Order matters more than the list
Every local SEO checklist online contains roughly the same items. What they leave out is that the items are not equal, and doing them out of order wastes months.
Work down this list. Do not start item four until items one through three are genuinely finished, not started.
1. Claim the Google Business Profile and finish it
For a local business this is the highest-value hour of work available anywhere. The map results sitting above the normal search results are drawn almost entirely from this profile, not from your website.
Finished means every field. Primary category, secondary categories, services with descriptions, hours, service areas, photos, the website link, and the description. A half-filled profile competes against fully-filled ones.
Get the details wrong and you can lose the profile entirely, which is a worse outcome than not having one. We wrote up the specific ways that happens in the Google Business Profile mistakes post.
2. Make your name, address and phone identical everywhere
Character for character. Not "close enough". If your profile says Suite #3 and your website footer says Ste 3 and the chamber directory says Suite 3, that is three versions of you as far as a search engine is concerned.
Pick one format, write it down, and use that exact string forever. Ours is (907) 560-0711 with the parentheses and the space, and 1101 Gambell St, Suite #3, Anchorage, AK 99501. Every directory, every profile, every page.
This is boring and it works. It is also free.
3. Get reviews steadily instead of in a burst
Thirty reviews arriving in one week reads as exactly what it is. Two a month for a year reads as a business.
Build asking into the moment the work finishes, when the customer is happiest, rather than into a quarterly campaign. A text with a direct link the same afternoon converts better than an email three weeks later, by a wide margin.
Reply to all of them, including the bad ones, especially the bad ones. A calm reply to a one-star review sells better than the five-star above it.
4. Give every service its own page
A single page listing eight services ranks for none of them. Search engines match a query to a page, so a search about a website redesign needs a page about website redesigns, not a bullet on a capabilities page.
Each page needs its own title, its own heading, and at least several hundred words that could not be copied onto a sibling page by swapping one noun. Duplicate-shaped pages get filtered as a set and none of them index. Our own service pages are built to that rule.
5. Give every real service area its own page, and only the real ones
Same logic, applied to geography. If you genuinely work in Wasilla, a page about working in Wasilla can rank for searches in Wasilla.
The trap is obvious and everybody falls in it anyway: generating forty city pages by find-and-replace. Those get filtered, and a page about a town you have never worked in has nothing true in it to write. We publish four, for Anchorage, Eagle River, Wasilla and Palmer, because those are the four where there is a real client or a real reason.
6. Fix the technical floor
Not glamorous, still required. One H1 per page. A unique title and description on every page. A sitemap that lists every page you want indexed and nothing you do not. Search Console connected and actually checked.
Then speed. Google measures three things: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, and Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1, all judged at the 75th percentile of real page loads, per web.dev. That last part matters. Your fastest visits do not count, and in this state neither does testing on Anchorage fiber. More on that in the speed post.
7. Citations and local links, last
Chamber of commerce, trade associations, the Better Business Bureau, industry directories. Real ones with real membership, not the $99 packages promising two hundred listings.
This is item seven for a reason. Citations reinforce a profile that is already correct. They do nothing for a profile that is wrong, and two hundred listings of an inconsistent address actively hurts.
8. Publish something worth reading, occasionally
Not a weekly post. Not AI filler. Four or five pages a year that answer a question your customers genuinely ask, written by somebody who does the work.
The test is simple. If your competitor could publish the identical article without changing a word, it is not worth publishing.
9. Track it, then leave it alone
Search Console for what people searched before they landed. Analytics for what they did after. The Business Profile insights for calls and direction requests, which for a lot of local businesses is the only number that matters.
Then wait. Local rankings move over months, not days, and checking daily just teaches you to panic at noise.
What this list will not do
It will not put you at number one, and neither will anybody who promises to. Google says it plainly in its own documentation: "No one can guarantee a #1 ranking on Google." The same page tells you to be wary of anyone claiming a special relationship with Google or a priority submission.
What the list does is remove every reason you are not ranking that is under your control. That is usually enough, because most of your competition has not done items one through three.