Is Your Website
Hurting Your SEO?

A website can be perfectly nice to look at and still be the reason your business does not show up on Google. We see it constantly during free website SEO audits: an owner who paid real money for a site three or four years ago, has never touched it since, and cannot understand why a competitor with an uglier site ranks above them.

Here are the nine problems we find most often. For each one there is a way to check it yourself in a few minutes, and a fix. Some fixes are an afternoon. A couple of them are a rebuild. Knowing which is which is the point.

1. It loads slowly

Speed is a ranking factor, and more importantly it is a leaving factor. People on a phone give a page about three seconds before they go back to the results and tap the next listing.

How to check: Go to PageSpeed Insights (pagespeed.web.dev), paste your homepage address, and look at the mobile score and the Core Web Vitals section. Then do the same for your most important service page. Anything in red is a real problem.

How to fix: Usually it is oversized images, a page builder loading scripts you do not use, and cheap shared hosting. Compressing images and removing unused plugins can get you part of the way. We cover the whole topic in website speed and SEO.

2. It does not work well on a phone

Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. For a local service business, well over half of visitors are on a phone anyway, often standing in a flooded kitchen.

How to check: Open the site on your own phone. Can you read the text without zooming? Can you tap the phone number and have it dial? Does anything hang off the right edge of the screen? Does the menu open? Try the contact form with your thumb.

How to fix: If the site was built in the last five years, it probably has a mobile layout that just needs adjustments: larger tap targets, a click-to-call button, fixing the one section that overflows. If it was built earlier, or on a template that was never responsive, it is usually faster to rebuild than to retrofit. That is a normal part of our website work.

3. It is not on HTTPS

Browsers now put a "Not secure" warning next to any site without an SSL certificate. Google has treated HTTPS as a ranking signal for years. In 2026 there is no excuse for this one, and yet we still find it.

How to check: Type your address with http:// at the front. Does it redirect to https://? Is there a padlock in the address bar on every page, including the contact page? Also check www versus non-www; both should end up at the same secure address.

How to fix: Certificates are free from Let's Encrypt and most hosts install them with a checkbox. The part people miss is the redirect: every old http and www variation has to send people to the one correct address, or Google sees four copies of your site.

4. One page does everything

The single-page site with everything stacked on the homepage was a design trend. It is a bad SEO strategy. Google ranks pages, not businesses, and a page cannot be the best result for "water heater replacement," "drain cleaning," and "commercial plumbing" all at once.

How to check: Search Google for site:yourdomain.com. If it returns five results or fewer and you offer more than five services, this is you.

How to fix: Give each core service its own page with its own title and a few hundred words of real explanation. Then a page for each area you seriously serve. Our local SEO checklist walks through what those pages need.

5. Pages have no titles or descriptions

The title tag is the blue link in Google's results. The meta description is the gray text under it. When they are missing, Google writes its own, usually badly, and your listing reads like "Home | My Site" next to a competitor's "Emergency Plumber in Chesterfield, VA. Same-Day Service."

How to check: Look at your browser tab on each page. If every tab says the same thing, or just the company name, the titles are missing. For descriptions, search your own business name and read the snippet Google shows.

How to fix: Write a unique title under 60 characters and a description under 155 characters for every page. Service plus place plus business name is the pattern. This is an afternoon of work on any platform and one of the highest-return fixes on this list.

6. Page-builder bloat

Drag-and-drop builders make it easy to put a site together and easy to ship one that loads two megabytes of scripts and styles to display a paragraph. Every slider, animation, and "premium" widget adds weight, and the theme loads all of it on every page whether or not the page uses it.

How to check: In PageSpeed Insights, open "Reduce unused JavaScript" and "Reduce unused CSS." If the list is long and the names are theme and plugin files, that is bloat. A page size over two megabytes for a simple service page is another tell.

How to fix: Remove plugins you do not use, switch off theme features you do not need, and add a caching layer. If the numbers barely move, the builder itself is the problem. This is the most common reason we recommend a move from WordPress to a custom site: a hand-built page for a local business is often a tenth of the size.

7. There is no location information

A surprising number of local business sites never say where the business is. No address, no city names, no service area. Google has to guess, and it guesses conservatively.

How to check: Read your homepage as a stranger. Within ten seconds, could you say which city or county this business serves? Is the full address and phone number in the footer? Does the contact page have a map?

How to fix: Name, address, and phone in the footer of every page, matching your Google Business Profile exactly. Mention your main city in the homepage headline and title. Add a service-area section listing the counties and towns you actually cover. If you serve several distinct areas, give each one its own page with real local detail.

8. The forms are broken

This one does not hurt rankings directly. It hurts everything else. We have found contact forms that had silently failed for months because the email plugin broke during an update, or the address it sent to belonged to an employee who left. Every lead in that window went nowhere.

How to check: Submit your own form right now, from your phone. Did the confirmation message appear? Did the email arrive, and in the inbox rather than spam? Do the same for the quote request form, the careers form, and any other form on the site.

How to fix: Send form email through a proper transactional email service rather than the web server's default mail, add a spam check that does not block real people, and test the form monthly. This is one of the standing items in our Website + SEO Care Plan for exactly this reason.

9. Nobody is maintaining it

A website is not a brochure you print once. Software underneath it goes out of date, links break, hours change, the person who built it stops answering. Sites that are not maintained drift downward in rankings slowly and then get hacked suddenly.

How to check: When was the last time anyone logged in? Is the copyright year in the footer current? Are the hours right? Do you know who to call if the site went down this afternoon, and would they answer?

How to fix: Either put it on your own calendar (updates, backups, form test, speed check, a look at Search Console, monthly) or have someone do it for you. We wrote about what a real care plan should include so you know what to ask for.

Which ones matter most

If you can only fix three things this month: titles and descriptions (5), location information (7), and the forms (8). They are cheap, fast, and directly connected to the phone ringing. Speed (1) and mobile (2) are next, and if fixing them properly means a rebuild, that is usually the right call rather than another year of patches.

And if you went through the list and were not sure how to check half of it, that is what the audit is for. We look at all nine plus the things you cannot see from the front end, and send back a plain list of what to fix and in what order.