When a local business site will not rank, the cause is almost always dull. Not a penalty, not the competition, not a Google update.
Here are the seven we find most, in the order we check them.
1. The site tells Google to go away
Rule this out first, because it happens more than it should. A site gets built on a staging address with indexing switched off, goes live, and nobody switches it back on.
To check: search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If nothing comes back, or two pages come back when you have twenty, nothing else on this list counts until that is fixed.
2. Every page chases the same search
You have a services page, a local SEO page and a homepage, all written around one phrase. That feels like three shots at it.
Google sees three pages that look alike and cannot pick between them, so often it shows none of them well.
To check: write down your top ten pages and the one search each should win. Any phrase that appears twice is your problem. One page owns it and the others link to it.
3. Nothing links to your best pages
We see this constantly. The page selling your highest value service is reachable only by somebody who knows the address already.
Google travels a site by following links. A page that nothing points at looks unimportant, because inside your own website it is.
To check: open your homepage and try to reach every money page in two clicks without the search box. Whatever you cannot reach is your list.
4. The page never says what people search
A page titled “What We Do” that talks about craftsmanship for four paragraphs, without ever saying “gutter cleaning in Dayton”, will not rank for gutter cleaning in Dayton.
This is about saying plainly what you sell and where, in the title, the first heading and the opening two sentences. Fifteen repetitions of a phrase does something else, and it does not help.
To check: read the page out loud. Ask whether a stranger could say what you sell and where after ten seconds.
5. The site is slow on a phone
Not slow on your laptop on office wifi. Slow on a phone with two bars, in somebody’s driveway, which is where most of your customers are.
Usually one thing causes it, and that thing is enormous photos. A four megabyte hero image straight off a camera does it alone.
To check: put your homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and read the mobile score only. If it is red, begin with the images.
6. Your name and address disagree across the web
A suite number on one listing and missing from another. An old phone number on a directory you forgot about. “Miller Heating & Air” in one place and “Miller Heating and Air Inc” in another.
Each one alone means nothing. Twenty of them add up to a business Google cannot confirm as one company at one address. That confidence decides much of who gets into the map.
To check: search your own phone number in quotes. That finds the strays fast.
7. There is no page for the thing people want
The common version: a business sells eight services and has one page listing all eight in a bulleted row.
Somebody searching for the fourth item has nowhere to land. There is no thin page to improve, because there is no page at all. No amount of technical work makes a missing page rank.
To check: list what you sell, then list your pages. The gap between the two lists is usually the whole job.
Which one do you fix first?
Work down the list in order. Indexing first, because it makes everything else pointless. Then the free ones: internal links, page titles, and tidying up your listings.
Speed and new pages come after, since both cost time and money. Spending either while the site tells Google to go away is a waste.
One warning. Do not change ten things in a week. When something moves you want to know which change moved it, and a scattered week tells you nothing.
When somebody else should look
Every check above you can do yourself in an afternoon, and plenty of owners do.
It gets harder when all seven come back fine and the site ranks nowhere. Then you are into what you cannot see on the surface. How pages redirect, what the code says to Google, whether an old version of the site competes with the new one.
That is the work inside an seo audit for small business. We read the whole site, write down what is wrong in plain words, and hand you the list in the order that pays.
Want somebody to tell you which of the seven applies? Book a call and we will do the checks with you on screen.