A homeowner with a leak opens Google on a phone, looks at the roofing companies that come up, and calls one. What those sites do in that minute was settled months earlier, by small things nobody has looked at since.
How we picked the 13
On September 11 we searched Google Maps for roofing contractors in Honolulu. We took the open businesses that had a website, five or more reviews, and a rating of 3.5 or better. That came to 13 companies.
Twelve of the sites let the check run. One refused the automated request, so it is out of every count here. Every number below is out of 12, not 13.
The checks are the ones our free audit runs on a homepage: title tag, description, headings, images, business markup, sitemap, analytics, and Google's PageSpeed test for phones. One page per site, and every number below comes off that page.
None of this is about the roofing. A company can do excellent work and still have a website that Google cannot read properly.
Seven of them are not counting visitors
Seven of the 12 homepages carry no Google Analytics and no Tag Manager on the page. Nothing there counts who arrived or what they did next.
The phone rings or it doesn't, and that is the only signal. Nothing shows how many people visited the site, which pages they read, or whether last month was better or worse than the one before.
Analytics is the only way to know how many people arrived and what they did once they were there. Without it, the answer to every question about the site is a guess.
Putting it on changes nothing about how the site looks and nothing a visitor would notice. It changes what the owner can say about next month, and about the month after that.
The two lines people read in a result
The title tag is the blue headline in a Google result. One site has none at all. Of the 11 that do, 9 run longer than 60 characters, which is roughly where Google cuts a title off mid-word.
A title that long does not show up long. It shows up cut off at the point Google stops.
The shortest one we found is 45 characters. The longest is 333, because the site's menu text leaked into it.
The description is the line underneath. Two sites have none, so Google picks a sentence off the page and shows that instead.
Of the 10 that have a description, 4 run past 160 characters, which is about where Google cuts. The longest is 329. Both fields are text somebody types once.
Headings, photos, and the business details
Two sites have no main heading. Five have more than one. Five have exactly one, which is what Google expects when it works out what a page is about.
The 12 homepages carry 317 images between them. 111 have no alt text, the caption Google reads in place of a photo it cannot see. That is 35 percent, spread across 7 of the 12 sites.
On the worst one, 46 of its 60 images are blank to search. A roofing company photographs its own work, and those photos are usually the best thing on the site.
Four sites have no business markup, the code that states roofing contractor, this address, these hours, in the format Google reads. Without it, Google works it out from whatever else is on the page.
Old files, old years, slow phones
One site has no sitemap, the file that lists which pages exist. Among the rest, the newest date inside ranges from January 2025 to September 2026. Two have told Google about nothing new since 2025.
A sitemap that has not moved in a year tells Google the site is not being updated. Two sites also show an old year in the footer, 2024 and 2016.
On Google's phone speed test the 12 scored from 35 to 78, with a median of 51. Six land under 50, which the tool marks red. Most visitors arrive on a phone.
Google's own SEO check in the same tool gave three of these sites 100, and all three still show problems from this list. That check does not look at analytics, alt text, or business markup.
You can run these checks on your own site at the tools page, one at a time, with results on screen and no email asked for. If you want the whole thing looked at, every page, the listing, the reviews, the speed, and the competitors, there is the free audit, or book a call.