Tracsoft

75 Things You Should Know About Local SEO, One Line at a Time, Action Item After Action Item. Front load your keyword in your meta title. Not your business name. Your keyword. Your H1 tag and your meta title should match. Check every page right now. One keyword per page. If two pages target the same term, Google ignores both. Go to Google Search Console. Click Pages. Fix every page that is not indexed. Every city you want calls from needs its own dedicated page with 500 words minimum. Your GBP primary category matters more than almost anything. Match the top 3 in your Map Pack exactly. Fill out every single service on your GBP with 300 characters of keyword rich copy. Your business name on your GBP must match your LLC documentation exactly. Non negotiable. Real commercial address. Real signage. Real suite number. Google verifies this. Local area code phone number. Not a toll free number. Local numbers signal local relevance. Rename every photo before uploading. roof-repair-nashville-tennessee.jpg not IMG_4523.jpg. Upload 5 to 10 new photos to your GBP every single month. Consistently. Respond to every single review. Include the service and city naturally in the reply. One significant GBP change per day. Space them 48 hours apart or risk an automatic suspension. Reviews may be 50 percent of the GBP algorithm. Treat them accordingly. Get the majority of your reviews from people in the same metro area. Out of state reviews drop off constantly. Detailed reviews with specific job descriptions outperform short generic ones. Coach your customers. Never get 50 reviews in a week after months of getting two. Velocity spikes trigger spam filters. Respond to negative reviews calmly and professionally. Silence is worse than the bad review itself. Use BrightLocal to audit and manage your citations across the web. It is the fastest way to find where your NAP is wrong and fix it. Your NAP must be identical everywhere. Same abbreviations. Same suite format. Same everything. Get listed on Yelp and fill the profile out completely. ChatGPT cites Yelp constantly in local results. Make sure Bing has your business information correct. ChatGPT pulls from Bing's index. Get on every legal or industry specific directory relevant to your niche. Each one is a citation and a backlink. Join your local Chamber of Commerce month one. It is a backlink from a trusted local entity. Sponsor a local event. Local news covers it. Local news links to you. That link is worth more than ten generic ones. Find every "best [service] in [city]" listicle on page one and two of Google. Email every one you are not on. Backlinks are still the number one ranking factor on the website side of SEO. 80 to 90 percent of the links you build should point to your homepage. It looks the most natural. Branded anchor text is the safest link building strategy. Use your business name. Never build 15 backlinks in one month that all say the same exact keyword phrase. Google sees it immediately. Only build do follow links. No follow links provide almost no ranking value. Three to five quality backlinks per month from DR 30 plus sites beats 50 cheap directory links every time. Before accepting any backlink check the domain rating, organic traffic, relevance, and whether it has a real underlying site. Internal links between your city pages and service pages distribute authority across your entire site. Your city page should link to your service page. Your service page should link back to your city page. Build a FAQ page with 40 to 50 questions answered in your own voice with real pricing and real timelines. That FAQ page is your single biggest weapon for showing up in ChatGPT and Perplexity results. Generic marketing copy never gets cited by AI. Direct expert answers do. Go to ChatGPT right now and search for your service in your city. Look at every source it cites. Get listed there. Get mentioned on Reddit. Local subreddits are indexed and cited by AI tools constantly. Answer questions in your city subreddit genuinely. No promotion. Just real expertise. People remember. Do not rebuild a website that is already generating rankings and calls. Recovery from a migration takes up to a year. If you do migrate, make sure every old URL has a 301 redirect to its new equivalent. After any migration check every canonical tag immediately. They often default to the old hosting domain. Your URL slugs should describe the page exactly. /nashville-roof-replacement not /page-2 or /services. Website platform does not matter. WordPress versus Wix is a distraction. Get the fundamentals right on any platform. Site speed matters. A page that takes five seconds to load on mobile is losing you rankings and customers. Run a geo-grid scan on Local Falcon. See exactly where you are invisible in your own service area. One GBP cannot dominate a 30 mile radius. Every red zone on that geo-grid map is a second location opportunity. A second GBP requires a real address, real signage, a unique local phone number, and its own landing page. Set up call tracking. If you do not know which channel generated each call you cannot improve anything. Check Google Search Console at least once a month. It tells you exactly what is broken before it costs you rankings. Answer your phone. First business to pick up wins the job. Speed to answer beats everything. Missed call text back is the bare minimum. Set it up today. Do not rely on a single marketing channel. If your GBP gets suspended and that is your only lead source you are in trouble. SEO compounds. Paid ads reset to zero the day you stop paying. They are not the same investment. A plastic surgeon needs ten clients a month. A cleaning company needs one hundred. High ticket SEO is less competitive. Always. GBP rankings and website rankings are two completely separate algorithms. They require completely independent strategies. If you need results fast, focus on GBP first. Your time to rank on GBP is almost entirely determined by how fast you build reviews. Link your social media pages to your GBP. An Instagram with 300 posts proves to Google you are a real operating business. Open Google Maps and route to your own business address every single day. It is a real engagement signal and it is free. Every photo you post on TikTok, Instagram, or Facebook should have your city and service in the caption. Say your city and service out loud in every TikTok video. The platform transcribes audio for search. Get on every "best of" list in your local market. One placement earns a backlink, a citation, and AI visibility at the same time. Get quoted in your local business journal. One media mention feeds Google rankings, AI visibility, and credibility simultaneously. Your homepage links are the most powerful links on your entire site. If you own multiple businesses, link them to each other. The older your domain, the better it performs. Digital real estate appreciates exactly like physical real estate. Do not major in the minors. Schema markup and alt tags matter far less than backlinks, reviews, and your meta title. If your agency only builds no follow links, fire them. You are paying for links that do almost nothing. Ask your agency what their indexing strategy is. A backlink that Google never crawls is a backlink that does not exist. Today, six months of solid SEO can get you ranked number one. Five years from now it may take eighteen months. The time to start is now. Every single one of these is worthless if you do not execute. Print this out. Work through it line by line. The business owners who actually do the work are the ones who never have to worry about where their next customer is coming from.