Local SEO + AI search checklist for Dallas-Fort Worth businesses

01How Google picks local businesses

Everyone selling local SEO has a theory. Google publishes its own explanation, and it's short. Local results are mainly based on three things:

• Relevance: how well your Business Profile matches what someone searched for.
• Distance: how far your business is from the person searching, or from the place they named.
• Prominence: how well-known your business is. Google says links from other websites and your review count and ratings play a part here.

Google also says, in plain words, that there's no way to request or pay for a better local ranking. So when someone guarantees you the top spot in the map, they're guessing.

Source: Google Business Profile Help, "Tips to improve your local ranking on Google".

What that means in Dallas-Fort Worth

DFW is a big, spread-out market. A business in Plano and a competitor in Fort Worth aren't really fighting for the same map results, because distance is built into the ranking. You can't move your address, so the fight is over relevance and prominence in the area you actually serve.

That shapes the strategy. A Frisco roofer doesn't need to rank in Arlington. They need to be the obvious answer in Frisco, Little Elm, Prosper, and the cities next door, with a profile, reviews, and pages that prove it.

02Google Business Profile: setup and verification

If you do one thing from this guide, do this section. Your profile is what shows up in the map, in the panel on the right side of search results, and often in Google's AI answers.

Set it up the way Google's guidelines say

• Name: your real business name, exactly as it appears on your sign, truck, or storefront. Google doesn't allow extra words in the name. "Smith Plumbing" is right. "Smith Plumbing | Best Plano Plumber 24/7" breaks the rules and can get your profile suspended.
• Address or service area: if customers come to you, use your precise address. If you go to them (plumbers, cleaners, mobile groomers), you're a service-area business and Google says to hide your address. Your service area shouldn't extend farther than about two hours of driving from your base.
• No mailbox addresses. Google doesn't accept P.O. boxes or mailboxes at remote locations, and it doesn't allow more than one profile per location.
• Phone: a local number you control, that rings at this location. Google prefers a local number over a call center line.
• Categories: as few as possible, as specific as possible. Your primary category matters most. "Emergency veterinarian" beats "Veterinarian" if that's what you are.
• Hours: your real customer-facing hours, plus holiday hours. If you only work by appointment, read Google's rules on whether to list hours at all.
• Services, description, and attributes: list every service you want to be found for, in the words your customers use.
• Photos: real ones. Outside, inside, your team, your work. Add new ones every month.

Source: Google Business Profile Help, "Guidelines for representing your business on Google".

Verification

Verification proves you're allowed to manage the business, and Google says verified businesses are more likely to show up in results. Google picks the method for you. Depending on the business, it can be a phone call or text, an email, a recorded video, a live video call, or a postcard by mail. Google says reviews of your verification can take up to five business days.

Two tips from Google's own help page that save owners weeks:

1. While you wait for a postcard, don't change your business name, address, or category, and don't request a new code. Either one can cancel the code or delay things. Postcard codes expire after 30 days.
2. For a video, be at the business with proof: your signage, your equipment or vehicle, and something only the owner has, like keys to an employee-only area.

Source: Google Business Profile Help, "Verify your business on Google".

03A reviews system, not a hope

Google says more reviews and positive ratings can help your local ranking, and that replying to reviews shows you value the feedback. Most businesses have happy customers and almost no reviews, because nobody asks at the right moment.

The rules first

Two sets of rules apply, and both are stricter than most owners expect:

• Google's policy bans offering incentives (payment, discounts, free goods or services) for reviews. It bans discouraging negative reviews or selectively asking only happy customers. It bans staff quotas for reviews and asking customers for specific wording, and it says businesses shouldn't pressure people to review while they're still on site. (Google Maps user-contributed content policy)
• The FTC's rule, announced in August 2024, bans fake reviews (including AI-written ones posing as customers), buying reviews conditioned on a positive or negative sentiment, undisclosed insider reviews, and threats to get bad reviews removed. (Federal Trade Commission, August 2024)

The system

1. Get your direct review link from your Business Profile, so customers land right on the review box.
2. Ask every customer at the moment the job is done, not only the ones who seemed happy. Asking everyone is both the rule and the habit that works.
3. Send it by text the same day. It's one tap on a phone.
4. Follow up once three days later if they haven't left one. Then stop.
5. Reply to every review within two business days. My rule of thumb, not Google's.
6. Count them monthly. Review count and average rating go on the same sheet as your calls.

Keep replies short, calm, and free of customer details. If you're in health care, never confirm someone was a patient in a public reply.

04NAP consistency and listings

NAP means name, address, and phone number. When they read the same everywhere, Google and the AI tools that read the web can be confident all those mentions are the same business. When they don't, you split your own reputation across what look like different companies.

Start by writing your official NAP once, in one document, exactly as it should appear everywhere: suite numbers, abbreviations, and all. Then make every listing match it.

Where	Why it matters	Priority
Your website footer and contact page	The source every other listing gets checked against	First
Google Business Profile	The listing most customers see	First
Bing Places for Business	Bing's map and local results, and Microsoft's assistant	Next
Apple Business Connect	Apple Maps and Siri on every iPhone	Next
Yelp and the top directory in your industry	Customers check them, and other sites copy from them	Next
Facebook, Instagram, Nextdoor	Local customers look here for recommendations	Later
Your chamber of commerce and trade associations	Real local mentions from organizations people trust	Later

Then search Google for your old phone numbers and old addresses in quotes. Every listing that still shows them is a cleanup task.

05Service-area pages that aren't spam

Here's where a lot of DFW businesses get it wrong. They make 40 pages: "Plumber in Allen," "Plumber in Garland," "Plumber in Irving," each one the same text with the city name swapped. Google has a name for that. Its spam policies list "doorway abuse," and one of the examples is having multiple pages targeted at specific regions or cities that funnel users to one page.

Source: Google Search Central, "Spam policies for Google web search".

Build a city page only when you can fill it with something real

• Jobs you've actually done there, with photos (with the customer's permission).
• Something specific to that city: the neighborhoods you cover, the kinds of homes or buildings, local rules your customers ask about.
• Reviews from customers in that city, quoted accurately with permission.
• Who serves that area and how fast you can get there.
• A clear next step: call, text, or book.

Three strong pages for the cities where most of your work happens beat 30 thin ones. For most DFW businesses that means your home city and the two or three next to it. A Plano business might start with Plano, Allen, Richardson, and Frisco, then add cities only as jobs there pile up.

06Schema basics

Schema is a short block of code on your site that labels facts for search engines: this is the business name, this is the phone number, these are the hours. Visitors never see it. Google's documentation for LocalBusiness markup lists only two required properties, name and address, and recommends others such as telephone, url, openingHoursSpecification, geo, and priceRange.

A minimal example for a service business, with placeholders to swap:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "Plumber",
  "name": "Smith Plumbing",
  "url": "https://www.example.com/",
  "telephone": "+1-972-555-0100",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "123 Example St, Suite 100",
    "addressLocality": "Plano",
    "addressRegion": "TX",
    "postalCode": "75024",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "areaServed": ["Plano", "Allen", "Richardson", "Frisco"],
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
    "opens": "08:00",
    "closes": "17:00"
  }]
}
</script>

Pick the most specific type that fits (Plumber, Dentist, HVACBusiness, and so on), match every value to what's visible on the page and your Business Profile, then test it in Google's Rich Results Test and fix any critical errors, as Google's guide says.

Source: Google Search Central, "Local Business (LocalBusiness) structured data".

07How AI assistants pick businesses, and what you control

Customers now ask ChatGPT, Google's AI Mode, Copilot, and Siri for "a good electrician in McKinney." Owners want to know how to get named. Here's the honest answer: none of these companies publishes a formula for which local business gets mentioned. Anyone selling you a guaranteed spot in AI answers is selling something nobody can deliver.

What Google says

Google says there are no additional requirements to appear in AI Overviews or AI Mode, and no special optimizations needed. A page has to be indexed and eligible to show in search with a snippet. Google says you don't need new machine-readable files, AI text files, or special schema. The best practices it lists are the same basics: let Google crawl your site, link your pages to each other, keep important content in text, keep structured data consistent with the page, and keep your Business Profile information current.

Source: Google Search Central, "AI features and your website".

I do publish an llms.txt file on my own site, because it's cheap and harmless. But given what Google says, don't pay anyone to make one for you as if it were the key to AI search.

What OpenAI says

OpenAI says its OAI-SearchBot crawler is what surfaces websites in ChatGPT's search features, and that sites which block it won't appear in ChatGPT search answers. It recommends allowing it in robots.txt. That's separate from GPTBot, which collects training data and which you can block without leaving ChatGPT search.

Source: OpenAI, "Overview of OpenAI crawlers".

What you control

• Be reachable. Check robots.txt and your hosting or security settings aren't blocking Googlebot, Bingbot, or OAI-SearchBot.
• State facts plainly, in text. What you do, where you do it, your hours, a price range if you can share one, how fast you respond. An AI can't repeat a fact that only lives in an image or a PDF.
• Answer the questions customers ask. A short FAQ on each service page, written the way people actually ask.
• Be consistent. The same name, phone number, and services on your site, your profile, and your listings.
• Be talked about. Reviews, local news mentions, sponsorships, partners linking to you. That's prominence, and it matters to people as much as to software.

Once a month, ask a few assistants the questions your customers would ask, like "who does same-day AC repair in Allen, Texas?" Write down who gets named. It's not a ranking report, answers change by person and by day, but over a few months it shows you whether you're in the conversation.

08The 40-point checklist

Work top to bottom. "First" items matter most and cost the least. Tick the box when it's done, not when it's planned. Priorities are my judgment from doing this work, built on the Google guidance above.

09The 90-day plan

Forty items is a lot. Here's the order I'd work them in for a business starting from a half-finished profile and a basic website. If you're further along, skip what's done.

Days 1 to 30: the foundation

• Write your official NAP document (item 17).
• Fix the Business Profile: name, category, service area, phone, hours, services (items 1 to 7).
• Match your website footer and contact page (item 18).
• Set up Search Console and submit your sitemap (item 25).
• Start the review system: link, same-day text, reply to everything (items 9, 10, 12 to 15).
• Write down today's numbers: review count, rating, monthly profile calls. That's your before.

Days 31 to 60: the website

• Rewrite the homepage title and add tap-to-call everywhere (items 26 and 27).
• Give every core service its own page with a short FAQ (items 28 and 35).
• Write plain-text hours, service area, and price ranges (item 34).
• Add LocalBusiness schema and test it (item 31).
• Check mobile speed and fix the worst problem (item 32).
• Check robots.txt for blocked crawlers (item 33).

Days 61 to 90: prominence and measurement

• Claim and match Bing, Apple, Yelp, and your industry directory (items 19 to 22).
• Build city pages for your two or three busiest cities, only with real content (item 29).
• Ask two local partners or organizations for a mention or link (item 37).
• Start the monthly tracking: profile calls, Search Console, AI assistant log (items 38 to 40).
• At day 90, compare against your before numbers and decide what to double down on.

10Where this gets hard

11Questions owners ask