Local SEO checklist for Australian small businesses

If your customers are mostly nearby, local SEO is often the most useful marketing you can do. Work through this list in order.

Google Business Profile

• Claim and verify your profile.
• Choose the most accurate main category.
• Add your services, service areas, hours, phone number and website.
• Upload real photos of your work, team and premises.
• Post updates occasionally, and answer questions people ask.

Reviews

• Ask every happy customer, and send a direct link to make it easy.
• Reply to every review, including the bad ones.
• Don’t buy reviews or offer rewards only for positive ones. The ACCC treats fake reviews as a serious issue.

Your website

• Put your suburb or city in page titles where it’s natural: “Emergency plumber in Geelong”.
• Give each main service its own page.
• Show your business name, address and phone number on every page.
• Make the phone number tappable on mobile.
• Make sure pages load quickly on a phone.

Read more about SEO and AI search if you’d like help with these.

Suburb and area pages

Pages for the areas you serve can work well, but only if each one is useful. Mention real jobs, local details and the suburbs nearby. Copying one page and swapping the suburb name won’t help, and it can look like spam.

Consistent details and directories

Your business name, address and phone number should match everywhere. Check Google, Facebook, industry associations and Australian directories like True Local and Yellow Pages. Fix old addresses first.

Structured data

Add LocalBusiness schema to your site. It helps search engines understand your business, and it also makes your details easier for AI tools to use.

Measure what matters

Connect Google Search Console and Google Analytics, then track phone calls, form enquiries and direction requests from your profile. Rankings are only useful if they bring in customers.

How long does it take?

Fixing your profile and website can help within weeks, while reviews and links build over months. Keep at it, because your competitors probably aren’t doing all of this.