01How I checked, and what I cannot tell
I found 288 websites for businesses and organisations around Forest Row. 21 were down or parked, which left 267. A script read each homepage and recorded the same things for every one.
I cannot tell from the outside who built which site, so this is not a verdict on doing it yourself. It is what local websites look like. I am not naming any of them.
A check like this reads the page as it arrives. Anything added afterwards by a script can be missed, so where a finding depends on that, I have left it out.
02The details Google and assistants cannot read
These are the things a search engine or an AI assistant reads to understand a business. A person never sees them, which is why they get missed.
- 60% have no structured business details: the machine readable version of your name, address, phone number and hours. That is 159 of 267.
- 99% have no structured questions and answers, the format assistants quote from most easily. Only 3 sites had it.
- 27% have no meta description, so Google writes its own summary in the search results. That is 71 sites.
- 51% do not have exactly one main heading, and 26% have none at all, so a search engine has to guess what the page is about.
- 24% have no link preview tags, so the site looks bare when somebody shares it.
03The things that quietly put people off
None of these will stop a site working. Each one makes it a little less likely that somebody gets in touch.
- 30% show a phone number that cannot be tapped to call on a mobile. That is 80 sites.
- 15% have broken links. That is 41 sites.
- Of the 158 sites that show a copyright year, 52, about a third, still say 2024 or earlier. It makes a business look as though it has stopped.
- 78% have at least one image with no description for people using a screen reader.
04Privacy, which is easy to forget
136 of the 267 sites, about half, never mention privacy anywhere on the homepage, so there is no way to find a privacy policy from there.
Of the 135 sites with a contact form, 56 have no mention of privacy on the page. A form collects somebody's name and email, and people are entitled to know what happens to them.
05Tracking that stopped working in 2023
33 sites, 12%, still have Universal Analytics code in them. Google stopped processing data for standard Universal Analytics on 1 July 2023.
For 24 of those sites it is the only Google tracking they have. They have recorded nothing for more than three years, and the code is still sitting there looking as though it works. It is the clearest sign I found of a site that was set up once and never looked at again.
06Five minutes on your own site
Most of this is quick to check yourself, without any tools.
- Open your site on your phone and tap the phone number. It should offer to ring.
- Scroll to the bottom and look at the year in the footer.
- Find your privacy policy, starting from the homepage.
- Click every link in your menu.
- Log in to Google Analytics, if you have it, and check that it shows visits from this month.
Sources and further reading
Written by Morgan Loughton at Ferris Creative in Forest Row. If something here does not match what you are seeing on your own site, email me and I will take a look.