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Ashcroft CapitalIf your business serves a place, whether a practice with an office, a firm with a catchment area or a property with an address, then a large share of your searches are local, and they're decided by signals that live outside your article content.
Verand detects this automatically. If your site looks like a local business, the Local SEO section appears, with two pages: Overview and Directory Citations. Your business details and your Business Profile report both open from Overview.
What gets checked
The crawl already reads every page, so the local audit costs nothing extra. It scores these signals:
| Check | Why it carries the weight it does |
|---|---|
| LocalBusiness structured data | The machine-readable version of who and where you are. Without it, search engines infer; with it, they know. |
| Complete NAP (name, address, phone) | The foundation every other local signal keys off |
| Primary business category | The single biggest factor in Local Pack ranking |
| Consistent NAP across the site | A phone number that differs between your footer and contact page is a trust problem |
| Contact page | |
| Geo coordinates in structured data | |
| Opening hours in structured data | |
| Business Profile linked from your site | |
| Service area defined | |
| Directory citations | Lower direct ranking weight, but a rising signal in AI search results |
You get a weighted score and a punch list in priority order. Structured data and NAP consistency dominate, because they're the ones everything else depends on.
Multiple locations are detected and reported, but don't count against your score. More than one address is a fact about your business, not a defect.
The audit is free. Fixing it is where services come in.
The diagnosis is included on every plan: you see exactly what's wrong with your local presence whether or not you ever buy anything. Add-on Services is where you can have the work done for you rather than doing it yourself.
That split is deliberate: the free audit has to be honest to be worth anything, and it can't be honest if it's a sales tool.
Directory Citations
A citation is your business listed consistently across directories and data aggregators. It matters for two reasons: search engines corroborate your details against them, and AI assistants increasingly pull from the same sources.
Doing this by hand is genuinely tedious: dozens of directories, each with its own form, and a wrong keystroke anywhere creates the inconsistency you were trying to fix.
What you actually get
The service submits your business to the major data aggregators, a set of established directories, and a long tail of smaller ones. We describe the tiers honestly, because "500 directories!" is a number the industry inflates by counting link farms. The aggregators and established directories are where the value is; the long tail is volume.
What it costs
$500 per location, paid once when you place the order. There's no subscription.
How an order runs
- Readiness check. Your NAP must be complete and consistent before anything is submitted. Submitting inconsistent details to fifty directories makes your problem worse, permanently and at scale.
- Free listings check. We look at where you're already listed, so you're not paying to duplicate what exists.
- Verify before submit. You confirm the exact details that will go out. This is the last moment they're easy to change.
- Payment. Continue to payment opens a secure Stripe checkout. Nothing is submitted to any directory until you've paid. If you leave checkout before paying, your details stay saved and you can finish the payment or withdraw the order.
- Submission and progress. Once payment is confirmed, your order joins the submission queue, and submissions usually begin within one business day. You can see where the order is.
- Report. What was submitted and where.
Spotted a mistake after paying? Withdraw this order any time before submissions begin and your payment is refunded in full.
The verify step exists because citations are hard to unwind. A wrong phone number on fifty directories takes months to correct, and some never do.
Google Business Profile
Your Business Profile is usually the highest-leverage local asset you own: for many local searches it outranks your website. The audit covers whether it's linked from your site, whether your category is right, and the completeness signals that affect Local Pack placement.
The Business Profile report on Overview searches for your profile using your business name and address, and only links a listing that matches your phone number or street address. If it finds nearby listings but none match, or finds nothing, it says so and asks you to add your profile link to your business details rather than guessing. If the lookup can't run at that moment, it tells you that instead, which doesn't mean you have no profile.
On reviews: only ever respond to genuine reviews. Incentivised or fabricated reviews are a US federal enforcement matter, and for a regulated business the exposure is worse than the ranking benefit could ever be.