Hudson Creative Documentation

How to Run a Local Search Audit

Perhaps one of the most powerful dashboards in BrightLocal, the Local Search Audit does an audit of your Google Business Profile & Website to provide a full report on key SEO factors that play a role in how well a business ranks in SERPs. This audit is very technical and will highlight which things need improvement to help your local search rankings. Factors can range from linking to your website, Google My Business factors, and even technical on-site SEO factors like page speed, duplicate meta descriptions/titles, mobile speed, and Schema markup for each page.

This tool provides real value on some of the things we’d want to fix for a client. Reports can be saved so we can run this report again at the end of a project to see if there was progress!

Open the client’s location in BrightLocal

Click “Local Search Audit” in the left-hand menu

Click the green “Run Local Search Audit” button

Local Search Audit Step 3

In the pop-up, click the green “Monitor Local SEO Data Only”

Local Search Audit Step 4

Make sure “Do you want this report to be available on an external URL?” is checked

Local Search Audit Step 5

Double-check that the Business Information matches the ABIS

Local Search Audit Step 6

For the Search Settings

Paste in the first 5 keywords from the ABIS into the “Enter your search terms:” section

Choose the City & State from the ABIS as the “Set your Search Location“

The “Type of Business:” field should match the Primary Category from the ABIS

Local Search Audit Step 7

For the Report Sections

Check every box except the “Social Channels” box

Local Search Audit Step 8

Skip the “Receive Email Alerts” section

Click the green “Run Local Search Audit” button

Once the report is done, click the “Actions” button at the top-right, and then click “View External Report”

Local Search Audit Step 9

Copy the URL of the white-labeled report and paste it into an Asana comment within the task

Assign the Asana task to the SEO Manager