Findability
What a search engine actually reads
Your site looks fine to you. To a search engine, it may be almost blank. Here is the part that does the work, and how to check yours today.
Open your website in a browser, right-click, and choose View page source. What you are looking at is the version a search engine reads. Most of what a visitor experiences — the photographs, the spacing, the colours — is not in there in any form Google can understand.
Four things in that code do most of the work.
The title
This is the blue headline in search results and the text in the browser tab. It should say what you do and where you do it: Roof repair in Northport, AL — Company Name. Not Home. "Home" is the single most common title on small business websites, and it tells a search engine nothing.
The description
The grey paragraph under the headline. It does not change your ranking much, but it decides whether a person clicks. One or two plain sentences with a reason to choose you.
Alt text
Every image needs a line describing what it shows. It is read aloud to people using screen readers, shown when an image fails to load, and used by search engines to understand the picture. The test: if you read only the alt text aloud, would someone know what the photo is of?
- Weak: IMG_4471.jpg
- Weak: photo
- Good: A finished cedar deck behind a brick ranch house in Tuscaloosa
Structured data
A small block of code that states, in a format search engines specifically look for, that you are a business, where you are, and how to reach you. It is part of what produces the panel with your hours and phone number off to the side of the results.
How to check yours
Search your own business name in a private browsing window. Read the headline and the grey paragraph as if you were a stranger. Then view the source and search the page for alt=. If your images have no alt attributes, or they are all filenames, that is an hour of work with a real payoff.
None of this is trickery. It is labelling. A search engine is doing its best to describe your business to someone who is looking for it, and the labels are all it has.