A local SEO audit that finds the fixes, not a score and re-runs itself every week

Every local audit has to start at the Google Business Profile because it is the surface Google most directly controls and most heavily weights. But 'GBP audit' as a category has been reduced to a checkbox exercise in most tools — did you fill in the description, did you upload ten photos, did you pick a primary category. That is table-stakes hygiene, not an audit. A real GBP audit compares your profile against the top-three competitors in the specific map pack you are trying to enter and flags the gaps that actually predict rank movement. Categories are the largest lever: about a third of locations we audit have a wrong primary category or are missing two to four relevant secondaries that every competitor in the pack has selected. Services are the second largest — Google is now using service items as its clearest disambiguator between similar categories, and half the profiles we scan have three services filled in when the category supports thirty. Attributes, Q&A ownership, photo cadence, post recency, and hours integrity round out the layer. SeoNexus runs 40+ checks in this pass and, critically, sorts them by expected impact on your specific category in your specific geo. A missing 'accepts new patients' attribute matters for a dentist and not at all for a boutique. A missing primary category is a red-line issue everywhere. The fix list you get out of the profile pass is ordered by that impact, so an operator can start at the top and stop guessing which yellow checkbox is worth their Tuesday morning.

Most audits treat rank as the score you get after doing the work. That is backwards. Rank data is diagnostic — it tells you where the profile is failing right now and where the specific competitor problem lives. If a med spa in Denver ranks in the top three across every cell of its service area except the three ZIP codes where a specific competitor won a battle over 'CoolSculpting near me' six months ago, no amount of generic 'improve your GBP' advice will move the needle. The audit has to name that competitor, name those cells, and hand back the specific move that closes the gap. This is why the audit uses geo-grid scans, not one-shot keyword tracking. A single 'position 4.2' number for a keyword tells you nothing about which neighborhoods you own and which you don't. The 5x5 grid tells you exactly which of 25 cells you rank top-three in, which competitors you lose each red cell to, and — cross-referenced against the profile audit — which specific profile weakness maps to that loss. Often it is a category the competitor has and you don't. Often it is a service item explicitly named in the query. Occasionally it is an address ambiguity Google's algorithm is treating as a low-confidence signal. Every red cell becomes a testable hypothesis with a specific fix, not a decorative color in a heat map.

The other half of what Google reads is trust — signals it can pull from outside your own profile that corroborate your location is real, active, and preferred by real people. That half of the audit lives in two places: reviews and citations. Reviews get overweighted by legacy SEO advice as 'get more reviews.' The velocity and coverage matter more. A location with 400 reviews from 2019 and none this quarter is losing rank to a competitor with 60 reviews collected steadily in the last twelve months. And a location responding to 20% of reviews is treated differently from one responding to 100% — Google's own case studies name response coverage as a factor. The audit measures velocity, sentiment mix, coverage across all twelve platforms in the unified inbox, and the delta between your review profile and the top-three competitors in the pack. Citations are the more invisible half. NAP consistency across 86+ directories still matters, not because a Yellow Pages listing sends traffic, but because inconsistent name, address, or phone data across the citation graph acts as a suppressor on the confidence signal. Duplicates are worse — a duplicate listing dilutes your authority across both records and can even trigger suspension review. SeoNexus scans the full citation graph, flags every mismatch, and hands back a duplicate-merge and update path. The trust half of the audit is where the slow, compounding rank movements come from — locations that fix reviews and citations in the same quarter typically see rank gains stick for the next two.