On this page
How to use this list
Work top to bottom and finish a tier before starting the next. The ordering is not aesthetic preference, it is dependency. There is no point writing service pages if search engines cannot index them, and no point chasing links to a page that contradicts the phone number on your Business Profile.
You need three free tools open and nothing else: Google Search Console verified on your domain, the Google Business Profile dashboard, and a phone in incognito mode for checking what a real searcher sees. If Search Console is not verified yet, that is item one and everything else waits.
Where an item says “done test”, that is the specific thing you check to stop yourself declaring victory too early. Half-finished SEO tasks are the norm precisely because most of them have no obvious finish line.
Tier one: the blockers
Nothing below this section works until these are true. Budget a day.
- Search Console verified and the sitemap submitted. Done test: the Pages report shows a number of indexed pages that roughly matches the number of pages you believe you have. If it shows three and you have thirty, stop and read the excluded reasons before doing anything else.
- Every page returns 200 and renders its text in the raw HTML. Done test: use the URL Inspection tool, click View Crawled Page, and search the HTML for your own heading text. If the heading is missing, the site is rendering client-side and search engines are seeing an empty shell.
- One canonical version of the domain. The www and non-www variants, and http and https, must all redirect to a single chosen version with a 301. Done test: type all four into a browser and confirm the address bar always lands on the same one.
- Business Profile claimed and verified. Not created, verified. Done test: the dashboard shows no verification prompts and the listing appears when you search the business name in incognito.
- Name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Pick one written format, down to the abbreviation of the street and the spacing of the postcode, and use it on the website footer, the Business Profile, Companies House, Checkatrade or wherever you list, and every social profile. Done test: search your phone number in quotation marks and check that every result agrees on the business name.
- The phone number is a real, answerable number and it is clickable on mobile. Done test: ring it from a phone that has never called you before, at four o'clock on a Friday.
Two of these have caught out sites we have audited more than anything else: client-side rendering, and a site that returns a page for every URL including invented ones. The second creates unlimited crawlable rubbish and dilutes everything genuine.
Tier two: relevance
This tier decides which searches you are even eligible for. Budget two or three days spread over a fortnight.
- One page per service, and the page uses the words customers use. A single “Services” page listing eleven things cannot rank strongly for any of them. Done test: for each service you want work in, you can name the URL that targets it.
- Unique title and meta description on every page. Put the service and the primary town in the title, in that order, and keep it short enough not to truncate. Done test: sort the Search Console Pages report and confirm no two pages share a title.
- One H1 per page, describing the page. Not the company name on all forty pages.
- Internal links from the homepage to your priority pages. Three or four descriptive text links, not a nav item called “More”. Done test: from the homepage, you can reach any priority page in one click.
- LocalBusiness structured data on the homepage carrying name, address, phone, opening hours and area served, matching the Business Profile exactly. Done test: the Rich Results Test returns no errors.
- Mobile page speed under about two and a half seconds on a 4G connection, not office wi-fi. Compress the job photographs first; they are almost always the cause.
- A page that answers what it costs. The highest-volume unanswered question in most trades. Done test: search “how much does [your service] cost” and see whether anything local appears at all.
The temptation at this tier is to produce volume. Resist it. Google's spam policies have named scaled content abuse since March 2024, and pages produced from a template with the place name swapped are precisely what that covers. The number of area pages to build is the number you can make genuinely different, which for most firms is somewhere under fifteen. Our SEO service page explains how we decide that number for a given business.
Tier three: proof
Tier two gets you shown. Tier three gets you chosen, and it also feeds back into ranking through engagement. Ongoing, roughly an hour a week.
- A review request that fires after every completed job, automatically, with a direct link. Done test: the last three jobs you finished each triggered a request without anyone remembering to send one. The mechanics are in the reviews guide, including the rules on what you are not allowed to do.
- Every review answered, positive and negative, within a week.
- Your own photographs on the site and the profile, with descriptive file names and alt text that says what the job was and where.
- Case detail on the page, not just a gallery. What the problem was, what you did, how long it took, roughly what it cost. Done test: somebody in the trade reading it would recognise it as real.
- Accreditations displayed with the registration number where you have one — NICEIC, Gas Safe, FMB, CHAS, TrustMark. The number is what makes it checkable, and checkable is what makes it worth displaying.
- Insurance and guarantee terms stated plainly rather than hinted at.
Tier four: compounding
Slow, unglamorous, and the reason two firms with identical websites end up in different positions three years later.
- Local citations on the sources that matter — Companies House, Yell, Bing Places, Apple Business Connect, the trade bodies you actually belong to, and the manufacturer installer directories for the products you fit. Free and accurate beats paid and premium.
- Links you can justify. Suppliers, manufacturers, a sponsored junior football kit, the local chamber, a genuine piece of local press. If you cannot explain why the link exists in one sentence, it is the kind of link that becomes a liability.
- One substantial piece of content a quarter answering a real question in your trade. Four good pages a year beats forty thin ones.
- Search Console query review every month, looking for phrases where you rank between position five and fifteen. Those are the pages where a modest improvement produces a real traffic change.
- Prune. Once a year, find pages with zero impressions over sixteen months and either improve them or remove them.
The whole list, with timings
| Tier | Task | Time | How you know it is done |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Search Console verified, sitemap submitted | 30 min | Indexed page count matches reality |
| 1 | Text present in raw HTML | 20 min | Heading found in the crawled page source |
| 1 | Single canonical domain | 30 min | All four variants land on one URL |
| 1 | Profile verified, details consistent | 1 hr | No verification prompts; number search agrees |
| 2 | One page per service | 1–2 days | You can name the URL for each service |
| 2 | Unique titles and H1s | 2 hr | No duplicate titles in Search Console |
| 2 | Structured data on the homepage | 45 min | Rich Results Test passes clean |
| 2 | Mobile speed under 2.5s | Half a day | Field data, not a lab score |
| 3 | Automated review request | 2 hr | Last three jobs triggered one unaided |
| 3 | Real job photography with alt text | Ongoing | Twelve genuine images minimum |
| 4 | Citations and justified links | Ongoing | Each link explainable in a sentence |
| 4 | Quarterly content, annual prune | Ongoing | Four pages a year that earn impressions |
What to leave off the list entirely
Some of the most commonly sold local SEO work does very little, and a few items actively cost you.
Bulk directory submissions. Sold in packages of two hundred. The handful of directories that matter are listed above and take an afternoon; the rest are pages nobody reads on sites nobody visits.
Chasing a third-party authority score. Domain authority metrics are invented by SEO tool vendors, not by Google. They are useful for comparing two link opportunities and useless as a target.
Keyword density. Writing “plumber Leeds” nine times reads badly to a human, which is the audience that decides whether you get the call.
An exact-match domain. Buying leedsplumbing247.co.uk to replace a nine-year-old domain with existing history is usually a downgrade dressed as a strategy.
Monthly blog posts for the sake of it. Four hundred words on “five signs you need a new boiler” that duplicates what forty other sites already say will not earn anything. If you have nothing specific to add, publish nothing and spend the hour asking for reviews instead.
The monthly check
- Search Console: impressions and average position for your priority queries, compared with the same month last year rather than last month.
- The Pages report: has anything fallen out of the index?
- Business Profile: calls, direction requests, website clicks, and how many new reviews arrived.
- Check your actual position from two or three postcodes across your area, not from your own phone at your own address, which is personalised and flattering.
- Pick one item from the next tier down and finish it.
Local SEO is not complicated, it is just long. Six months of the above, done consistently, will move a trade business further than any single tactic, and it lowers what you have to pay for enquiries on the advertising side at the same time. If you want to see the sectors we have run this in, the industries pages set out the specifics, and any unfamiliar term is defined in the glossary.
Rather have someone else do this?We run exactly this for trade and construction firms across the UK. Call and we will tell you what is realistic in your area, including when the answer is that it is not worth it.
Call 07443 392243WhatsAppCommon questions
How long before this checklist shows results?
Tier one changes can affect indexing within days. Tier two usually shows in Search Console impressions within four to eight weeks. Meaningful movement on competitive service-plus-town phrases generally takes three to six months, and the compounding work in tier four is measured over years rather than months.
Do I need an SEO tool subscription to work through this?
No. Everything in tiers one to three can be done with Search Console, the Business Profile dashboard and a browser. Paid tools become useful once you are competing for phrases where you need to track rank movement across several towns, which is a later problem than most firms think.
Should I do this before or after starting Google Ads?
Alongside, but tier one first. Advertising traffic lands on the same pages, so a slow site or a page that does not answer the search wastes paid clicks as well as organic ones. Fixing the blockers improves both channels at once.
My site was built on a page builder. Is that a problem?
Only if it fails the tier one tests. Plenty of builder-based sites render server-side, load quickly and index perfectly well. The problem cases are the ones that serve an empty shell to crawlers or return a valid page for every invented URL. Run the two checks before assuming you need a rebuild.
Is there any point doing this if I only serve one town?
Yes, and it is easier. A single-town firm has fewer pages to make genuinely distinct and a much clearer proximity advantage in the map results. The whole list gets shorter and the results tend to arrive sooner.