The five things we see on almost every site we check
Different trades, different builders, the same handful of problems keep turning up.
We have run our checker over a lot of small business websites now. Different trades, different builders, different budgets. The same handful of problems keep turning up. Here are the five, in plain English, so you can look for them yourself.
1. The content is invisible to the robots
The big one. The site looks full to a person, but the plain version that Google and the AI assistants read arrives nearly empty, because the words only load after the code runs. If the machines cannot read you, they cannot recommend you. This is the one that quietly costs the most.
2. No structured data
There is a simple, invisible way to tell search engines and AI what your business is, where you are, what you offer, and your hours. It is called structured data. Most small sites have none, so the machines are left guessing.
3. Slow on a phone
The site feels quick to the owner and drags for a first-time visitor on mobile. People leave before they read a thing, and Google marks you down for it. Usually fixable without a rebuild.
4. No sitemap or robots file
These are the little signposts that tell search engines where everything is and how to crawl it. They take minutes to add, and a surprising number of sites skip them, which makes the search engines work harder to find your pages. Some never get found.
5. A homepage that does not say what you do
Not a technical one, a human one. A visitor should know what you do and who for within a few seconds. A lot of homepages open with a slogan or a stock photo and make you hunt for the actual answer. The machines struggle with it too.
None of these are hard to fix. The trick is knowing which ones apply to you.
Our free checker looks for the first four in a few seconds and tells you straight. The fifth you can judge yourself: show your homepage to someone who has never heard of you, and ask them what you do. If they pause, that is the fix.
Give it a burl.