used on one directory and a landline on another, and a trading name that differs from the name you are listed under. Your registered office address at Companies House is a separate thing and often sits with your accountant, so do not force that to match your trading address. Fix your source of truth first, which is your website and your Google Business Profile, then work outward through the directories that actually rank for your business name.
One clarification first, because it trips people up. The review schema the scan looks for is structured data on your own site. Google's published structured data guidelines exclude self-serving reviews, meaning reviews about your own business on your own site are not eligible for star review snippets. The markup is still worth having as a clear description of your business entity, but do not add it expecting stars. The reviews that show in the map pack are Google reviews, earned on the profile itself, and they cannot be created with markup on your website.
The practical benchmark is competitive, not absolute. Open the three businesses ranking above you and note their review count, average rating and the date of their most recent review. That is your target. A steady trickle beats a burst, because a cluster of reviews from one week followed by silence tells a prospect reading your profile six months later that nothing has happened since.
Distance between the searcher and your verified address is one of the three factors Google names for local results, and it is why your rankings look different on your own phone than they do to a customer three miles away. Checking your position from your own office is the most common way local businesses fool themselves.
Two honest consequences follow. First, if you are based on the edge of a city, appearing in map results for the city centre is hard no matter how good your site is. Second, a service area business with a hidden address is leaning on relevance and prominence alone, so content and reviews matter even more. The workable response is to accept what the map pack will and will not give you, then win the standard organic results below it with genuinely useful location and service pages, which are not constrained by proximity in the same way.
The scan checks whether your target town appears in your title, your H1 or your page content. That is the minimum. The harder question an audit asks is whether the page deserves to exist. A page that is your standard service copy with the town name swapped in is the most common local SEO failure, and pages like that commonly end up sitting in Crawled currently not indexed in Search Console rather than ranking.
Prominence is the part no page scan can score and most small businesses ignore. It is built by being cited by other local sites. Practical sources include sponsoring a junior sports team or village event, supplier and manufacturer stockist pages, trade association member directories, chambers of commerce, local news coverage of something you actually did, and partner businesses you already refer work to.
Audit this by opening the top three competitors in a backlink tool and looking specifically for local domains rather than raw totals. Those links are usually obtainable, because they were earned by a phone call or a cheque rather than by outranking anyone.
Most local SEO reporting measures the wrong things. Rankings checked from your own device are misleading, and impressions on your own brand name flatter every report. Track these instead:
If the audit above returned a list, do not work through it top to bottom. Sequence by effort against impact:
This audit fetches one URL and inspects the returned HTML. It cannot log into your Google Business Profile, cannot see your review count or your categories, cannot compare your NAP against directories, cannot measure proximity to searchers, and cannot see anything that only appears after JavaScript runs in a browser. If your schema is injected client side by a tag manager, the scan may report it missing even though a rendering crawler would find it. It also reads one page, so a pass on your homepage tells you nothing about the location pages doing the actual ranking work. Run it on those too.
Use it for what it is good at: a fast, honest check that the foundations on your own site are in place before you spend money on anything else. When they are, the next steps are the profile, the reviews and the links. If you want that handled for you, see local SEO services or generate the markup this audit looks for with the local schema generator. Two sectors where the local pack decides who gets the enquiry: SEO for dentists and SEO for estate agents.