A plumbing company hired me in March because they vanished from local search results overnight. Their phone stopped ringing, and competitors with worse reviews were showing up first.
Here's what the audit revealed:
Google Business Profile chaos: Their address on GBP didn't match their website. Different phone numbers across three directories. Google couldn't verify their location consistency, so it stopped showing them in the map pack. Simple but devastating.
Missing location signals: Their service pages mentioned "plumbing services" but never specified their city or service areas. Meanwhile, competitors had dedicated pages for "emergency plumber in [city]" with neighborhood names embedded naturally.
Citation inconsistencies: Found their business listed on 18 directories with six different address variations. Someone had moved offices two years ago and never updated anything.
Review response gap: They had 47 Google reviews but hadn't responded to a single one. Competitors with fewer reviews but active engagement ranked higher.
The fix was straightforward but tedious. Corrected NAP everywhere, created location-specific service pages, claimed and cleaned up directory listings, and started responding to reviews.
Three weeks later, they appeared in position 2 of the map pack for their primary keyword. Phone calls increased 200% compared to the previous month.
Local SEO isn't complicated. It's just detailed work most business owners don't know they need to do.