wp-audit-local-standards git:20261006.ff44a3bA

Immutable. This exact content never changes and is served at /api/v1/blob/52c86e69efeb3a2a.

---
name: wp-audit-local-standards
description: Local SEO audit reference — business-type and vertical detection, NAP consistency sources, LocalBusiness subtype selection, location-page quality gates and citation tiers, with the WordPress option and meta keys each check reads. Use when the wp-audit-seo agent audits a business with a physical location or service area.
user-invocable: false
---

# Local SEO Audit Standards

The `SEO-055` through `SEO-063` checks in `agents/wp-audit-seo.md` are the *what*. This
file is the *how* and the *why*: which signals decide a business type, which schema
subtype a vertical requires, and where a WordPress site actually stores each value.

Local SEO differs from the rest of the SEO audit in one structural way: **most of the
ranking surface is off-site** — the business profile, the reviews, the directory
listings. A code-only audit cannot see any of it. Everything below is scoped to what a
theme, its options and its rendered head can prove, and the checks say so explicitly
rather than reporting an absence as a pass.

---

## Applicability Gate

Run the local checks only when the site is a local business. Otherwise every check
reports `not_applicable` and none of them count toward the score.

A site is local when **any two** of these hold:

- A `LocalBusiness` node (or a subtype of it) exists in the rendered JSON-LD.
- A street address appears in the footer, the contact template or an options-page field.
- A `tel:` link exists outside a generic "call us" placeholder.
- Rank Math's local SEO module is active (`rank_math_modules` contains `local-seo`).
- The theme registers a location post type or an ACF location field group.

One signal alone is not enough: a `tel:` link in a footer is as common on a SaaS
brochure site as on a dentist's site.

---

## Business Type Detection

The type decides which checks apply. Getting it wrong produces false criticals — a
service-area business has no street address *by design*.

| Type | Signals | Checks that do NOT apply |
|------|---------|--------------------------|
| **Brick-and-mortar** | Street address in content, footer or schema; map embed with a pin; "visit us", "located at" | — (full set applies) |
| **Service-area (SAB)** | No visible street address; "serving <region>", "we come to you", "mobile service"; `areaServed` present without `address.streetAddress` | the map half of SEO-056; the address half of SEO-057 (parity and absence) |
| **Hybrid** | Both a physical address and service-area language | — (full set applies, plus `areaServed`) |

When signals are contradictory, report the type as `undetermined`, run only the checks
that are type-independent (SEO-055, SEO-058, SEO-060, SEO-061, SEO-063) and say so in the
report. SEO-059 and SEO-062 still run wherever their own preconditions hold — a
`LocalBusiness` node to read `geo` from, more than one location page.

---

## Industry Vertical Detection

The vertical decides the required schema subtype. Detect from template and content
signals; never from the client's name.

| Vertical | Detection signals | Required subtype |
|----------|-------------------|------------------|
| Restaurant | menu template or post type, dish names, reservations, "dine-in", "takeout" | `Restaurant` |
| Healthcare | "patients", appointments, insurance accepted, practitioner bios, HIPAA notice | `MedicalClinic`, `Dentist` or `Hospital` |
| Legal | "attorney", practice areas, bar admission, case results, "free consultation" | `LegalService` |
| Home services | service-area language, "free estimate", licensed/insured/bonded, 24/7 | subtype + `areaServed` |
| Real estate | listings, MLS references, agent bios, brokerage, "open house" | `RealEstateAgent` |
| Automotive | inventory, VIN, test drive, service department, "new/used/certified" | `AutoDealer` |

No vertical detected → generic `LocalBusiness` is correct, not a finding.

**Deprecated subtypes that still appear in older themes:** `Attorney` (use
`LegalService`), `VehicleListing` as a business type (use `AutoDealer`), bare
`MedicalBusiness` for a clinic (use the specific subtype). Flag these under SEO-058.

---

## Where WordPress Stores Each Value

A local audit reads three sources for what is conceptually one fact — the rendered page,
the stored settings and the theme's templates — and the discrepancies between them are the
finding. Stored settings are two different stores, so they get two columns.

| Value | Rendered | Rank Math option (`rank-math-options-titles`) | Options-page ACF field (starter names) | Theme template |
|-------|----------|-----------------------------------------------|----------------------------------------|----------------|
| Business name | JSON-LD `name` | `knowledgegraph_name` (and WordPress's `blogname`) | — | header, footer |
| Address | JSON-LD `address.*` | `local_address` | `business_address` | footer template part, contact template |
| Phone | JSON-LD `telephone`; `tel:` href | `phone_numbers` | `contact_phone`, `header_phone` | footer template part |
| Opening hours | JSON-LD `openingHoursSpecification` | `opening_hours` | the theme's hours repeater, when it has one | — |
| Geo coordinates | JSON-LD `geo.latitude` / `geo.longitude` | `geo` | the theme's map fields, when it has them | map embed attributes |

Rank Math keeps its local values inside the `rank-math-options-titles` option, not in an
option of their own. An adopted site's field names are its own: read them from its field
groups rather than assuming the starter's. The agent reads every option once, with `$WP`,
in step 3 of its local procedure — never by parsing PHP.

**Bilingual sites.** Options-page fields carry their `_<lang>`
suffixes under *both* i18n strategies — `business_address_es` — because options are global
and Polylang's one-post-per-language model does not reach them. So always compare every `_<lang>` variant,
whichever strategy the project records. An address that is correct in one language and
stale in the other is a real NAP discrepancy, not a translation artifact.

---

## NAP Consistency

NAP is Name, Address, Phone. The check compares the three sources above pairwise and
reports each disagreement separately — a phone that differs between schema and footer is
a different defect from an address that differs between two languages.

Normalize before comparing, or the check reports noise:

- Phone: keep the digits only, then drop, in order, a leading `00`, the site's
  country calling code (from `addressCountry`) and a leading trunk `0`; compare what is
  left. The country code is the step that matters — digits alone leave `34900000000` and
  `900000000` unequal, which is the false positive normalization exists to prevent.
- Address: collapse whitespace, lowercase, strip trailing punctuation; treat common
  abbreviations as equal (`St.` / `Street`, `Ave` / `Avenue`).
- Name: strip legal suffixes (`S.L.`, `Inc.`, `Ltd.`) before comparing; report a bare
  suffix difference as INFO, not WARNING.

| Source A | Source B | Normalized | Verdict |
|----------|----------|------------|---------|
| `+34 900 00 00 00` (JSON-LD, Spain) | `900000000` (footer `tel:`) | `900000000` and `900000000` | same number, no finding |
| `+44 20 7946 0000` (JSON-LD, UK) | `020 7946 0000` (footer) | `2079460000` and `2079460000` | same number, no finding |
| `+34 900 00 00 00` | `+34 900 00 00 01` | `900000000` and `900000001` | SEO-057 |

Absent NAP is more severe than inconsistent NAP: a brick-and-mortar or hybrid business
whose address appears nowhere in the rendered HTML fails SEO-057 at WARNING even when the
schema is perfect, because the schema alone gives a human visitor nothing. A service-area
business has no street address by design, so for it an absent address is not a finding.

---

## Citation Tiers

Off-site, so the audit can only detect *references* to these from the site itself —
badges, links and `sameAs` entries. Report what is present; never assert that a missing
reference means a missing listing.

- **Tier 1 (general):** the business profile itself, Yelp, the Better Business Bureau,
  Facebook, Apple Maps, Bing Places.
- **Tier 2 (authority):** chamber of commerce, local press, industry associations.
- **Vertical directories:** per-industry listing sites appropriate to the vertical
  detected above.

The `sameAs` array in the Organization or LocalBusiness node is the one citation signal
a code-only audit *can* verify, which is why SEO-060 anchors on it.

---

## Location-Page Quality

Multi-location sites fail in one characteristic way: templated pages that differ only in
the city name. Search engines treat these as doorway pages.

**The swap test.** Take two location pages, exchange the city names, and read them. If
both still make sense, the pages carry no location-specific content and SEO-062 fires at
WARNING. This is a judgment call the agent makes by reading, not a ratio it computes.

Quality gates by page count, applied before the audit spends effort:

| Location pages | Action |
|----------------|--------|
| 1–29 | Audit each one |
| 30–49 | Audit a sample of 10, report the sample size in the finding |
| 50+ | Audit a sample of 10 and report the total at INFO; a full walk is manual-only |

**URL structure.** Subdirectories (`/locations/<city>/`) consolidate authority better
than subdomains. A store locator whose individual locations have no crawlable URL of
their own — rendered entirely client-side — is a CRITICAL finding: those pages do not
exist for a crawler.

**Schema per location.** Each location page carries its own `LocalBusiness` node with a
unique `@id`, linked to the site-wide Organization through `parentOrganization` — schema.org
supersedes `branchOf` with it; accept `branchOf` on older markup and never report correct
`parentOrganization` markup for lacking it. A single shared `@id` across locations
collapses them into one entity.

---

## Schema Properties

Required by Google for a local rich result:

- `name`
- `address` as a `PostalAddress` with `streetAddress`, `addressLocality`,
  `postalCode` and `addressCountry`

Recommended. These are not findings of their own: no check id carries them, and a finding
without one can be neither rendered nor tracked across runs. List the absent ones in the
local section of the report as recommendations. `geo` is the exception, because SEO-059
checks it.

- `telephone`, `url`, `image`
- `geo` with `latitude` and `longitude` — **at least five decimal places**; three
  decimals places the pin roughly a hundred metres off (SEO-059)
- `openingHoursSpecification`
- `priceRange` — under 100 characters
- `areaServed` for service-area and hybrid businesses

`aggregateRating` is never on that list. Absent, it is not a finding and not a
recommendation, because recommending it is a nudge toward inventing one. Present without
real review data behind it, or carrying placeholder values, it is a CRITICAL finding under
SEO-063: structured-data spam that risks a manual action. The starter theme must never ship
one.

Schema is not a ranking factor. It earns rich results and gives AI systems parseable
business data. Word the findings that way; a report claiming schema lifts rankings is
wrong and the client will eventually be told so.

---

## What This Audit Cannot See

Every local report ends with this list. Omitting it implies a completeness the audit
does not have:

- Business-profile completeness, categories, posts and photos
- Review count, rating, velocity and owner responses
- Actual local-pack or map position, which varies by the searcher's location
- Citation accuracy on third-party directories
- Profile insight metrics

These need the business-profile account or a paid rank tracker. Say which, so the client
knows what the gap costs to close.

---

## Attribution

The business-type and vertical taxonomies, the swap test and the citation tiering are
adapted from the MIT-licensed `claude-seo` project by AgriciDaniel
(<https://github.com/AgricIDaniel/claude-seo>). The WordPress mapping, the i18n rules,
the severity assignments and the check codes are this plugin's own.