The local SEO checklist for Indian businesses

For a business with a physical location, the map pack is worth more than the blue links. Here is what to fix and in what order.

Google Business Profile first

Complete every field. Primary category matters more than any other single setting, so pick the most specific one that describes your main service. Add secondary categories for the rest. Load at least twenty photos and refresh them quarterly.

Reviews, steadily

Velocity matters more than total count. Twenty reviews over six months beats fifty reviews in one week, which looks bought. Ask at the moment of delivery, with a QR code or a WhatsApp link that goes straight to the review form.

Reply to every review

Including the bad ones, calmly and without arguing. Prospective customers read the replies as carefully as the reviews.

One page per location and per service

If you have three branches and five services, that is fifteen possible pages. Write them properly with genuinely different content, not a template with the city name swapped, which Google has been filtering for years.

Citations and consistency

Name, address and phone number identical everywhere. Fix Justdial, IndiaMART, Sulekha and the industry directories that matter in your category. Ignore the bulk directory packages, they do nothing.

Then measure the right thing

Map pack rankings vary by the exact location of the searcher. Track calls and direction requests from the profile instead. Those are the numbers that turn into revenue.