Use this when
local SEO, Google Business Profile, GBP, map pack, local pack, NAP consistency.
Process
Before scoring, detect two things from the page: business type and industry vertical. Business type: brick-and-mortar (visible street address, a Maps embed, "visit us at"), service-area business (no visible address, "we come to you," "serving [city/region]"), or hybrid (both signals present). Industry vertical: restaurant (/menu, cuisine, reservations), healthcare (insurance, NPI, "Dr.", HIPAA notice), legal (attorney, practice areas, bar admission), home services (service area, "free estimate," licensed/insured), real estate (listings, MLS, agent bio), or automotive (inventory, VIN, dealership). If no vertical is clear, use a generic LocalBusiness path and say so.
Score six weighted dimensions:
- GBP signals (25%): Maps embed or place reference on the page, category signals consistent with the page's own content, GBP posts/photo/Q&A evidence, business hours visible. Primary category mismatch is the single most damaging signal in this dimension.
- Reviews & reputation (20%): visible review count and star rating,
aggregateRatingin schema, recency signals, owner-response patterns. Flag any hint of review gating (pre-screening customers before directing them to leave a review) as a policy violation, not just a quality issue. - Local on-page SEO (20%): city/service keywords in title and H1, dedicated pages per core service (this is the single highest-value local on-page signal), NAP visible in footer/contact, click-to-call
tel:link, no doorway-page pattern on location pages. - NAP consistency & citations (15%): compare Name/Address/Phone across the visible HTML, the LocalBusiness JSON-LD, and any visible GBP data; flag every discrepancy explicitly rather than picking one as truth.
- Local schema markup (10%): correct industry subtype (Restaurant not LocalBusiness, LegalService not the deprecated Attorney, AutoDealer not the deprecated VehicleListing), geo coordinates at 5+ decimal precision, opening hours, price range.
- Local link & authority signals (10%): Chamber of Commerce or BBB mentions, community involvement content, "best of" list presence — these matter more for AI-visibility citations than for classic local-pack ranking now.
For multi-location sites, apply the quality gate from the multi-location-quality-gate playbook before scoring location pages individually.
Report: overall score with the six-dimension breakdown, business type and vertical detected, a NAP consistency table (source vs value vs match), and a prioritized action list (Critical/High/Medium/Low). Always close with a limitations note: this audit reads what the page and its schema expose; live Google Business Profile data, verified review velocity, and real local-pack position all require a connected paid tool this team doesn't have.