Local & Technical SEO Checklist for Gurugram Service Businesses

If you run a service business in Gurugram - a clinic, a salon, an interior studio, a coaching centre, a repair service - most of your high-intent customers find you through "near me" searches and Google Maps. Winning that real estate is a mix of local SEO (how you show up in the map pack) and technical SEO-friendly development (whether Google can crawl and trust your site). This is a checklist you can work through over a few weeks, not a theory lesson.

Lock down your Google Business Profile first

For local businesses, your Google Business Profile is more important than your homepage. Claim and verify it, then fill every field: exact business name, a precise category plus relevant secondary categories, full address with the correct pin, phone number, hours, and a description that names what you do and where. Add real photos of your premises, team, and work - profiles with 10+ genuine photos consistently get more calls and direction requests than bare ones.

Keep your NAP - Name, Address, Phone - identical everywhere: your website footer, Justdial, Sulekha, Facebook, and any local directory. Even small inconsistencies ("Sector 29" vs "Sec-29", different phone formats) confuse Google and dilute ranking. Use Google Posts weekly for offers and updates, and answer the Q&A section yourself before competitors or randoms fill it with wrong information.

Earn and respond to reviews deliberately

Reviews are among the strongest local ranking factors and the deciding factor for the customer choosing between you and the listing above you. Build a simple habit: after a completed job, send the customer your review link over WhatsApp with a one-line, polite ask. Reply to every review - thank the positive ones and respond calmly and helpfully to the negative ones, because prospects read your responses to judge how you handle problems. A steady trickle of recent reviews beats a burst of fifty followed by silence.

Build location-relevant pages on your site

If you serve multiple NCR areas, create a dedicated page for each meaningful service-and-location combination - for example "AC Repair in Gurugram" and "AC Repair in Sohna Road" - with genuinely localised content: the areas you cover, local landmarks, response times, and real testimonials from that area. Do not spin up dozens of thin, near-identical pages with the place name swapped; Google treats that as doorway spam and it can hurt you. Embed a Google Map, list your service areas in plain text, and make sure the page's title and H1 contain the service plus the location naturally.

Add the schema that local search rewards

Structured data tells search engines exactly what you are. Implement LocalBusiness schema (or a more specific type like Dentist or HomeAndConstructionBusiness) with your NAP, opening hours, geo-coordinates, and price range. Add Service schema for each offering, FAQ schema on pages that answer common questions, and Review/AggregateRating where you legitimately have ratings. Validate everything with Google's Rich Results Test so you do not ship broken markup that gets ignored.

Get the technical foundations right

None of the above helps if Google cannot crawl your site or users bounce before it loads. Work through the technical basics: serve the whole site over HTTPS; submit a clean XML sitemap and sane robots.txt in Search Console; give every important page a unique title and meta description; and fix duplicate-content issues with correct canonical tags. Make sure the site is genuinely mobile-friendly, since Google indexes the mobile version and the vast majority of your NCR traffic is on a phone.

Chase Core Web Vitals, not vanity scores

Page speed is both a ranking signal and a conversion lever, and dedicated website speed optimization is often the fastest win. Focus on the three Core Web Vitals: LCP (largest content should appear under ~2.5 seconds), INP (the page should respond to taps quickly), and CLS (the layout should not jump around as it loads). The biggest wins for most Indian sites are compressing and correctly sizing images, lazy-loading anything below the fold, removing unused scripts and heavy third-party widgets, and using a CDN. Measure real-world data in Search Console's Core Web Vitals report rather than chasing a perfect lab score.

Set up measurement and a monthly rhythm

Finally, instrument everything so SEO is a managed process, not a gamble. Connect Google Search Console to watch impressions, clicks, and which queries you rank for, and Google Analytics to see what visitors do next. Track calls and form fills as conversions so you can tie rankings to actual enquiries. Then make SEO a recurring habit: each month, check index coverage, fix any crawl errors, publish one genuinely useful local article, request a handful of reviews, and refresh your top service pages. Local SEO compounds - the business that does the boring checklist consistently outranks the one chasing a single magic trick.