Astro Local Business

A starter for local service businesses — tradespeople, studios, clinics, any business that serves a city and lives or dies on being found in it.

Services and locations are Markdown. Schema, sitemap, robots.txt and llms.txt are generated at build time. Ships zero JavaScript and one small CSS file, so the Core Web Vitals score that actually matters (the one Google measures) is not something you have to chase.

7 pages · 0 KB JS · 5.6 KB CSS · one config file to edit

Why this exists

Most "Astro + SEO" starters give you a <head> component and call it done. Local businesses need four things that a <head> component doesn't provide:

1. One page per service and per city. A single "Leistungen" section can't rank for "Sanitär-Notdienst" and "Badsanierung" and "Sanitär in " at the same time.
2. A correct LocalBusiness graph. Name, address and phone that match the Google Business Profile exactly. Mismatches cost local rankings, and they're invisible until you check.
3. A sitemap that matches reality. Generated from the same collections the pages come from, so it can't list deleted URLs.
4. llms.txt. Not for Google — for ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity, which is where an increasing share of "who should I call for this" questions get answered.

Quick start

npm create astro@latest -- --template RelayStack/astro-local-business
# or
git clone https://github.com/RelayStack/astro-local-business
cd astro-local-business && npm install
npm run dev

Then edit src/config.ts. It is the only file you have to touch to make this someone's site: business name, address, phone, opening hours, price range, service area. The layout, footer, schema and llms.txt all read from it, so they cannot contradict each other.

export const site = {
  name: "Muster Sanitär AG",
  url: "https://example.ch",      // ← must match the real domain
  phone: "+41 00 000 00 00",
  address: { street: "Musterstrasse 1", zip: "0000", city: "Musterstadt", country: "CH" },
  hours: [{ days: ["Monday", "Tuesday"], opens: "07:30", closes: "17:00" }],
  areaServed: ["Musterstadt", "Beispieldorf"],
  // ...
};

src/config.ts also drives astro.config.mjs's site, which drives every canonical URL. Set it before you deploy, not after.

Adding a service or a location

Drop a Markdown file in src/content/services/ or src/content/locations/. The filename becomes the URL.

---
title: Sanitär-Notdienst
description: 120–160 characters. Becomes the meta description and the llms.txt line.
from: "CHF 180 Pauschale"
order: 1
faqs:
  - q: Was kostet ein Notdienst-Einsatz?
    a: A short, self-contained answer. This is what gets quoted back to you.
---

Your content. Written for a person, not a crawler.

The FAQ frontmatter is emitted as FAQPage schema and rendered as a <details> block, from one source. Editing an answer in the Markdown updates both.

What's generated

File	Source	Notes
/sitemap.xml	services + locations collections	Native endpoint, no @astrojs/sitemap dependency
/robots.txt	src/pages/robots.txt.ts	Allows AI crawlers on purpose
/llms.txt	src/config.ts + collections	Contact details, services, service area
JSON-LD	src/lib/schema.ts	LocalBusiness, Service, FAQPage, BreadcrumbList

A note on llms.txt: Google ignores it entirely. It exists for AI assistants. If someone tells you it helps you rank, they're wrong, and this template won't pretend otherwise.

Schema rules this template follows

These are the mistakes that quietly cost local sites their rich results:

• One LocalBusiness node per page, never several. Competing nodes are worse than none.
• One @id per business. Service pages reference the business by @id instead of re-declaring a second business with a slightly different name.
• Location pages state areaServed, not a second address. Two addresses for one business reads as two businesses.
• geo is omitted unless you set it. A wrong coordinate is worse than no coordinate.

Deploying

Static output — any host works. npm run build produces dist/.

• Cloudflare Pages: build npm run build, output dist
• Netlify: build npm run build, publish dist
• Vercel: detected automatically

Whichever you pick, add the custom domain and check that https://your-domain/sitemap.xml resolves before you submit it anywhere.

After you deploy

1. Submit /sitemap.xml in Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
2. Create or claim the Google Business Profile. Business name, address and phone must match src/config.ts character for character — that consistency is most of local SEO.
3. Check one page in the Rich Results Test.
4. Fetch /robots.txt and confirm it points at the right sitemap.

Writing content that isn't a doorway page

Location pages only help if each one says something true about that place. A page that swaps the city name into identical paragraphs is a doorway page, and search engines have filtered those for years. Write what's genuinely different: which neighbourhoods, which building stock, how long the drive is, what's common there. This template gives you the structure; it can't give you the facts.

Companion project

If you generate the SEO files from a Markdown directory outside Astro, or you want IndexNow submission and a pre-deploy validator, see astro-seo-toolkit. This template intentionally uses native Astro endpoints so it has no extra dependency.

License

MIT — see LICENSE.