We get some version of this call a lot: an owner in Sherman or Denison is sure the website is broken because the phone went quiet. Usually it isn’t. Usually it’s three or four small, boring things. A business category picked in a hurry years ago. A phone number that doesn’t match across directories. A services page that never once says “Denison.” An owner can find every one of them with a local SEO audit that takes half an hour.
No paid tools, no technical background. Grab your phone, open a notes app, and set a timer.
Minutes 1 to 5: search like a customer
Open a private browsing window on your phone and search the way a customer would: the service and the city, not your business name. “Roof repair Sherman TX.” “Dentist Denison.” “Emergency plumber near me.”
Write down three things. Whether you show up in the map pack (the three businesses listed under the map). Where you land in the regular results below it. And who’s above you. That last one tells you what kind of fight you’re in. Losing to national chains with hundreds of reviews is a different problem from losing to a two-truck outfit out of Pottsboro.
Look at the very top of the page, too. On a lot of searches Google now shows an AI Overview before anything else. Note whether it names you, and which businesses it does name. If it names competitors and never you, that’s a gap worth knowing about, and it’s the one our AI search optimization work goes after.
Repeat all of this for your three highest-margin services. Owners tend to check the service they’re proudest of, and it’s rarely the one paying the bills.
Minutes 5 to 12: the Google Business Profile fields nobody fills in
Open your Google Business Profile and look at it the way a stranger would.
- Primary category. Is it the most specific option that’s accurate? “Roofing contractor” beats “Contractor.” Whitespark’s 2026 Local Search Ranking Factors survey put the primary category first on its list of factors for map rankings, so don’t guess on this one.
- Additional categories. Most businesses use one or none. Add each one that honestly describes work you do, and nothing you don’t.
- Services. Every service you offer should be listed, with a real description.
- Photos. When did you last add one? If it’s been months, customers can tell.
- Hours, holiday hours included. If Google isn’t sure you’re open on a holiday it may warn searchers that your hours might differ, and some of them will just call somebody else.
While you’re in there, open the performance section and find the list of searches that showed your business. Those are the words people actually typed. There’s often a service on that list you don’t have a page for. We go through every field in more detail in how to optimize your Google Business Profile in 2026.
Minutes 12 to 18: check your name, address and phone everywhere
Search your business name in quotes and click through the first ten or so results that aren’t your own site. Yelp, Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places, the BBB, the chamber directory, and whatever directories exist for your trade.
You’re hunting for mismatches. An old suite number. The phone number from before you switched carriers. “LLC” on some listings and not others. A Sherman address two years after you moved to Denison.
Google uses these listings to cross-check who and where you are. When they disagree, it trusts your information less, and AI tools pulling from the same directories get confused the same way. The work is dull. It’s also often one of the best-returning fixes on this whole list. Start with the listings customers actually use (Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing, Yelp) and work down from there.
Minutes 18 to 23: reviews, and read the dates
Everybody checks their star rating. Almost nobody checks when the reviews came in.
A business with 140 reviews and nothing newer than March looks worse to a customer than one with 45 reviews and six from the past month. Google cares about this too: recency of reviews lands in the top dozen map-ranking factors in the same Whitespark survey. Count how many reviews you’ve gotten in the last 90 days, then do the same for the top competitor you wrote down in minute three.
Then check whether you’ve replied to them. Unanswered reviews, especially bad ones, are the cheapest problem on this list and one of the first things a customer reads when choosing between you and the shop up the road.
Minutes 23 to 28: what your website says about where you are
Pull up your own site on your phone and go down this list:
- Does the title in the browser tab name a service and a city? “Home” is a wasted title.
- Does each major service have its own page, or is everything crammed onto one Services page? A page ranks for what it’s about, and a page about everything is about nothing in particular.
- Are your address and phone number in the footer as real text, not part of an image?
- Does the phone number dial when you tap it?
- How long does the homepage take to load on cell data, away from the office wifi? If you’re drumming your fingers, so is everyone else.
- Does the site mention every town you actually serve? If you work in Denison and only Sherman appears anywhere, read why you rank in Sherman but not Denison.
Minutes 28 to 30: rank the fixes
You now have a list. Don’t try to do all of it this week. Work it in this order:
- Anything factually wrong: phone, address, hours. These cost you customers today.
- Empty Google Business Profile fields. Free, fast, and the categories matter most.
- Review recency. Start asking every satisfied customer, this week.
- Directory mismatches. Tedious, but the fixes add up.
- Website structure and speed. The biggest lift and the slowest payoff. Still worth doing.
What a 30-minute local SEO audit won’t catch
Half an hour won’t turn up technical problems like broken schema markup or pages Google never indexed. It won’t show you a competitor quietly collecting links from every chamber, church and youth league in Grayson County. It can’t tell you whether the traffic you do get turns into calls. And it won’t show you the searches in Van Alstyne, Whitesboro and Pottsboro where you never appear at all. That deeper layer is where a real SEO engagement starts.
What it will do is keep you from paying anyone to fix things you could have handled yourself on a Tuesday morning. Run it again every quarter. The second time takes about fifteen minutes.