Ten minutes in, I had already found three problems.
I had just started a free health check on a website for a home-services company out in the Midwest. A fellow small business owner. No pitch, no catch.
First, the contact page was hidden from Google. One toggle. Someone had switched on “noindex” for that page, and the site had been telling Google to ignore it. That is the page where customers call you.
Second, the business was telling Google two different postal codes and two different sets of opening hours. Neither matched the Google profile.
Third, the same chat and reviews widget was loading twice on every page. The same analytics tag was loaded twice. The ad tag, twice.
None of this was the owner’s fault. I want to be clear about that.
Nobody owned the outcome
Here is what I think happened. Someone sold them a site on a popular drag-and-drop site builder. They pasted in code snippets the owner will never find. They left a handful of “copy-of” pages behind, test pages that are still live and still in the sitemap. They stacked tracking tags from three different vendors, each added by a different person at a different time. Then they walked away.
The owner pays every month. The owner has no idea what is under the hood.
That is what vendor lock and digital abuse look like at street level. It is not fraud. Nobody stole anything. It is just that nobody owns the outcome. Everyone got paid for their piece, and the business owner is left holding a site they cannot read, cannot fix and cannot leave.
Why I am angry
I am 56. I have run businesses for 35 years and worked in SEO for 20. I have watched this play out at scale.
Big companies get enterprise-grade analysis and a real plan. Small ones get a dashboard with red dials and an upsell. The dial says “poor.” The upsell is a monthly retainer. Nobody explains what the dial means or who broke it. Nobody says what it would take to fix it, because the fix is not the product.
Small business owners are the least able to spot this and the most able to be hurt by it. A bad site costs a big company a rounding error. It costs a small one customers. They are busy running the actual business. So they trust the person who says “leave it with me.” And “leave it with me” quietly turns into a lease on their own storefront.
I believe every builder needs to own their intelligence, not lease it. The same goes for a website. I am done watching it happen, and I have the skills to do something about it.
What the check actually involved
Here is what I did, so you know it was not a gimmick.
I crawled the site, about 70 pages, with the same tooling an enterprise SEO team uses. I ran it through the frameworks I have built over 20 years. Every page was read. I looked at titles, descriptions and headings. A dozen pages had no headline at all. Four different pages were wearing the same title, so Google could not tell them apart.
I measured speed on a simulated phone. The mobile speed score landed in the 30s. Each page weighed nearly 5 MB, and almost all of it was other people’s scripts, not the owner’s photos.
Then I checked the business details against their Google profile, which is where the two postal codes and two sets of hours showed up.
What the owner got back was a plain-English PDF. Click paths they can follow inside their own site editor. Nothing for sale. No proposal at the back. I am not pitching them. Fixing it takes an afternoon or two.
Human in the loop, always. The tools do the heavy lifting, but a person reads the results and explains them like a person.
What Marcela and I are doing about it
My fellow co-founder Marcela Shine and I run Ready, Plan, Grow!. Marcela has coached more than 5,000 entrepreneurs. We have both watched too many good small businesses get worked over by digital vendors.
We are fighting back the only way that works. We hand owners the same analysis the big companies pay for, and we show them what to do with it.
The rule is simple. You own everything we build. No vendor lock. Ever.
We also run free weekly Office Hours. Business owners from all over bring one problem. We work on it out loud, together, and they leave with a fix. Pricing, hiring, websites, AI, whatever is on fire that week. It is free to join, and it stays free: readyplangrow.com/pricing
This check was me paying it back, big time. I would like to do a lot more of it.
If this sounds like your site
If you run a small business and want to know what is really going on with your website, ask me. Email rc@logoclothz.com. I will tell you what I see in plain words. No bait, no switch.
What would you find if someone actually looked?
Stay curious.
Ryan
What to check on your own site this week
You do not need me for these. Each one takes minutes.
- Is your contact page set to noindex? Open your page settings for the contact page and your top services. Make sure “hide from search engines” is off.
- Do any pages share a title? Search your own name on Google and look at the tab titles. If four pages read the same, Google cannot tell them apart.
- Does your business info match your Google profile? Check the name, postal code, phone and hours in your footer and on your Google listing. They should match to the letter.
- How many tracking tags do you really have? Ask whoever built your site for a list. If the same analytics, ad or chat tag shows up twice, you are paying for it in speed.
- Are there leftover “copy-of” pages? Open your page list and sitemap. Delete or hide old copies, tests and drafts that are still live.
Find me across the web
Stay curious, my AI friend. It's the secret sauce - think like you are seven. - Ryan