1. Google Business Profile 0/8
Your GBP listing (formerly Google My Business) powers the map pack and most local visibility. It's the highest-leverage hour you'll spend.
✓ Claim and verify your Google Business Profile Verification itself is a ranking factor for Search and Maps. Unverified listings barely surface. ✓ Set a specific primary category (plus secondaries) Primary category carries the most weight — "Family law attorney" beats "Lawyer". Add every secondary that truly applies. ✓ Complete every field: hours, phone, website, attributes Include holiday hours. Attributes (delivery, card payments, accessibility) answer questions before they're asked. ✓ Add services and products with real descriptions Use the words customers actually search for, not internal jargon. ✓ Upload photos on a schedule — not once Exterior (findable from the street), interior, products, team. Refresh monthly; stale profiles read as closed. ✓ Write a description with natural local keywords "Family-run bakery in Astoria specializing in sourdough" — descriptive, not stuffed. ✓ Post weekly: updates, offers, events Posts keep the profile active and can appear directly in your business panel. ✓ Seed and answer the Q&A section Add the questions customers actually ask, then answer them publicly — before someone else answers wrong.
2. Website Foundations 0/7
Your site confirms what your profile claims. Machines cross-check both.
✓ One dedicated page per location or service-area city Unique content per page — find-and-replace city names is a duplicate-content trap. ✓ NAP (name, address, phone) identical sitewide and visible in the footer Exact-match consistency, down to "St." vs "Street". ✓ LocalBusiness schema on every location page Address, geo-coordinates, hours, and sameAs links to your profiles — structured data machines can verify. ✓ Embed a Google Map on each location page Reinforces the address association and helps customers, which is the point. ✓ Title tags: service + city "Emergency Plumber in Austin, TX | YourBrand" — the oldest trick that still works. ✓ Pass a real mobile speed test Local searches happen overwhelmingly on phones, often on the street. Test on an actual device, not just Lighthouse. ✓ Link from blog content to location pages Internal links tell Google which pages matter. Location pages are usually orphans — fix that.
3. Reviews & Reputation 0/6
Review volume, recency, and your responses influence rankings — and increasingly, what AI assistants say about you.
✓ Ask every happy customer, at the moment of satisfaction In person, right after the "thank you so much" — not three weeks later. ✓ Create a short review link and QR code On receipts, tables, and follow-up emails. Every step you remove doubles the response rate. ✓ Automate the ask via email or SMS after service A single friendly message the day after. One follow-up max. ✓ Reply to every review — especially the bad ones Future customers read your responses more carefully than the reviews themselves. ✓ Never incentivize or gate reviews Discounts-for-reviews and on-site "review stations" violate Google's policies and get listings penalized. ✓ Build reviews beyond Google Yelp, Facebook, and whichever industry platform your customers check (Houzz, Avvo, TripAdvisor…).
6. AI & New Surfaces 2026 0/6
"Best [your category] in [city]" is now asked to ChatGPT and answered by AI Overviews. The checklist above feeds these surfaces — this section makes sure nothing blocks them.
✓ Ask the AI engines about your category — and read the answers Run "best [category] in [city]" through ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity, and Google's AI mode. Note who's named, who's cited, and whether you exist. ✓ Complete your Bing Places listing properly ChatGPT's web results run on Bing. An empty Bing listing means invisibility in the fastest-growing answer surface. ✓ Keep entity facts identical everywhere Same name, services, founding year, and story on your site, profiles, and directories — AI cross-checks before it recommends. ✓ Maintain review recency — everywhere AI answers lean on review volume, recency, and sentiment when picking who to recommend. A 2023 last-review date reads as closed. ✓ Make your proof pages machine-readable Clear headings, direct answers up top, schema markup. AI cites what it can parse and quote. ✓ Don't block AI crawlers in robots.txt GPTBot, PerplexityBot, ClaudeBot and friends can't cite what they can't read. Check your robots.txt today.
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