The Site Looks Fine, The Phone Doesn't Ring

A plumber in Maidstone has a site that looks properly done, decent photos, a clear list of services, a contact form that actually works. The phone still isn't ringing from Google. Enquiries come from word of mouth and the odd Facebook post, search brings in nothing, and nobody's ever gone through the site to check it for search engine optimization issues and find out why. The design was never the problem, nobody ever confirmed the site was actually set up to be found in the first place.

An SEO Check, Explained Properly

Treat It Like An MOT, Not A Score Out Of 100

An SEO check works like an MOT. It goes through each part of the site and tells you exactly what's failing and why, so you know what to fix and in what order, rather than handing you a number and leaving you to guess. Free checker tools give you a score based on things that are easy to measure automatically, page speed, meta tag length, a handful of technical boxes ticked. Google's actual ranking system cares about harder things to measure: whether the business's name, address and phone number match everywhere online, whether the page genuinely answers what someone searched, whether other sites link back to it. A site can score 90 on a free checker and still sit on page three, because none of these tools can see whether the Google Business Profile is verified or whether the site has a single real backlink.

The Same Four Problems, Every Time

The same problems turn up on trade and service sites across Kent, over and over: duplicate or missing title tags across service pages, a Google Business Profile nobody's touched in over a year, no schema markup telling Google what the business actually does, and image files still named IMG4021.jpg instead of anything useful. None of these on their own sinks a site, but stack all four together and Google reads the business as either not real or not properly maintained, and neither reading helps rankings. Fixing all four is an afternoon's work. Most sites carry at least two of them for years without anyone noticing.

The Checklist, With The Numbers That Actually Matter

Speed, And Whether Google Can Even See The Page

Run the site through Google PageSpeed Insights and check the three Core Web Vitals scores: Largest Contentful Paint under 2.5 seconds, Interaction to Next Paint under 200 milliseconds, Cumulative Layout Shift under 0.1. Miss those numbers on mobile and visitors are leaving before the page finishes loading, which means Google never gets the chance to rank it for anything, a visitor who's already gone never becomes a ranking signal. Then open Google Search Console, go to Indexing, then Pages, and see which pages are actually indexed rather than assuming they all are. Run the URL Inspection tool on three or four core service pages specifically, if one comes back "URL is not on Google," that page is the first thing to fix, no amount of good content on it will help until it does.

Title Tags, And The One Line Most Sites Get Wrong

Title tags need to be unique per page, between 50 and 60 characters, and actually name the service plus the area covered, not just the business name repeated on every page. A plumber's emergency call out page titled "Emergency Plumber Maidstone | [Business Name]" tells Google exactly what the page is for and who it's for, where a page titled just "Services" tells Google nothing useful at all. Screaming Frog's free tier crawls up to 500 URLs and flags every missing, duplicate, or oversized title tag on the site in one run, which covers most small trade sites in a single pass. Meta descriptions matter less for rankings directly but still need to stay under 160 characters and give someone an actual reason to click, rather than restating the title tag in different words.

Local Signals: Same Details, Everywhere

Name, address and phone number need to match exactly across the website, the Google Business Profile, and any directory listing. "St." on one and "Street" on another is enough to weaken the signal, because Google reads the mismatch as two possibly different businesses rather than one consistent one. LocalBusiness and Service schema markup tells Google directly what the business does and where it operates, instead of leaving Google to guess from the page content alone, and most trade sites still don't have it. The Google Business Profile itself carries more weight for local rankings than almost anything on the website, so the category needs to be specific and correct, the service area listed properly, and the photos need to be real jobs, not stock images. A profile that's sat half finished for a year is a missed ranking opportunity every single day it stays that way.

Fix In This Order

Fix blocked pages before anything else, they're the highest impact and lowest effort item on this list, a single noindex tag or a leftover robots.txt line can undo every other fix on the page. After that, missing or duplicate title tags on core service pages, still low effort and still high impact. Mobile usability errors come next, they take more time to sort but matter just as much. Local schema and Google Business Profile completeness sit after that, useful but rarely urgent. Leave sitewide Core Web Vitals work for last, it's usually the biggest job on the list for the smallest marginal gain once everything above it is sorted.

The Point DIY Stops Being Enough

Running through this yourself is enough for a business that wants to know roughly where it stands, or one with a small, simple site and no pressure to rank faster right now. It stops being enough once the fix involves schema markup gone wrong, backlink strategy, or duplicate content left over from an old site migration, because getting those wrong does more damage than leaving them alone. A tradesperson happy editing their own website can handle everything on this list with an afternoon spare. A business that's already worked through these fixes and is still invisible for its core search terms after a few months is better off with a proper SEO audit built for small businesses than another hour spent guessing.

Common Questions

Are Free SEO Checker Tools Worth Using at All?

Free checker tools are worth using as a first pass, mainly to catch obvious technical errors like broken links, missing meta descriptions, or slow loading images. They're not worth trusting as a complete verdict on whether a site is properly optimised, since most of them can't see Google Business Profile activity, backlink quality, or whether the content actually answers what someone searched. Treat the score as a starting checklist, not a finished report card.

Does Site Speed Really Affect Rankings That Much?

Site speed affects rankings directly through Core Web Vitals, and indirectly through a bigger factor: people leave slow sites before they finish loading. A mobile page that takes over four seconds to load loses a meaningful share of visitors before Google even gets the chance to rank it for anything, a lost visitor never becomes a ranking signal or an enquiry. Fixing image file sizes usually accounts for most of the improvement on a small business site, before anything more technical needs touching.

Do I Need to Check My Site Every Month?

A full check isn't necessary every month, quarterly is usually enough for a small business site that isn't actively being worked on, alongside a quick Search Console glance for new errors. The exception is straight after any redesign, domain change, or migration, when checking within the first week catches redirect and indexing problems before they cost weeks of visibility. Google Business Profile activity, reviews and posts, is worth a lighter check monthly regardless of how the website itself is doing.

Can a Site Look Fine and Still Have Serious SEO Problems?

Yes. A site can look polished and professional while missing schema markup, running duplicate URLs, or having a Google Business Profile that's never been claimed. Visual design and technical SEO are almost entirely separate skill sets, so a beautifully designed site built without SEO foundations in mind can still be nearly invisible in search. This is exactly the gap a proper technical check is built to catch, since it looks underneath the visible design rather than at it.

None of this needs doing all at once. Fix the two or three biggest issues and the needle moves more than chasing a perfect checklist ever will. Checking a website for search engine optimization properly just means knowing which handful of things Google actually cares about, and leaving the rest for another day.