The site audit we run before the new year

November is the last calm stretch most local businesses get. The holidays are close enough to plan for and far enough away that nobody is drowning yet, and the budget conversation for next year has just started.

It is also the month when a website audit is worth the most, for two reasons. Search has moved twice since August, so thin pages are a live question rather than a theoretical one. And anything you fix now has six weeks to settle before the January rush, when dental benefits reset, contractors get called about the cold, and everyone who put something off in December finally deals with it.

Here is the audit we run on every local business site this time of year, in the order we run it, and what it usually turns up.

Start on a phone, outside, on cellular

Not the emulator, not the office wifi. A normal phone on a normal connection, standing in the parking lot.

• The hero. The biggest image or the background video at the top of the page is almost always the slowest thing on the site. Compress it, serve it at the size it is actually displayed, and delete the rotating slider if one is still there. Nobody reads slide three.
• Things that move while the page loads. Images without a width and height, booking widgets, sticky offer bars, fonts swapping in. Every one of them shifts the page under a thumb that was already reaching for a button.
• Scripts nobody can name. Most sites we inherit carry a chat widget, a review widget, a heatmap tool somebody installed years ago, two analytics tags and a tag container full of things with no owner. Remove what is unused and delay what is not needed immediately.
• The tap targets. Phone number, book button, menu. If you cannot hit them cleanly while walking, neither can a customer.

Google has been talking this year about a new responsiveness measure for how quickly a page reacts to a tap, on top of the Core Web Vitals already in use. Nothing has changed in the reports yet, but the fix is the same fix: fewer scripts fighting for the phone’s attention.

Structure: one page per service, one page per place

Most local sites we look at have a single services page listing eight things with a sentence each, and then a client wonders why none of them rank.

The rule we use is simple. If someone could search for it and pay for it, it gets its own page with its own heading, its own photos and its own booking path. A dental practice that does implants, clear aligners and emergency visits has three real pages to write, not three bullet points.

The same goes for the places you serve, with a warning attached. A page for a town you genuinely work in, written by someone who works there, is worth having. Twenty near-identical town pages with the name swapped are the exact thing Google’s helpful content update was built to push down, and because that update looks at the whole site, they can weigh on the pages you care about. Going into next year, we are deleting more of those pages than we are writing.

Check the plumbing while you are in there: every service page linked from the main navigation, no page more than two clicks from the homepage, no orphan pages left over from a redesign, and no duplicate site at an old address still live.

Service pages a person would actually read

The test we apply to each page: could anyone else in town publish this word for word? If yes, it is not doing anything for you.

What makes a service page specific:

1. Photos of your building, your team and your work, not stock photography of a model in a chair.
2. What the visit actually involves, step by step, including how long it takes and what it feels like.
3. Who it is not for, and what you would recommend instead. Nothing builds trust faster.
4. What affects the cost, and whether you take that insurance or offer a payment plan. You do not have to publish a price to answer the question people are really asking.
5. Real questions from your front desk, answered in the words patients and customers use.
6. One clear next step at the top and again at the bottom, with a phone number that is a link.

The quiet leaks

This is the part of the audit that pays for itself. Every one of these has been live on a site we were asked to look at this year.

• The contact form errors on mobile and nobody has ever tested it on a phone.
• The form asks for nine fields when three would do, and the drop-off is invisible because nothing tracks it.
• Submissions go to an inbox nobody opens, or to a staff member who left.
• There is no confirmation page and no confirmation message, so people submit twice or assume it failed.
• Nothing replies for hours. A lead that gets a text back in five minutes books far more often than one that waits until morning.
• The phone number is typed as text instead of a link, so tapping it does nothing.
• Calls after closing go to voicemail with no way to leave a message that anyone hears.
• Hours are wrong on the site, right on the listing, or the other way round. Holiday hours are not set anywhere yet.
• A chat bubble sits in the corner with nobody behind it.
• Nothing records which page a lead came from, so next year’s budget is guesswork.

The first four cost you leads you already paid to generate. The rest cost you the ones that were easiest to win.

What to do this month

• Open your own site on your phone, outside, and fix whatever is slow, jumpy or hard to tap.
• Submit your own contact form and call your own number, twice: once in business hours, once at 7pm. Write down what happens.
• Pick the two services that make you the most money and rewrite those pages with real photos and real detail.
• Delete or merge the thin town pages nobody reads, and keep the ones you can write honestly.
• Set holiday hours on the site and on your Google Business Profile now, while you are thinking about it.
• Decide who answers a form within five minutes, and what the automatic reply says until they do.

None of this is a redesign. It is an hour with a phone and a notepad, then a short list of fixes. If you would rather hand it over, auditing and fixing local business websites is a large part of what we do, and most of what we find sits in the overlap between the site and how you show up in local search.