Las Vegas local SEO checklist

Claim and complete your Google Business Profile (GBP)

The single highest-leverage thing you can do. Businesses with complete GBP profiles get 2.7x more requests for directions and 7x more clicks than incomplete profiles, per Google's own Business Profile data. Vegas's local pack rewards completeness aggressively: categories, hours, services, photos, attributes, Q&A. Add at least 10 photos taken on-site, not stock. Update your GBP photos monthly; Google logs that as an active-business signal.

Vegas-specific: set your service area to specific neighborhoods (Summerlin, Henderson, North Las Vegas, Spring Valley, Centennial Hills) rather than "Las Vegas metro." Neighborhood-level service-area triggers different ranking signals.

Get your NAP identical everywhere

Name + Address + Phone. Identical character-for-character. Your website footer, GBP, Yelp, Yellow Pages, Facebook, every listing. Suite 100 is not the same as Ste. 100. Comma vs no comma matters. Pick a canonical format and use it everywhere.

Tool: Run your business name through brightlocal.com/local-search-grid (free trial) to find inconsistencies. Fix the most-trafficked listings first: Yelp, BBB, MapQuest, Yellow Pages, Facebook, Bing Places.

Add LocalBusiness or industry-specific schema

This is the biggest miss for local SEO across Vegas. Add LocalBusiness, then upgrade to your specific subtype: ProfessionalService for therapists/coaches/lawyers; HomeAndConstructionBusiness for contractors; Restaurant for dining; RealEstateAgent for agents.

Required fields: name, image, address, telephone, url, openingHours, priceRange, geo (lat/long), and areaServed.

Hit the Vegas citation list

Beyond the universal directories, Vegas has a tier of local citation sources Google explicitly trusts more than national ones:

• Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce directory (paid, but counts)
• vegas.com business directory
• reviewjournal.com business directory + sponsored content
• vegasinc.com (LV Sun's business arm)
• nevadabusiness.com
• henderson.com + summerlin.com if you serve those areas
• NLV.com for North Las Vegas businesses

Each citation should link back to a specific service page on your site, not your homepage. That's how local citations actually drive ranking. They're votes for specific pages, not for your domain.

Add neighborhood pages, not city pages

Don't write "Las Vegas Web Design" as one big page and call it done. Vegas search splinters by neighborhood. Build pages for: Summerlin, Henderson, Green Valley, Spring Valley, North Las Vegas, Boulder City, Centennial Hills, Anthem, Mountain's Edge, MacDonald Ranch.

Each neighborhood page should mention 3 to 5 actual local landmarks (Downtown Summerlin, Red Rock Casino, Boca Park, etc.) and at least one client testimonial from that neighborhood if you have one. Generic "we serve all of Vegas" pages get eaten by competitors with neighborhood-specific pages.

Title tags that match how Vegas locals search

Vegas search behavior skews toward direct intent. People search "trauma therapist henderson" not "compassionate trauma-informed care professional." Match the search, not your brand voice.

Format: [Service] [Neighborhood or Las Vegas] | [Brand]

Examples that work: "AC Repair Henderson NV | Desert Cool", "Family Law Attorney Las Vegas | Smith & Jones", "Trauma Therapist Summerlin | Mindful Solutions". Each under 60 characters. The neighborhood goes in the title, not just on the page.

Get reviews on the right platforms in the right order

Google reviews first (literal ranking factor), Yelp second (Vegas residents trust Yelp more than national average), then industry-specific (Avvo for lawyers, Healthgrades for medical, Houzz for contractors).

Aim for 5 new Google reviews in your first 60 days. Then 1 to 2 per month. Respond to every review within 48 hours, including the negative ones. Response text counts as ranking signal.

Mobile site that doesn't make tourists rage

Vegas has the highest concentration of mobile search in the country (tourists, walking traffic, Strip foot traffic). If your site loads slowly on mobile, takes more than one tap to call you, or has a popup over the contact info, you're losing clients to competitors with cleaner mobile sites.

Hard rules: tel: link in your header on mobile. Click-to-call should be one tap, no popup. Total page weight under 1MB on mobile.

Submit your sitemap and verify Google Search Console

If you haven't done this, nothing else matters. Google literally cannot index pages it can't crawl. Sign up for Search Console (free), verify your domain via DNS or HTML file, submit your sitemap.xml.

Then check the Coverage report weekly for the first month. Pages with "Discovered, not indexed" status are your fixes. Usually means duplicate content, thin content, or canonical conflicts.

Internal linking with neighborhood + service anchor text

Every service page should link to at least 2 neighborhood pages with anchor text like "trauma therapy in Summerlin" (not "click here" or "learn more"). Every neighborhood page should link to your top 3 service pages with similar anchor text.

This is the cheapest, fastest local SEO lever. 30 minutes of internal linking outperforms a month of paid link-building for local intent.

FAQ schema on every service page

Pull the actual questions Vegas customers ask you and put them on the page with FAQPage schema. This wins zero-click features (People Also Ask, AI Overviews) for hyperlocal queries.

The Vegas-specific angle: include questions about timing tied to Vegas events ("Will you be open during F1 week?", "Do you take same-day appointments during EDC?", "Are your prices different during NFR?"). Tourists search these. Locals search these. National FAQ templates miss them entirely.

Service-area page with embedded Google Maps

One page that shows your full service area as an embedded Google Map (not a static image). The embed has structured data Google uses for proximity ranking.

List every neighborhood and ZIP you serve in plain text on the page. Include drive-time estimates from the Strip if you serve tourists, or from major employers like UNLV/Switch/MGM/Caesars if you serve locals.

Image alt text and filename SEO

Every image: descriptive filename ("ac-unit-installation-henderson-nv.jpg" not "IMG_4823.jpg") and meaningful alt text. Vegas image search drives a real percentage of local-business clicks because of how visual the market is.

Geotag your photos before uploading them (use a free EXIF editor). Google reads EXIF location data as a soft local signal.

Add a real local landing page for each major event

Vegas has 4 events that generate massive local-intent search spikes: CES (Jan), F1 (Nov), EDC (May), NFR (Dec). If your business has any reason to mention these (extended hours, special services, event-area considerations), build a real landing page for each.

Don't build it the day of the event. Build it 60 days ahead so Google has time to index and rank. The pages compound year-over-year.

Real testimonials with first names + neighborhood

"Sarah, Summerlin" beats "Sarah" beats "S.M." Real names + specific neighborhoods = more trust + a soft local SEO signal (Google reads testimonial text for entity recognition).

Get permission. Include a photo if you can. Even better, link the testimonial to their Google review (if they wrote one).

Active blog with hyperlocal content

One post a month, evergreen, written for actual Vegas search terms. Examples: "Best time of year to replace your AC in Las Vegas (it's not summer)", "What does a Henderson family law attorney charge?", "Why your Summerlin home insurance is going up in 2026."

Goal isn't to go viral. Goal is to rank for very specific local-intent queries that your competitors aren't targeting.

HTTPS + a basic security baseline

Every page on HTTPS, no mixed content warnings, no expired certs. Google explicitly downranks sites with HTTPS issues. Free via Cloudflare or your host's built-in SSL.

Bonus: add HSTS header (`Strict-Transport-Security: max-age=31536000`). Tells browsers to always use HTTPS. Sub-1% ranking lift but signals professional setup.

Track Vegas-specific keywords, not generic ones

Don't track "best web designer." Track "web designer henderson", "summerlin web design", "las vegas wordpress developer." Use a free tool like Google Search Console's Performance report or a paid tool like Ahrefs or Semrush.

If you don't track, you can't tell what's working. What gets measured gets fixed.

Add llms.txt for AI search engines (and audit your AI-bot allowlist)

Add a /llms.txt file at your domain root. It's a markdown file telling AI search engines (ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude, Google AI Overviews) what your business does, where you serve, and what your key pages are.

Honest disclaimer: Otterly's 90-day study across 1M+ AI bot citations found only 0.1% of AI bot visits hit /llms.txt. So it's not a visibility lever. The actual lever sits one layer up: your robots.txt needs explicit Allow rules for the 8+ named AI bots (GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot, Google-Extended, CCBot, etc.). Otterly found 73% of sites have technical barriers blocking AI crawlers before content is even evaluated, usually because Cloudflare's bot-management defaults block them.

Test it yourself: curl -A "GPTBot" -I https://yoursite.com/. If you see 403 or 429, your CDN is blocking AI bots. Fix that before worrying about llms.txt.

Re-audit every 30 days

Local SEO compounds slowly. The score you have today is irrelevant; what matters is whether it's moving up over time. Re-run your audit every 30 days. Track the score. Celebrate the small wins.

Free re-audit, same form, takes 30 seconds: willcwebdesign.com/audit