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Is my website showing up on Google?

Search for the work you do plus a town you work in, and look for your name on the list. That's the check, and it takes a minute a town. A site can show up for the business name and for nothing else, so search by the job and the town, not by your name. Google Search Console then gives you the full picture for free.

The check, town by town

Take the list of towns you work in. For each one, type the job and the town into Google the way a customer would: garage floor coating Hudson WI, roof repair Chippewa Falls. Look at the map with three businesses on it, then the list under it. If your name isn't in either, you're not showing up there.

Do it from your phone, because that's what your customers use. Google gives every town its own list, built from where the person searching is standing, so a search from your own shop shows you your own town's list, not the next town's. Search Console, below, shows you every town.

Searching your own business name doesn't count. Almost any site shows up for its own name. The question is whether you show up for the work, in the town, when the person searching has never heard of you.

What Google Search Console tells you

Google Search Console is a free tool from Google that shows you, for your own site, every search you came up for, how many times, where on the page, and how many people clicked. It's the same data we use to measure a site, and anyone who owns a site can have it.

Three numbers matter. Impressions: how many times your site was shown. Clicks: how many times someone tapped it. Position: how far down the page it sat. A site with impressions and almost no clicks is being shown where nobody scrolls.

Look at the pages report and the searches report side by side. If the only searches on the list are your business name, and the only page with clicks is your home page, your site is showing up for people who already know you and nobody else.

What it looks like when a site works

A site that's working shows up for the job and the town, in town after town, on pages that are about those towns. A concrete coating company we built for, out of River Falls, Wisconsin, shows up in 27 towns across Wisconsin and Minnesota. In the same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site, they came up on Google 5.9x more often and got 2.7x more visits.

That's what the check should find: your name on the list for the job, in the towns you drive to, not just at home. Each of those towns has its own page on their site, written about that town, and that's the whole difference.

Why a live site can still be missing

Being online and being shown are two different things. Google has to find the page, decide it's worth listing, and then decide it's the right answer for a search in a town. A page can be live for a year and never be shown, because it says nothing about the towns and nothing Google can use.

The usual reasons: the site only names your home town; it's one page with everything on it; the pages for other towns are copies with the name changed; or nobody ever told Google the pages exist. Every one of those is fixable, and none of them has anything to do with how good your work is.

One customer's before and after

A concrete coating company

River Falls, Wisconsin. Same 81 days before and after we rebuilt their site.

more often on Google
3,864 to 22,885
5.9x
more visits from Google
106 to 284
2.7x
Towns they show up in
Wisconsin and Minnesota
27

What this means for you

Run the check for every town you work in and write down where you're missing. Then set up Google Search Console on your site, or ask whoever runs it to, so you can see the same thing in numbers every month instead of guessing.

Bindingstone builds and runs the site that gets you found in every town you work in, handles the Google side, and watches Search Console for you.

Ready to show up in every town you work in?

Your site can be live in about ten days. After that, the towns you drive to can find you.