Calgary, AB

The local SEO checklist, in the order that actually matters.

Every item here is something you can do yourself in an afternoon. They're ordered by leverage rather than effort, which is the part most checklists get wrong.

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Can Google actually crawl your site?

Check robots.txt for a blanket Disallow and check your pages for a stray noindex tag. Nothing else on this list matters until both are clean.

Visit yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, your entire site is asking search engines to stay out. This happens most often when a staging site goes live without the developer changing the file back.

Then view the page source of your homepage and search for 'noindex'. A single leftover tag from a redesign can remove a page from Google entirely while the page looks perfectly normal to you.

Does every page have a title worth clicking?

One unique title per page, naming the service and the city, under about sixty characters so it isn't truncated.

The title tag is the blue line in the search result and it's the single strongest on-page signal about what a page is for. The default failures are all common: the same title on every page, 'Home | Company Name', or the business name alone with no indication of what the business does.

'Emergency Plumber Calgary | 24/7 Callouts | Company' does three jobs at once. 'Welcome to our website' does none.

Is your Google Business Profile category right?

Set the primary category to the words customers type, not to your professional self-description. Everything else goes in secondary categories.

This is usually the highest-value fifteen minutes available to a Calgary local business, and it's a dropdown. Google weights the primary category heavily, and the common error is choosing the most flattering or most specialised option rather than the most searched one.

The test: what would someone type if they didn't know your business existed? File under that. A pharmacy with a strong travel practice is a pharmacy first, with travel clinic as a secondary.

Are your pages competing with each other?

Search site:yoursite.com plus a service term in Google. If several near-identical pages come back, they're splitting your ranking.

This is the most common structural problem on established local sites, because pages accumulate over a decade and nobody checks whether one already exists. 'Prescription refills', 'renew prescriptions' and 'refill your prescription' are three pages competing to answer one query, and Google frequently ranks none of them.

The fix is to merge them into the strongest one and redirect the rest to it. It usually moves things more than publishing anything new.

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Do your details match everywhere?

The same business name, address and phone number on your site, your Business Profile and every directory. Inconsistency reduces Google's confidence in all of it.

Check for the usual suspects: an old suite number that survived a move, a tracking number that appears on one listing only, and a Google business name with keywords the signage doesn't have.

Your website footer
— The reference version. Make sure it's the one you want and that it appears as text, not inside an image.
Google Business Profile
— Exact match to the footer, including suite number formatting.
Yellow Pages, Yelp, and industry directories
— The ones that most often carry an old address years after a move.
Facebook and Instagram
— Checked less often than any other listing and wrong surprisingly frequently.
Your invoices and email signature
— Not a ranking factor, but the place inconsistencies originate.

Is there one page per thing you sell?

A single 'Services' page can't rank for eight services. Split it, one intent per page, and only where you can write something real.

This is the largest content gain available to most local sites and it doesn't require a blog. It requires taking the eight bullet points on your services page and turning each into three hundred honest words.

The limit is the same one that applies to neighbourhood pages: if you can't say something specific and true, the page will be thin, and thin pages drag the rest of the site down rather than helping.

Can an AI assistant read you?

Check robots.txt for blocks on the live-search crawlers OAI-SearchBot, Claude-SearchBot and PerplexityBot, and check that your page has text before JavaScript runs. Training crawlers are a separate privacy choice.

AI crawler blocks are usually accidental — they arrive with a security plugin or a CDN's bot-protection default. For a local business that wants to be recommended, they're pure loss.

The JavaScript check is easy to do by hand: disable JavaScript in your browser and reload your homepage. What remains is roughly what several crawlers see. If it's blank, that's the finding.

What should you not bother with?

Keyword density, meta keywords, submitting to hundreds of directories, and buying links. None of these work and two of them cause harm.

The meta keywords tag has been ignored by Google for well over a decade. Keyword density isn't a thing any modern ranking system measures. Bulk directory submission services produce listings on sites nobody visits, with inconsistent details that actively hurt the consistency you just fixed.

Bought links are the one that carries real risk. They're the most commonly sold 'SEO service' to local businesses and the most likely to result in a penalty that takes months to recover from.

Common questions

How long does this checklist take?

The first five items are an afternoon if you have access to your site and your Business Profile. Splitting the services page is a week of writing.

Which item matters most?

Crawl access, because everything else is wasted if it's broken — and then the Business Profile category, because it's a dropdown that moves the whole map listing.

Do I need a tool for any of this?

No. Every item here is checkable in a browser. The free check on this site automates about half of it if you'd rather not do it by hand.

How will I know it worked?

Google Search Console, which is free and is Google's own data about your site. Expect four to six weeks before changes are reflected.

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