On 2026-10-19 we ran our homepage check on 12 Honolulu landscaping companies found through a Google Maps search: open businesses with a website, five or more reviews, and a rating of 3.5 or better. One site refused the automated check. Every count below is of the 11 that loaded.
The check reads what Google reads: the title tag, the description, the main heading, images and their alt text, the sitemap, the footer year, analytics, and business markup. No business is named. "One site" or "a company we checked" is as specific as it gets.
What the counts show
These are not broken websites. Most load without trouble. Most look fine in a browser. The problems are the ones Google sees on a first read that the owner would not spot on a walk-through.
| Check | Result |
|---|---|
| No Google Analytics | 6 of 11 |
| Title tag over 60 characters | 5 of 11 |
| No description | 2 of 11 |
| Description over 160 characters | 4 of 9 that have one |
| No main heading | 1 of 11 |
| More than one main heading | 4 of 11 |
| No business markup | 4 of 11 |
| No sitemap | 3 of 11 |
| At least one image with no alt text | 8 of 11 |
| Old year in footer | 3 of 11 |
| Speed score under 50 | 3 of 11 |
Six of the eleven sites count nothing. They have no Google Analytics or Tag Manager on the homepage, so there is no record of how many people arrived from search, what they looked at, or whether they called. Without that number, nothing about the site can be judged. There is more on what analytics shows and what it costs at why your website needs Google Analytics.
Title tags and descriptions
The title tag is the blue headline a searcher sees in a Google result. Google cuts a title at about 60 characters; a title that runs longer gets cut off mid-word. Five of the eleven sites ran longer. The shortest title across all eleven was 15 characters. The longest was 155.
Two sites had no description at all. When that happens, Google picks any text from the page and shows it below the headline instead. Of the nine sites that did have a description, four ran past 160 characters, which is about where Google cuts a description. The longest was 187 characters.
A description that ends mid-sentence tells a searcher less than one that fits. Descriptions do not decide whether a site appears in results. They decide whether the person clicks.
Headings and business markup
One site had no main heading at all. Four had more than one. Google uses the H1 to understand what a page is about; one clear heading helps and several competing headings leave Google to guess which one matters.
Business markup is structured data that tells Google the business type, address, and hours in a format Google reads directly, rather than inferring from the page. Four of the eleven sites had none.
Images with no alt text
The eleven homepages carried 370 images between them. Seventy-two had no alt text, which is 19 percent of the total. Eight of the eleven sites had at least one image with no alt text. One site had 24 images on its homepage and every single one was blank.
Alt text is the caption Google reads in place of a photo. Google cannot see the photo itself. A blank image is invisible to search.
Landscaping websites rely on photos to show work: lawns, hedges, finished gardens. Those photos do nothing for search if they carry no description. The image alt check shows which images on any homepage are blank, with no email or account needed.
Speed on a phone
We ran Google's PageSpeed test on all eleven sites. Scores ran from 34 to 95. The median was 60. Three of the eleven scored under 50, which Google marks in red as poor.
| Score | |
|---|---|
| Lowest | 34 |
| Highest | 95 |
| Median | 60 |
| Under 50 | 3 of 11 |
Most visitors to a local business website are on a phone. A score under 50 means the page loads slowly for them. Google measures that and uses it when deciding which sites to show.
Six of the eleven sites scored 100 on Google's own SEO check inside the same tool. That check does not look at analytics, alt text on every image, or business markup. A perfect score on that check and most of the problems in the table above can exist on the same site at the same time.
Sitemaps and freshness
Three sites had no sitemap, which is the file that tells Google which pages exist. Without one, Google finds pages by following links and can miss some entirely.
Of the sites with a sitemap, the most recent date in the file ranged from 2022-02-16 to 2026-10-16. One site had not told Google about anything new since the year before. A sitemap that has not changed in a year signals to Google that the site is not being updated.
Three sites showed an old year in the footer: 2020, 2022, and 2024. A footer date behind the current year is one more small signal that the site is running without attention.
What these add up to
Six of eleven sites count nothing, so nobody knows if search is sending anyone. Five title tags get cut off before the full name shows in some results. Seventy-two images are invisible to search. Four sites give Google no formal statement of what kind of business this is or where it operates.
None of these are problems a visitor sees on a site that loads and looks right. They are the layer between a site that works and a site that appears in results when someone in Honolulu searches for a landscaping company.
The free homepage check shows where any site stands on every check above in about ten seconds. For a full picture of the site, the Google listing, speed, and competitors, the free audit at /audit covers all of it.