Local SEO is not mysterious. It is a list of unglamorous things, most of them free, that almost nobody finishes. Here is the list, in the order that actually pays.
First: the things that cost nothing
1. Claim your Google Business Profile. If you do one thing, this is it. See the full walkthrough.
2. Set the most specific primary category that is true. “Bakery” and “Cake shop” surface for different searches.
3. List every service individually. Not a paragraph. Separate entries, each with a description.
4. Fix your hours, including holidays. Set statutory holiday hours ahead of time.
5. Make your name, address and phone identical everywhere. Website, listing, Facebook, Yelp, directories. Character for character.
6. Ask for reviews out loud. At the moment someone is visibly happy. Nothing beats it.
7. Answer every review. Briefly. Take the bad ones offline with a phone number.
8. Add photos monthly. Recency counts more than volume.
Then: the things on your website
9. One page per real service. A service with its own buyers and its own objections earns a page. That page is what ranks, not your homepage.
10. Put your town in your headings, honestly. “Roof repair in Etobicoke” beats “Quality you can trust”. Do not stuff it into every sentence; once in the heading and naturally in the copy is enough.
11. Write titles and meta descriptions per page. Not generated, not duplicated. The title is the blue link people decide to click.
12. Put your address and phone in the footer of every page, as text. Not inside an image.
13. Make the phone number tappable. A tel: link. On a phone, a number you have to copy out is a lost call.
14. Add LocalBusiness structured data. It tells search engines your hours, address, price range and category in a format they read directly. Restaurants, services and products have their own types.
15. Get a sitemap and submit it in Google Search Console. Free, takes ten minutes, and Search Console is also where you find out what people actually searched to reach you.
16. Kill the PDF menu. A menu inside a PDF or a photo is invisible to search and miserable on a phone. Real text.
Then: the technical floor
17. Load fast on a phone on a bad connection. Compress images, serve them at the size they display, restrain fonts and JavaScript. Test on an actual phone, not a desktop score.
18. Fix anything broken. Dead links, forms that go nowhere, pages that 404. Check whether your contact form actually arrives; a surprising number do not.
19. Redirect old addresses. If you rebuilt or moved, every old URL should point at its new equivalent. Skipping this throws away whatever ranking you had.
20. Make it accessible. Contrast, alt text, labelled form fields, keyboard navigation. It overlaps almost entirely with what search engines read, and in Ontario organisations with fifty or more employees are already required to meet WCAG under AODA.
What is missing from this list
Link building, content volume, competitor displacement. Those matter, and they are what a real campaign spends its budget on. But they are step four, and doing them while your listing has the wrong hours is spending money to point people at a broken thing.
If you have finished this list, you are ahead of most businesses in your postcode and it is worth talking about content. If you have not, the list is worth more than a retainer.
Doing it
Items 1 to 8 are yours to do in an afternoon and I would rather you just did them.
Items 9 to 20 are build work. They are included in a Standard Website and up, or maintained monthly under Starter SEO. If you would rather have the list and not the invoice, take it, it is the same list I work from.