AUDIT YOUR OWN WEBSITE IN AN AFTERNOON

Everything else is wasted effort if Google isn't indexing you. Start here, always.

1. Search site:yourdomain.com in Google. No space after the colon.
2. Note roughly how many results come back.
3. Open Search Console, go to Indexing then Pages, and read the indexed count plus the table of reasons underneath it.

The two numbers won't match, and the Search Console one is the real answer. Google is blunt about the operator in its own documentation: it doesn't necessarily return all indexed URLs, the list isn't always exhaustive, and a bare site: query doesn't rank the results, so the order is close to random. It was built for searchers, not for owners auditing themselves.

What you're hunting for in the Pages report is any important page sitting under Discovered, currently not indexed or Crawled, currently not indexed. Those mean different things. Google describes the first as a page it found but hasn't crawled yet, often because crawling then would have overloaded the site. The second means it crawled the page and chose not to index it, and Google explicitly says there's no need to resubmit the URL. That part matters, because plenty of advice tells you to hammer the Request Indexing button, and that isn't what the button is for.

Right click your homepage, choose View page source, and use Ctrl+F to find three things:

1. <title>, and there should be exactly one that describes this page specifically
2. meta name="description", present and written for a human
3. <h1, and again there should be exactly one

Now the part that contradicts most of what you have read elsewhere. Google doesn't publish a character limit for either one. Its title link documentation says there's no limit on how long a title element can be, and the snippet documentation says the same about descriptions. Both get truncated in results as needed, typically to fit the device width. The familiar 60 and 155 character numbers are rules of thumb for avoiding truncation on a typical screen. Useful, but not rules, and a 63 character title isn't a finding.

What Google does document is when it will rewrite your title for you, and those are real findings: half empty title elements, boilerplate repeated across many pages, titles that don't match the page content, and stale titles carrying last year's date. For descriptions, Google says identical or similar text on every page isn't helpful, and that long strings of keywords are less likely to be used as a snippet at all.

This is the most common problem I find on small business sites, and almost nobody looks for it. Two of your pages target the same phrase, so Google has to choose between them, and it often chooses the weaker one.

1. List every service and location page in a spreadsheet.
2. Next to each, paste its title and its H1.
3. Read the column top to bottom and look for rows that would answer the same search.

Then confirm it with data rather than instinct. In Search Console open Performance, filter to a single query, and switch to the Pages tab. If more than one of your URLs appears for that query, they're splitting the signal.

Here's the real example from this site, and it isn't flattering. Search Console shows the phrase google maps seo company pulling 143 impressions with two of my own pages competing for it: /local-seo sitting at position 83.7 and /google-maps-seo-toronto at 47.6. The general page was outranking the specific one, and the specific one is the page that deserves to win. That's a fixable finding, and it fell out of a five minute check.

Open PageSpeed Insights, paste your homepage URL, and run it. Then ignore the big number for a moment and look at the top section, the one headed Discover what your real users are experiencing.

That section is field data: measurements from actual Chrome users who visited your site. The score below it is lab data, a simulation on a synthetic device. They answer different questions, and only one of them is what Google grades you on.

Three metrics matter, and web.dev gives the thresholds: LCP under 2.5 seconds for loading, INP under 200 milliseconds for responsiveness, and CLS under 0.1 for visual stability. Each is judged at the 75th percentile of page loads, split between mobile and desktop, so you're being measured by your slower quarter of visitors rather than your average one. INP replaced First Input Delay as a stable Core Web Vital in 2024, so if a tool or a blog post is still talking about FID, it's out of date.

That screenshot is the whole lesson. This site scores 92 in the lab, 100 for accessibility, 100 for best practices and 100 for SEO, and none of it tells you what a real visitor experiences, because there isn't enough traffic yet for Chrome to have collected a sample. No data is itself a finding. It means you can't claim your site is fast for real users, and you can't claim it is slow either. You simply don't know yet, and the honest move is to write that down rather than screenshot the 92 and call it a result.

If you do have field data, read the three numbers and note which fail. INP is the one most sites fail, because it measures what happens when someone actually taps something, and that's usually where the JavaScript lives.

Structured data is the block of JSON in your page source that tells search engines and AI assistants what your business is, where it is, and when it's open. Two free validators check it, and you need both, because they check different things.

1. Run your homepage through the Rich Results Test. This tells you which Google features your markup is eligible for.
2. Run the same URL through the Schema.org Validator. This checks your markup against the full vocabulary.
3. Write down every error and every warning from both.

The reason to run both is that they have different jobs. The Rich Results Test only reports on the features Google supports, so markup that's invalid in ways Google doesn't currently use can sail straight through. The Schema.org validator checks the vocabulary itself and will flag unknown property names, invalid values and type mismatches regardless of whether Google cares today.

While you're here, one expectation to reset. Don't expect schema to produce a rich result for most local business markup. Google removed HowTo rich results entirely, from mobile in August 2023 and desktop in September 2023, and pulled the documentation with it. FAQ rich results were cut back to government and health sites. Structured data still matters for machine readability and for AI assistants trying to work out what you are, but if someone is selling you schema markup on the promise of a fancier search listing, that promise expired.

Everything so far has been about your website. This step is about the thing that often outranks it: your Google Business Profile.

First, a note that trips people up. The standalone Business Profile dashboard was retired. For a single location business you now manage the profile directly inside Google Search and Google Maps while signed in as the owner. The separate manager interface still exists but is mostly for businesses running several locations through a business group. If a guide tells you to log in to a dashboard to edit your listing, that guide is describing something that no longer works that way.

1. Sign out of Google entirely, or open a private window. Better still, use your phone on mobile data.
2. Search your business name. Check the category, the hours, the phone number and the address against reality.
3. Search your main service plus your city. Note whether you appear in the map results at all.
4. Search your phone number in quotes. This surfaces directory listings you never created.

That last one is the highest yield check in the step. Businesses routinely find a disconnected number or a pre move address sitting on a directory that still ranks for their name.

Then finish the job a customer would. You're already pretending to be a stranger, so go the last step and try to hire yourself. Open your own contact form, fill it in properly, and submit it.

5. Submit your own contact form with a real message.
6. Confirm the email actually arrives, in the inbox and not in spam.
7. Call your own listed number from a phone that isn't yours, and let it ring through.

This isn't an SEO check and it belongs here anyway, because it's the most expensive silent failure a small business website has. A form that quietly stopped delivering after a plugin update, a hosting move or a changed email password looks completely normal from the outside. Nothing errors, the page still says thank you, and the enquiries simply stop arriving. Every ranking above it is worth nothing while that's true, and the average time to discover it is however long it takes for somebody to phone up annoyed that you never replied.

Two related problems, both quick to spot once you know to look.

Thin pages are pages with almost nothing on them. A service page with two sentences and a phone number isn't going to compete with a competitor page that actually answers the question. There's no magic word count, and anyone quoting one is guessing, but a page that can't answer the obvious follow up questions a customer would ask is thin regardless of length.

Orphan pages are pages nothing links to. If a page is only reachable by typing the URL, both visitors and crawlers struggle to find it, and it will usually be one of the pages sitting in your not indexed list from step 1.

1. Open each service and location page. Can it answer the three questions a real customer would ask next?
2. From your homepage, try to reach every money page in two clicks or fewer.
3. Note any page you could only reach from the sitemap or by typing the URL.

You now have a pile of findings, which isn't the same thing as a plan. The last step is putting them in an order that respects what actually blocks what.

This is the order I use, and the reasoning behind it is dependency rather than effort. A page Google won't index can't rank no matter how good it is, so indexing comes first every time.