Local SEO scores lowest of the non-AI tools, and the reason is a sampling artefact worth stating plainly: most pages scanned are not local businesses, and a page with no address is correctly marked as having no address. Read this tool's figures as a description of pages that were checked, not of local businesses in general. Where it is genuinely useful is on a page that should have this information and does not.
Here is where that sits. The median is 22/100, which ranks it 23 of the 25 measures in this dataset. The middle half of results falls between 8 and 40 — a band 32 points wide. That is wide: sites genuinely diverge here, which is to say getting ahead is still possible.
How the scores are distributed
An average on its own misleads. The chart below splits all 1,365 scans into five score bands, totalling 100%. The distribution banks up against the floor: most pages score badly, so even a modest result here puts you ahead of the majority.
- 0–19
- 20–39
- 40–59
- 60–79
- 80–100
| Score band | Local SEO |
|---|---|
| 0–19 | 36% · 491 |
| 20–39 | 36% · 487 |
| 40–59 | 22% · 297 |
| 60–79 | 6% · 86 |
| 80–100 | 0% · 4 |
| Total runs | 1,365 |
The grade mix
The same data as letters: A+ 95–100, A 85–94, B 75–84, C 65–74, D 50–64 and F below 50.
Where your score stands
If the page you scanned is not a local business, ignore the score entirely — it is answering a question that does not apply. If it is, the score is close to a checklist: name, address, phone, hours, map, schema. Each item is either present or not, and the ones that are missing are missing because nobody put them there, not because they were difficult.
| Tool | 10th | 25th | Median | 75th | 90th | Mean | Lowest | Highest |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Local SEO | 0 | 8 | 22 | 40 | 54 | 26 | 0 | 94 |
How to read it: 8 is bottom-quartile, 22 is a typical page, 40 starts the upper quartile and 54 or above is the top 10%. These thresholds apply to this tool only.
The checks that fail most
Everything here traces back to one requirement: a machine has to be able to extract the business's identity and location without guessing. Consistency matters as much as presence — an address in the footer, a different one in the schema and a third on the map listing is worse than one address in one place, because now nothing can be trusted.
| Check | Did not pass | Weight |
|---|---|---|
| Geo coordinates | 99% | Partial |
| Opening hours | 98% | Partial |
| Google Maps link / embed | 98% | Partial |
| Physical address (NAP) | 86% | Hard fail |
| Contact email | 81% | Partial |
| LocalBusiness / Organization schema | 77% | Hard fail |
| Linked social profiles | 30% | Partial |
| Phone number (NAP) | 28% | Hard fail |
“Hard fail” means the check’s full weighting is lost; “partial” means only part of the score is. Rates are the share of scans in which the check ran and did not pass.
The weakest areas
This tool groups its checks into categories. The chart below shows how often each category was the lowest-scoring one in a scan — which area is most often the weak link. It is not the average score in that category; it is how often it came last.
“Maps & hours” was the weakest area in 73% of scans.
What to fix first
Add LocalBusiness structured data with the name, address, phone and opening hours, and make sure it matches exactly what the page displays and what your business listings say. NAP consistency is not a stylistic preference: two variants of the same address are two businesses as far as an automated system is concerned.
A typical scan passes 2.0 of 8 checks and leaves 6.0 open items behind. What drags a score down is usually not one catastrophe but accumulated small omissions.
Run the Local SEO Audit on your own page
Month by month
The figures on this page are replaced at every refresh. At the end of each month a permanent edition is published for that month and never edited again — which is the only reason this series can be compared at all. One edition has been published so far; when the second lands this section will set the two months side by side.
| Edition | Median | vs. previous | Scored 80+ | Issues/run | Runs |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| August 2026 | 22 | baseline | 0% | 6.0 | 1,365 |
Frequently asked questions
What is NAP consistency and why does it matter?
Name, Address, Phone — written identically everywhere they appear, on your site and on every directory and map listing. Automated systems match businesses across sources by comparing these strings, so "Suite 4" in one place and "Ste. 4" in another can read as two separate businesses and split the signals that should have accumulated to one.
Do I need LocalBusiness schema if my address is already visible?
Yes, because visible and machine-readable are different things. A human sees an address in the footer; a parser sees a block of text that might be an address. Schema states unambiguously what each part is, which is what allows the information to be used rather than merely displayed.
Does this replace Google Business Profile optimisation?
No — this checks your own website, and the Business Profile is a separate property with its own optimisation. They support each other: consistent, marked-up information on your site corroborates the profile, and a well-maintained profile drives the local visibility that brings people to the site.
What is a good score on the Local SEO Audit?
In this dataset the median is 22/100, so scoring 22 puts you exactly in the middle. 40 is the start of the upper quartile and 54 or above is the top 10%; below 8 is the bottom quarter. Those thresholds are specific to this tool — the 25 measures in this dataset have very different medians, so 70 here and 70 elsewhere do not mean the same thing.
Which check fails most often on the Local SEO Audit?
“Geo coordinates”, which did not pass in 99% of scans. The costliest failures, though, are the ones scored as hard fails — this tool has 3, the most common being “Physical address (NAP)” at 86%.
Questions that govern the whole series — how the sample is collected, how sites are anonymized, how often the figures are refreshed — are answered in the methodology on the hub.
Using this data
The figures, tables and charts on this page are free to reuse under CC BY 4.0; the only condition is a link back to this page. Suggested citation: SeoMods — Local SEO Audit benchmarks, 2 September 2026, https://seomods.com/seo-score-benchmarks/local-seo. If you need to cite by date, use the August 2026 edition instead: this page changes at every refresh and that one never does.