The Sarasota SEO checklist: 27 items we verify on every local site

A checklist only works if every item is binary. "Improve your content" is not a checklist item; "the primary service page returns HTTP 200 and appears in Google's index" is. What follows is the working version of the list we run against local sites in the Sarasota-Bradenton metro, grouped into five blocks in the order we check them. If you fix things in this order, you fix the cheap, high-leverage problems first.

Block 1 — Indexation and access (items 1–6)

Nothing downstream matters if Google can't reliably fetch and index the pages that make you money. Roughly a third of the local sites we review fail at least one of these six.

• 1. Search Console is verified and you can see it. Not your old web designer. You. If you can't log in, that's item zero.
• 2. Every money page is indexed. Run site:yourdomain.com, then confirm in Search Console's page indexing report. Service pages sitting in "Crawled — currently not indexed" are invisible inventory.
• 3. One canonical version of the domain resolves. HTTP, HTTPS, www, and non-www should all 301 to a single version. We still find sites serving two live copies to Google.
• 4. robots.txt isn't blocking assets or sections. A leftover Disallow: / from a staging launch is rarer than it used to be, but blocked CSS/JS that breaks rendering is common.
• 5. An XML sitemap exists, is submitted, and contains only 200-status canonical URLs. A sitemap full of redirects tells Google your site map is unreliable.
• 6. The 404 page returns an actual 404 status. Soft 404s (a "not found" page returning 200) pollute the index with dead URLs.

Block 2 — Google Business Profile (items 7–12)

For "near me" and service-plus-city queries, the map pack sits above every organic result and absorbs the majority of clicks. Your profile is a ranking surface, not a listing.

• 7. The primary category is the most specific one available. "Roofing contractor" outranks "Contractor" for roofing queries. Specificity is a filter Google applies before ranking.
• 8. Name, address, and phone match the website exactly. Character-for-character. Suite numbers included.
• 9. The profile links to the most relevant page, not always the homepage. A multi-service business should test deep-linking the highest-value service page.
• 10. Review velocity is nonzero. A profile with 120 reviews and none in eight months reads as a dormant business. Cadence beats totals.
• 11. Every review has an owner response. Response rate is visible to users and correlates with conversion from the pack.
• 12. Photos are recent, geotagged where honest, and yours. Stock photos on a local profile are a trust leak. We cover the full field-by-field breakdown in our Google Business Profile optimization guide.

Block 3 — On-page fundamentals (items 13–19)

• 13. One page per money service. "Services" pages that list eight offerings in eight paragraphs rank for none of them. Query targeting is a page-level decision.
• 14. Title tags lead with the service and locality. Fifty to sixty characters, service first, brand last. Titles are still the highest-leverage line of text on the page.
• 15. Exactly one H1, and it agrees with the title. Mismatched title/H1 pairs dilute the page's query target.
• 16. The city is in the copy because it belongs there, not stuffed. Neighborhood references — downtown, St. Armands, Palmer Ranch, Lakewood Ranch — signal genuine local operation better than repeating "Sarasota" eleven times.
• 17. LocalBusiness (or a more specific type) structured data is present and validates. Test it in Google's Rich Results tool; broken schema is worse than none.
• 18. Every page is reachable within three clicks of the homepage. Orphan pages get crawled late and ranked reluctantly.
• 19. Embedded map and driving directions on the contact page. A small trust signal for users and a consistency signal for Google.

Block 4 — Technical health (items 20–23)

These four are the pass/fail summary of a much deeper discipline — the full version is our technical SEO audit guide, and it's the core of our audit service.

• 20. Core Web Vitals pass on mobile in field data. LCP under 2.5s, INP under 200ms, CLS under 0.1 — measured from the CrUX report, not a lab run on your office wifi.
• 21. The site is served over HTTPS with no mixed-content warnings.
• 22. Mobile rendering matches desktop content. Google indexes the mobile version. Content hidden or removed on mobile is content removed from the index.
• 23. No index bloat. If Search Console shows 4,000 indexed URLs and you have 40 real pages, filtered/paginated/parameter URLs are diluting your crawl. We've seen local sites carrying 100× their real page count in the index.

Block 5 — Off-site and the Sarasota calendar (items 24–27)

• 24. Citations are consistent across the major data aggregators and top directories. Pull your listings and diff them. One old address from a 2019 move can propagate for years.
• 25. You have at least a handful of genuinely local links. Chamber membership pages, local sponsorships, area press. Our Gulf Coast link building playbook lists targets and effort scores; the ongoing discipline is our link building service.
• 26. Seasonal pages are published before the season. Sarasota demand inflects hard from November through April as seasonal residents arrive. A page published in January to catch January demand missed its window — Google typically needs weeks to months to rank fresh local content. Publish peak-season targets by September. This timing problem is half of content strategy in this market.
• 27. You're tracking positions for the queries that pay, from local geography. Rank tracking set to a generic US location will lie to you about a proximity-weighted market. Track from Sarasota and Bradenton coordinates.

How to score yourself

Count your failures, then weight them by block. In our audit data, blocks 1 and 2 failures suppress more revenue per item than anything in blocks 3–5, because they gate everything else: an unindexed service page has a click-through rate of exactly zero, and an unoptimized Business Profile forfeits the single highest-traffic surface for local queries. A typical pattern we see on Sarasota sites that "look fine but don't rank" is 2–3 failures in block 1, 3–4 in block 2, and near-misses everywhere else. That profile is very fixable — usually within one quarter.

If you work through the list and everything passes, your next constraint is competitive: content depth and link authority, which are budget-and-time problems rather than checklist problems. That's where a sustained local SEO program earns its retainer.

Run it yourself, or hand it to us

Everything above is checkable with free tools: Search Console, Google's Rich Results test, the CrUX dashboard, and an hour of honest attention. If you'd rather have it done with a crawler, log files, and a prioritized fix list attached, send us your URL — the first reply is observations, not a pitch. More field notes on the TideRank SEO blog.