What Google Actually Checks on Your Website

You write well, you post decent photos, and your site still doesn't show up when someone searches for what you do. The temptation is to think you're missing some trick: stuffing the keyword twenty times, adding hidden text, buying some "SEO package." None of that is necessary.

Google doesn't read your website like a robot counting words. It reads it like someone deciding, in a split second, whether you're worth showing before the shop down the street. And to decide that, it looks at very specific things, not magic: what you say, how fast it loads, and whether what you claim matches everywhere else you show up.

The first thing it reads, before anything else

Before it even opens your website, Google has already read two lines from you: the tab title and the gray line underneath it that shows up when someone searches. You write that once, in the page's code, and it's the one thing guaranteed to be read in full, even if nobody ever opens the site.

If that title says "Home" or just your business name, you're not telling anyone anything. If it says what you do and where, and it matches what someone typed into the search bar, that counts for a lot more than any design flourish.

How long it takes to load

Google measures how long it takes your page to fully show up, especially on a phone using cell data, not the calm wifi of an office. If it takes too long, two things happen at once: the person leaves before reading anything, and Google notes that this website wastes people's time, so it shows it less.

What weighs the page down almost always isn't the text or the design: it's photos uploaded straight off the phone, uncompressed. A simple text page can weigh about as much as a text message; add three uncompressed camera photos, and it weighs as much as thirty.

That it says the same thing everywhere

Google cross-checks what your website says against your Google Business Profile, your social media, and any directory where you show up. If your phone number ends in 34 in one place and 43 in another, or one site says you close at eight and another at nine, Google doesn't assume which one is right: it distrusts both and shows both less.

This isn't a nice-to-have, it's a five-minute check. Before you touch anything else on your site, make sure your address, phone number, and hours say exactly the same thing there and on your Google Business Profile.

That it hasn't sat untouched for months

A website that never changes sends a signal: that the business isn't changing either. Google visits your pages from time to time to see if there's anything new, and if there never is, it starts visiting less often and paying less attention when it does.

You don't need to write something every week or keep a blog if it doesn't do anything for you. You need it so that when something actually changes in the business, it changes on your website first: a price, a schedule, a new service you've started offering.

That the text is actual text, not a photo with words on it

There's one last thing Google checks that almost nobody talks about: whether your site can be read without seeing it, whether the text actually exists in the code, or whether it's all photos with letters drawn on top. A sign made into an image can be read by any person with eyes, but Google can't read it.

If the name of your service, the price, or the address are stuck inside a photo, a nice-looking sign, a scanned menu, that part of the page is blank as far as Google is concerned. Write the same thing you show in the photo as regular text too, even if it looks plainer.

In Yodai every site goes live with its padlock, its sitemap and its titles, with nothing to buy or set up. See what the hosting included with your website covers.