By Royal Decree: Fix These 5 Things Before You Blame Google
Every few weeks someone tells me Google has it out for their business. I understand the feeling. But in my experience, Google is rarely plotting against a dental office in Temecula. Usually the website is quietly telling Google the wrong thing, or nothing at all.
So before you file a grievance with the search engine, the Empress decrees that you check these five things. Most of them take an afternoon. None of them require a developer who bills in fifteen-minute increments.
1. Make sure Google is actually allowed in
This sounds insulting. It is also the first thing I check, because I have found it more than once.
Open yoursite.com/robots.txt in a browser. If you see Disallow: / under User-agent: *, you have politely asked every search engine to leave. This happens a lot after a site launch, when a developer blocked crawlers on the staging site and the setting came along for the ride.
While you're there, view the source of your homepage and search for noindex. A <meta name="robots" content="noindex"> tag tells Google not to list the page. WordPress has a checkbox under Settings > Reading called "Discourage search engines from indexing this site." Make sure it is unchecked.
Then set up Google Search Console if you haven't. It's free, and the Pages report will tell you which URLs Google has indexed and, more usefully, which ones it hasn't and why. If you only do one thing from this post, do this one.
2. Give every page a title that says what it is
The title tag is the blue headline people see in search results. It is one of the clearest signals you can send about what a page covers, and an alarming number of sites leave it as "Home" or "Untitled" or the business name repeated on all forty pages.
A good title answers two questions: what is this, and where? Compare:
- Bad: Home | Smith & Co
- Better: Family Law Attorney in Murrieta, CA | Smith & Co
Each page should get its own. Your "Kitchen Remodeling" page and your "Bathroom Remodeling" page should not share a title, or Google has to guess which one to show.
Write a meta description too. Google doesn't use it as a ranking factor and sometimes rewrites it, but when it does show yours, it's your sales pitch in the results. One or two plain sentences. Tell people what they'll get if they click.
3. Get your name, address and phone number consistent everywhere
For local businesses this one matters a lot. Google cross-checks your business details across your website, your Google Business Profile, and other listings like Yelp, Apple Maps, Bing Places and industry directories.
If your site says "Suite 200," your Google profile says "Ste. B," and an old directory still has the phone number from two offices ago, you look less certain to a system that is trying to decide whether you're a real, current business.
Here's the fix:
- Pick one official version of your business name, address and phone number. Write it down.
- Put it on your website, ideally in the footer so it's on every page, as real text and not an image.
- Make your Google Business Profile match it exactly.
- Search your business name and old phone number. Update or claim the listings that are wrong.
Boring? Extremely. Worth it? Yes.
4. Have one real page per service, and one per place (if you truly serve it)
One "Services" page listing twelve things in bullet points will not rank for any of them. Google wants to send someone searching "water heater replacement" to a page that is clearly about water heater replacement.
Give each core service its own page. On it, say what the service is, who it's for, what the process looks like, roughly what affects the price, and how to book. Answer the questions your front desk hears every week. That last part is gold, because those are the exact phrases people type into Google.
Location pages work the same way, with one warning. Don't make twenty pages that are identical except for the city name swapped in. Google treats those as doorway pages, and they read as spam to humans too. If you genuinely serve a city, write something specific to it: the jobs you've done there, local permit quirks, how long it takes you to get there. If you can't say anything specific, you probably don't need the page.
5. Check your site on a phone, with patience turned off
Most local searches happen on phones. Google also indexes the mobile version of your site first. So pull out your phone, switch off Wi-Fi, and try to do the one thing a customer wants: find your number, or book.
Things I see constantly:
- A popup that covers the whole screen before you can read anything.
- A phone number that isn't tappable.
- Text so small you have to pinch to read it.
- A hero image the size of a small novel that takes several seconds to appear.
Run your homepage through Google's PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev). Don't chase a perfect score. Look at the specific issues it flags, especially oversized images, which are usually the easiest win. Compressing and resizing photos before uploading them fixes a surprising amount.
Then, and only then, you may blame Google
Sometimes the problem really is competition, or a site with years of reputation outranking a brand-new one. That's real, and it takes time and good content to beat. But I'd rather you find that out after these five are fixed, because otherwise you're competing with one arm tied behind your back and calling it a fair fight.
If you've checked all five and you're still invisible, that's when it's worth getting a second pair of eyes on it.
Want the Empress to take a look? Request an audience at Premazon.