What a Local SEO Audit Should Check for Austin Businesses

The short answer

A local SEO audit for an Austin service business should check three things: whether your Google Business Profile follows Google's own guidelines, whether your website clears the requirements Google documents for Search, and whether your reviews are being earned in a way Google's policy allows.

Google is unusually direct about the map pack. Google's local ranking help page says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and prominence, and it states flatly that "there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking on Google." An audit that promises you a position is promising something Google says nobody can sell.

What Google says local ranking is based on

Relevance, distance and prominence each point at something you can check. Google defines relevance as "how well a Business Profile matches what someone is searching for" and says the fix is to "provide complete and detailed business info." Distance is "how far each business is from the customer who's searching." Prominence is "how well-known a business is," based partly on "how many websites link to your business and how many reviews you have."

So relevance is a completeness check, distance is a service-area check, and prominence is a reviews and links check. Nothing in Google's list is a directory count, which is worth remembering when an audit report leads with one.

Business Profile checks

Confirm the profile is verified and complete first. Google's help page says businesses with complete and accurate info "are more likely to show up in local search results," and lists what it wants: the full address if customers can visit, business hours including special hours, what kind of business you are, and attributes such as parking.

The name and the categories are where Austin trades most often break Google's guidelines for representing your business without knowing it. Google says the name "should reflect your business's real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery," which rules out a profile called "Cedar Park Plumber Drain Cleaning" when the truck says something else. For categories, Google says to "choose the fewest number of categories it takes to describe your overall core business," never to use them "solely as keywords," and to pick ones that complete "This business IS a" rather than "this business HAS a."

Service-area business checks

Most of the businesses we work with are what Google calls service-area businesses, and Google names plumbers and cleaning services as its own examples. Google's guidelines say such a business "should have one profile for the central office or location with a designated service area," that there should be "only one profile per business," and that "if you're a service-area business, you should hide your business address from customers." An audit should catch a visible home address on a roofing profile and a second profile somebody set up years ago and forgot.

Two limits come straight from Google's service-area documentation. You can set "up to 20 service areas based on the cities, postal codes, or other areas you serve," and the boundary "shouldn't extend farther than about 2 hours of driving time from where your business is based." Service area edits "may take up to 48 hours to show," so an audit run the day after a change is reading stale data. A P.O. box or a rented virtual office does not qualify as a location under the same guidelines.

Reviews

Review checks are about how reviews are earned, not just how many there are. Google's local ranking page says "more reviews and positive ratings can help your business's local ranking" and that "helpful replies can help your business stand out," so volume, rating and whether you reply all belong on the list. Google's recommended method is to "share a review request link or QR code."

The audit should also look for what Google's Maps content policy prohibits, because those practices get reviews removed. Offering "payment, discounts, free goods and/or services" for a review is out. So is any process that discourages negative reviews or selectively solicits positive ones. Reviews from employees, family or competitors are a conflict of interest under the same policy.

Website checks

On the website, check the few things Google actually documents rather than running a hundred-point scan. Google's Search Essentials say "most sites pass the technical requirements without even realizing it." Google's page experience guidance asks six questions worth borrowing: good Core Web Vitals, pages served securely, content that displays well on mobile, no excessive ads, no intrusive interstitials, and main content that is easy to tell apart from the rest.

The thresholds are published on web.dev: Largest Contentful Paint within 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint of 200 milliseconds or less, and Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of page loads. Google indexes and ranks from the mobile version of a site, so the mobile numbers are the ones that count. Beyond that, every page needs a "descriptive and concise" title, its own meta description because "identical or similar descriptions on every page of a site aren't helpful," and LocalBusiness structured data with the required properties. That is the list we build against in our own website design work.

Where the numbers come from

Every number in a local SEO audit should come from Search Console or the Business Profile dashboard, not from a third-party estimate. Search Console's Performance report defines clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position and shows the past three months by default, which is enough to see whether the searches you care about show your site at all. Its URL Inspection tool says whether a page is in Google's index and why it could not be indexed. Those two reports are the honest baseline, and they are the first thing we open in our free Google Maps audit before any local SEO work starts.