Guides · For business owners
Ten concrete fixes. All doable today. No theory, no fluff, no "consider your funnel architecture."
Most small business websites are 80% of the way there. They look fine. They function. They just have ten small things wrong that, fixed, would meaningfully change the number of qualified leads they bring in every month.
We've seen the same ten things on every site audit we run. So here they are. In rough order of impact for a typical service business.
01
Run your site through PageSpeed Insights. If your largest image takes more than 2 seconds to load, compress it. We use Squoosh or TinyPNG. Drop a 2MB hero image to 250KB and most of your speed problem disappears.
02
A clickable phone number (tel: link) in your header. On mobile, 50% of your traffic wants to call you, not fill out a form. Make it stupid easy.
03
Your homepage title (the text at the top of the browser tab) should be your business name plus your location plus what you do. Like "Sullivan Creative Co. Greenville SC Photographer & Videographer." Not just "Home" or your business name alone.
04
"Loved working with them" from no one is worth nothing. "We hired Sullivan Creative for our wedding at Hopkins Farm in October" with a name and a photo is worth a lot. Real proof beats polished copy every time.
05
The description that shows up under your link in Google is 155 characters of free real estate. Most small business sites either leave it blank (Google generates a bad one) or fill it with generic copy. Write it like you are running an ad for your homepage.
06
Every extra field cuts your conversion rate. Name, email, phone, and what they are reaching out about. That is the whole form. You can ask everything else in a reply email or on the phone.
07
Stock images are the fastest way to feel generic. Even a phone photo of your actual office, your real product, or your team beats a polished stock image. People can spot stock from across the room.
08
A small block of JSON-LD in your site's head tag. Tells Google your business name, address, phone, hours, and service area. Search Console accepts it within hours. This is the single most under-used SEO move for local businesses.
09
Walk your site. On every single page, ask yourself what the one thing is you want a visitor to do. If you can name three things, you have zero, because nobody knows where to click first. Pick one CTA per page.
10
A line on your homepage like "5 stars on Google, 38 reviews" with a link to your profile. Social proof at a glance. Most businesses with great reviews never put them on their own site.
Pick the top three from the list. Block off two hours. Do them in one sitting.
The trap is reading the whole list, getting excited, and then doing none of them because you decided to "audit the whole site" instead. Audits are how websites stay broken for another year.
Three fixes is a real afternoon. Ten fixes is two afternoons spread across the next two weeks. That is genuinely all this takes.
We do this all day. We can audit your site in an hour and tell you which three of these to do first for your specific business. Sometimes that is the entire project. Sometimes it is the start of a bigger redesign.
Either way, the most expensive website is the one that has been collecting dust for three years while you keep meaning to fix it.
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