Local SEO audit rules: NAP, LocalBusiness and geo tags

Audit rules for local businesses: consistent phone numbers and postal addresses, location and service-area pages, and geo meta tags.

Local SEO rules cover the signals a business with a physical location or a service area publishes: LocalBusiness schema, one consistent phone number and postal address across the site, location pages and geo meta tags. Every rule in this category is skipped, with the reason shown in the report, when the site profile says the site is not a local business, so a global product site is never marked down for them.

Run only these rules

squirrel audit https://example.com --rule-include local

Where to start

These carry the highest severity and weight in the category.

NAP consistency: same name, address and phone everywhere: One phone number or address written several ways across a site. squirrel finds the site norm and lists every page that disagrees with it.
Service area pages: the location URLs squirrel looks for: A local business with no /locations or /service-areas page. squirrel scans the crawled paths and reports which location hubs it found.
geo.placename: what geo meta tags do and who reads them: Location pages carrying no geo.region, geo.placename, geo.position or ICBM tag. squirrel reports which of the four are present, page by page.

Rules

Rule	What it flags	Severity	Scope
geo.placename: what geo meta tags do and who reads them	Location pages carrying no geo.region, geo.placename, geo.position or ICBM tag. squirrel reports which of the four are present, page by page.	info	Per-page
NAP consistency: same name, address and phone everywhere	One phone number or address written several ways across a site. squirrel finds the site norm and lists every page that disagrees with it.	warning	Site-wide
Service area pages: the location URLs squirrel looks for	A local business with no /locations or /service-areas page. squirrel scans the crawled paths and reports which location hubs it found.	info	Site-wide

Key terms

Doorway page: A page made to rank for a query and funnel visitors elsewhere, often many near-identical pages per keyword or city.
Geo meta tags: Legacy geo.region, geo.placename and geo.position meta tags that state a page’s location; not to be confused with GEO, generative engine optimization.
LocalBusiness schema: LocalBusiness structured data with address, opening hours and geo coordinates for a physical business.
NAP consistency: Name, address and phone number stated the same way across a site’s pages, schema and listings.

Structured data checks LocalBusiness markup for a name and either a full address or a service area. E-E-A-T looks for address structured data among a site’s trust signals.

Learn more

Fix SEO issues with AI, the coding agent workflow for working through a report
Website audit tool
Sample report, with the Local SEO section on a real site

Disable all Local SEO rules

[rules]
disable = ["local/*"]

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