What we measure
Six measured problems that keep old business websites off Google
Before we rebuild anything, we measure. The six checks below come from a real assessment: a family-run heating & plumbing shop in an Ohio county seat, trading since 1947, whose website failed all of them at once. Every number is a real measurement from that assessment — nothing here is estimated, and nothing is invented.
The same checks run on any old site, including yours. If you post your link, the preview we send back names and measures each problem it found — so you can check our claims yourself before anything else happens.
The site asks Google not to list it
One leftover line of code that tells search engines “leave this page out.” It usually arrives during a redesign or a builder migration and nobody removes it. The business below it can be excellent for 75 years and still be unfindable. This is the first thing we check, because it makes everything else moot.
<meta name="robots" content="noindex"> — measured on the live homepage
Built for a desktop monitor, shown on phones
Most local searches happen on a phone. A page with zero media queries and a hard-coded desktop width forces visitors to drag the page sideways to read it. They don’t drag. They tap the next result.
CSS media queries found: 0 · fixed desktop width: yes
The page announces its own abandonment
A “coming soon” notice that has sat there for years tells every visitor the business stopped looking at its own website. Worse, it dates itself — a stale copyright year is a small sign with a loud message: nobody is home.
Text on homepage: “New website coming soon!” · copyright line: 2024
The phone number cannot be tapped
On a phone, a number wrapped in a tel: link is one tap to call. A number pasted as plain text means memorize, switch app, type. For a trade business where the call IS the sale, this single missing attribute quietly costs real jobs.
tel: links found: 0
One page weighs as much as a small book
Over 400 KB of markup on a single page — before images — is a builder exporting everything it ever knew. On rural mobile connections that is seconds of blank screen, and every second is measured in visitors giving up.
Homepage HTML: 421,153 bytes
The competition is beatable — that’s the point
We score every competitor Google ranks in the same local search. In this market, every rival with a website measured cleaner. But here is the real finding: 6 of the 11 ranked businesses had no website at all. Ranking locally is not won with a website — it is lost with a bad one.
Defect scores in one local market: 0, 0, 2, 3 — against 16
How to check your own site in two minutes
You don’t need us for the first pass. Search Google for site:yourdomain.com — if nothing comes back, Google isn’t listing you (check 1). Open your site on your phone: if you have to drag sideways to read it, that’s check 2. Try tapping your phone number: if nothing happens, that’s check 4. Three of the six, diagnosed from a parking lot.
The rest need tooling, which is what we’re for. We run every check, fix what it finds, and you see the finished result before any conversation about money — that’s the whole model, and the price is published rather than quoted on a call.