LOCAL SEO / AUDIT
Every owner with a public email address has been offered a free SEO audit by a stranger, usually a template with a retainer pitch stapled to it. That has poisoned a useful word. A real local SEO audit is a defined piece of work: a professional runs the checks below against your business, ranks what they find by impact, and hands you a plan you could give to anyone to execute. This page sets out exactly what gets checked, what you should receive, and what you should refuse to accept.
Categories, services, photos, hours and attributes, checked for completeness, and the business name checked against Google's guideline that it must be your real-world name with nothing stuffed into it. Violations risk suspension, and competitors who cheat can be reported, so the audit looks both ways.
How many, how recent, how fast you reply and where the gaps are against the businesses out-ranking you. Surveys consistently show most consumers read reviews before choosing and treat an owner's replies as part of the service, so the reply record is audited too.
Your name, address and phone checked for consistency across the directories that matter, and duplicate or abandoned listings flagged for removal. This is hygiene, not a growth lever, and the audit says so rather than inflating it into a line item.
Service and location pages, titles, LocalBusiness schema, mobile experience, speed and indexing status. A profile can be perfect and still lose to a competitor whose site answers the query better.
Where you rank today for the searches that pay, who holds the map pack and what they have that you do not, plus a check that calls and enquiries are actually being tracked, so the before picture is provable rather than remembered.
AUDIT
Google documents how local ranking works in three words: relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well your profile matches the search, distance is how far you are from the searcher, and prominence is how well known you are, which Google says draws on links, review count and review score. You cannot audit distance, but everything else on this page exists to move one of the other two. Google also states there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking, which is worth remembering whenever an audit email promises one.
The weighting comes from practitioner evidence. Whitespark's survey of 47 local search experts ranks profile signals as the largest factor group in map pack results, with review signals second, and puts your primary category as the single most important individual factor. That ordering drives the audit: profile first, reviews second, then the site, citations and links. An audit that spends half its pages on directory submissions has the priorities backwards.
AUDIT
The free audit economy runs on volume: scraped emails, automated scores, identical findings for a plumber and a florist. Owners are right to be cynical about it. The tell is specificity. A template says improve your page speed. A real audit says which page, measured against which competitor, costing you which searches, and what fixing it is worth relative to everything else on the list.
The deliverable standard is simple and worth holding anyone to, including us: a prioritised list of the fifteen to twenty highest-leverage fixes ranked by impact and effort, written in plain language, walked through with you on a call, and structured so any competent person could execute it. Never accept a raw data export or a generic scored PDF as an audit. Those are printouts, and you can generate one yourself for free.
AUDIT
A good audit is the first input to a strategy, not a product that ends when the call does. The findings sort into an order of work: what unblocks rankings this month, what compounds over the quarter, and what is not worth doing in your market at all. That sequence is its own discipline, and we keep a separate plain-language page on how a local SEO strategy is staged.
You are also free to take the audit and run. The deliverable is designed for handoff, which means your own team, your web person or another agency can execute it without us. Some owners do exactly that and come back later for the parts they could not staff. That is the audit working as intended.
HOW IT RUNS
The audit is fixed-scope work with a defined finish line, not the first month of an open-ended retainer. From access to handover it runs about two weeks.
Book the callRead access to your profile, site and analytics, then the baseline captured: current rankings for the searches that pay, the competitor set, and whether enquiries are being tracked at all.
Profile against Google's guidelines, reviews against the competitors who out-rank you, citations and duplicates, and the site's pages, schema, speed and indexing.
Findings ranked by impact and effort into a plain-language plan, then a call where we walk through it and answer the awkward questions, including which findings are not worth fixing.
You keep the plan. Execute it in-house, hand it to your web person, or ask us to quote the pieces you want done. The audit's value does not depend on hiring us afterwards.
WHAT HAPPENS WHEN YOU ENQUIRE
Pick a time and bring one workflow. Nothing is charged, and there is no form maze or sales script to sit through.
We look at your real figures, work out what the issue is costing you and pick the first thing worth fixing. If it does not stack up, we say so.
One workflow examined and one honest recommendation, whether or not you hire SevenLens. No obligation and no follow-up pressure.
CLIENT REFERENCE
Every project has solved a real business problem and saved a huge amount of manual work. We own everything we paid for, and we stay because we like working with Stuart, not because we are locked in.
WHO YOU WORK WITH
SevenLens is founder-led. Stuart Asta designs, builds and stands behind every engagement, with no account managers and no handovers.
You own everything: the code, the accounts, the data and the documentation. Another provider could take over tomorrow. Clients stay because the work earns its place, not because they are locked in.
About SevenLensHOW PRICING WORKS
SevenLens does not sell packages off a shelf. Every engagement starts with a dollar figure on the problem it solves, so you see the return before you commit. If the maths does not stack up, we tell you before you spend, not after.
COMMON QUESTIONS
No. Those are automated templates fishing for retainers, and your instinct about them is correct. On a first call we will happily look at your rankings for nothing, but the full audit is paid, fixed-scope work with a defined deliverable, which is precisely why it is worth having.
A prioritised plan of the highest-leverage fixes, ranked by impact and effort, in plain language, plus a walkthrough call. Not a raw export, not a generic score. Something you could hand to any competent person and have executed.
About two weeks from access to walkthrough. Fixed scope, so there is no incentive for it to sprawl, and the finish line is the handover, not a subscription.
No. The plan is built for handoff. Some owners execute it themselves, some give it to their existing web person, some ask us to quote parts of it. All three are fine outcomes, and we will tell you which findings genuinely need a specialist.
Stuart, the founder, with Google Search Console, Lighthouse and professional rank tracking, checked by hand against your competitors' live profiles. No automated score sheet, because the point of paying a person is judgement about what matters in your market.
Yes, all of it. The code, accounts, data and documentation are yours from day one. There is no lock-in, and another provider could take over if you ever wanted.
Stuart Asta, the founder. The person on your first call designs the work and stands behind it, with no account managers, no handovers and no offshore team you never meet.
We will tell you on the first call. A clear no is more useful than the wrong project, and it costs you nothing to find out where you stand.
WHERE TO START
Bring the searches you want to win. On a short call we will look at your rankings for nothing, tell you whether a full audit is worth your money, and if it is not, say so before you spend it.
Book a call