You can usually tell when a local SEO setup is costing you money, even before you look at rankings.
The phone goes quiet for a couple of weeks. The enquiries that do come in are price shoppers. Commercial clients say they “couldn’t find much” when they searched your name. Or worse – a competitor with half your track record looks more credible online.
A proper seo audit for local business is not a PDF full of green ticks. It is a commercial inspection. Like walking a site before you price the job: you are looking for the few structural issues that will blow the margin if you miss them.
This article is written for owner-directors who need results, not jargon. If you run a construction firm in the UK and you want fewer quiet periods and better-quality leads, here is what an audit should actually cover, what to ignore, and what “good” looks like.
A local audit has one job: identify what is blocking you from winning the searches that already have buying intent.
For a construction business, those searches are rarely fancy. They are things like “commercial roofing contractor Glasgow”, “shopfitting contractor Edinburgh”, “groundworks contractor near me”, or “dilapidation works contractor”. The people typing those in are not browsing – they are shortlisting.
So the audit should answer three plain questions.
First, can Google clearly tell what you do and where you do it? Second, when someone lands on your site, are you set up to convert them into a call or a qualified enquiry? Third, are you being outranked because competitors have stronger local signals and authority, not because you need more blog posts.
If an audit does not link findings to revenue outcomes, it is not an audit. It is content.
Be wary if the “audit” is mostly:
Local SEO is not a checklist game. Some fixes matter in your market, some do not. A good audit makes that call and explains why.
A thorough local audit covers five areas. Miss any one of them and you can spend months “doing SEO” without moving the dial.
For many local searches, the Google Business Profile (GBP) is the first – and sometimes only – thing a prospect looks at. Yet most profiles are treated like a directory listing.
An audit should check whether your primary category matches the service that makes you money (not just the closest option). It should review your service areas for accuracy, look at the quality and relevance of photos, and confirm your business description is written for buyers, not Google.
Reviews are another big one. Quantity matters, but relevance and recency matter more. A steady flow of reviews that mention the actual work (flat roof replacement, CAT A fit-out, cladding repairs) will usually outperform a pile of vague “great service” ratings. The audit should also look at whether you are replying properly – not with robotic templates.
Trade-off: more reviews is not always the fastest win. If your profile is miscategorised or your location details are inconsistent, fixing that can lift visibility quicker than chasing ten extra reviews.
If you want to rank across multiple towns or cities, your website needs pages that earn that right. Not doorway pages. Proper service pages that show expertise.
A local audit should look at your key service pages and ask: do these pages make a commercial buyer confident?
For a construction firm, that usually means clear scope (what you do and do not do), evidence (project examples, accreditations, insurances), and a way to take the next step without messing about. It also means writing that reflects how people buy in your world – quotes, tenders, site visits, lead times.
The audit should also check whether you have created location pages that are genuinely useful. If you have ten pages that are basically the same with the town name swapped, that is not a local strategy. It is a liability.
Trade-off: highly polished copy is not the goal. Clarity and specificity win. A simple page that states your approach, typical project size, compliance standards, and response time will beat a “marketing” page every day.
This is where many local businesses get caught out, especially if the website was built by a generalist.
A proper audit should check indexation (are important pages even in Google), internal linking (can Google find and understand your service pages), and site speed on mobile. It should also look for technical mess that leaks authority – duplicate pages, broken redirects, thin content, and poor canonical setup.
For construction companies, image handling is a common culprit. Heavy project galleries can slow pages to a crawl, and slow pages lose leads. The audit should assess whether images are properly sized and served efficiently.
It should also check schema markup, particularly LocalBusiness and service-related schema where appropriate. This is not magic, but it helps Google understand your entity, locations, and offering.
Trade-off: technical perfection is not required. But technical negligence is expensive. The audit should prioritise fixes that affect crawling, indexation, and conversions first.
When two businesses offer similar services in the same area, Google leans heavily on trust signals.
Your audit should review your backlink profile, but in a way that makes sense for local. It is less about “Domain Rating” and more about whether you have credible mentions from relevant local or industry sources. Think trade associations, local press, suppliers, industry directories that actually get used, and partnerships.
It should also check your NAP consistency (name, address, phone number) across key citations. Inconsistent details can quietly weaken your local presence.
And yes, the audit should look for toxic links if you have used bargain-basement SEO before. But the bigger issue is usually absence: competitors have built trust over time while your online footprint is thin.
Trade-off: chasing links can become a time sink. The audit should identify the handful of authority moves most likely to matter in your patch, not recommend “100 directory submissions”.
This is the part many SEO agencies ignore because it is not as easy to report.
A local SEO audit should review whether your website turns traffic into calls and quote requests. That includes obvious things like click-to-call on mobile and visible contact details, but also the less obvious stuff: does your site filter out the wrong enquiries?
If you want fewer price shoppers, you need to qualify. That might mean being upfront about minimum job sizes, focusing on commercial compliance, showing the process, and using forms that capture the right details. A phone number alone is not a strategy.
The audit should also check tracking. If you cannot measure calls, form submissions, and quote requests properly, you are guessing. Guessing is fine for hobbies. Not for growth.
A strong audit does not just list problems. It groups them by impact and effort.
You want to see a small number of high-impact actions that will improve visibility and lead quality inside 30 to 90 days, plus a longer-term plan that builds authority and strengthens your local moat over 6 to 12 months.
For example, a realistic short-term win might be fixing GBP categories, rebuilding one or two key service pages to match search intent, and resolving technical issues stopping those pages from being indexed properly. Longer-term, it might be building out supporting pages for profitable niches (for example, “asbestos garage removal” or “roof surveys for insurers”), and earning local authority through partnerships and PR that actually reflect your business.
If the plan is “publish two blogs a week”, ask how that translates into better enquiries. Sometimes content is part of it. Often it is the slowest lever for local construction.
If you have time, you can spot some basics yourself: check your GBP, search your main services in your target towns, and look at what the top businesses have that you do not. You will learn a lot quickly.
But a proper audit earns its keep when your site is even slightly complex, your service mix is broad, or you have already spent money on SEO without seeing a return. The value is not the tools – it is the judgement. Knowing what to fix first, and what to ignore.
That is also where accountability matters. If the person selling the audit is not the person doing the work, the recommendations tend to be vague. You get a document. You do not get momentum.
If you want a direct-to-expert audit built around commercial outcomes, this is exactly the kind of work we do at Wicked Spider®. We keep onboarding deliberately limited because the point is execution, not volume.
If you have built a solid business offline, you do not need louder marketing. You need a local search setup that matches the quality of your work – and makes the phone ring with the right kind of jobs.
