local seo
Google updated its local-business documentation in September to support more query types in aggregator and supplier searches. Translation: if you’re a contractor, small business, or nonprofit with physical locations, Google now pulls your business details into more search features—but only if your markup is clean.
Most organizations won’t notice the change until they don’t show up where they should. Year-end is the right moment to audit, before holiday searches ramp up and before everyone starts planning projects for 2027.
This isn’t about chasing every new Google feature. It’s about making sure the basics work when search volume matters.
Google’s September update expanded how local-business structured data feeds into search results—specifically for queries where people are looking for suppliers, service providers, or comparing multiple locations.
If you run an HVAC company, a hardware store, or a food pantry with multiple sites, you’re now eligible for richer search placements. But eligibility doesn’t mean automatic inclusion. Google needs accurate, consistent data across your website markup, your business profiles, and your location pages.
The gap between “we have a website” and “our website tells Google what we actually do and where we do it” is where most small organizations lose visibility.
Your website’s structured data and your claimed business profiles need to agree. If your homepage says you’re open Monday–Friday and your profile says Monday–Saturday, Google doesn’t know which to trust—so it trusts neither fully.
Check:
Discrepancies aren’t just cosmetic. When Google sees conflicting information, it dampens the ranking signal for local queries. You’re fighting yourself.
If you have multiple physical locations, each one should have its own page with its own structured data. A single “Locations” page with a list of addresses doesn’t cut it for local search.
Each location page needs:
This is where platform migrations often break things. A site rebuild is the perfect time to bundle structured-data review into the same sprint—momentum is high, stakeholders expect some disruption, and you’re already touching every template.
Structured data has optional fields. You don’t need to populate all of them, and you definitely shouldn’t make things up to complete the template.
I’ve seen organizations add “priceRange: $$” when their services are quoted per-project, or list “aggregateRating: 4.5” when they don’t actually collect reviews. Google’s validator won’t stop you, but manual reviewers (and algorithm updates) will eventually catch it.
If you don’t have the data, leave the field empty. Accurate incomplete markup beats fabricated complete markup every time.
November and December drive planning queries. January drives “new year, new project” searches. If your markup is wrong, you’re invisible during the exact window when people are comparing options.
Fix it now, while traffic is stable and you can verify changes without worrying about breaking something during a high-volume week.
This also applies to nonprofits. Giving season searches spike in November and December. If your donation page, your volunteer opportunities, or your service locations aren’t showing up in local results, you’re leaving mission-critical visibility on the table.
If you’re planning a website redesign, a CMS migration, or a rebrand in the next six months, treat it as a forcing function for this audit.
When you’re already rebuilding templates, moving content, and reconfiguring analytics, adding structured-data review to the checklist costs almost nothing. Doing it later—after the new site is live and everyone’s moved on—requires a whole new round of approvals, testing, and deployment.
Launch hygiene and ongoing measurement are different projects. Deploy core tracking and structured data at go-live. Defer the complex attribution models and custom dashboards until traffic stabilizes. Early data will be noisy anyway, and premature dashboards create false confidence.
If you’re inheriting a site with existing analytics containers, tag managers, or tracking setups, write down what you’re keeping and why. Set a review date.
Silent technical debt becomes invisible until it breaks during the next platform change. Six months from now, you won’t remember why there are two Google Analytics properties or why the old schema markup is still in the footer.
This goes double for local businesses with legacy listings, claimed profiles on old platforms, or multiple phone numbers that forward to the same desk. Document the decisions so the next person (or future you) doesn’t have to reverse-engineer intent.
Nobody gets excited about schema markup audits. But showing up in local supplier searches when your competitor doesn’t—because you took two hours in December to verify your structured data—pays for itself the first time someone calls.
Google’s expanded local-business support is live. The question is whether your site is ready for it.
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