The SEO checks I run on my sites every Monday

This week I read a Reddit thread asking what you should do every week to keep a small business ranking on Google. The top answer said to open Google Maps and get driving directions to your own shop, over and over, so Google thinks people visit you. One commenter knew a guy who drives around with 100 phones doing this for clients.

Skip that. Google calls it faking location signals, and a suspended Business Profile costs you more than the trick could ever earn.

I run five checks instead. On October 30 I pointed them at the five websites I work on, and they found real problems on three of them, including a client site I built myself.

1. Type a fake address into your own site

Go to yoursite.com/this-page-does-not-exist. You should see a “page not found” message.

On steamvacgreen.com, a carpet cleaning site I built, that address showed the homepage. So did /blog, which doesn’t exist. Google treats that as junk: hundreds of possible URLs, all showing the same page. I added a real 404 page, and the fake address now returns an error the way it should.

2. Click every link in your menu and watch the address bar

If you click “About” and the address bar flips from /about.html to /about, your link points at a redirect. Visitors don’t notice. Google does, because every redirect is one more hop before it reaches the page.

Every menu and footer link on the Steam Vac site worked this way. My Big Discounts footer had the same problem with its Terms and Privacy links. The fix took one search-and-replace per site.

3. Read your page descriptions out loud

The meta description is the gray text under your link in Google results. Mine on the Big Discounts privacy page said “Privacy for bigdiscountsusa.com.” That’s 32 characters. Google gives you about 155.

Write one or two plain sentences that tell a searcher what the page has. If you sell carpet cleaning in Staten Island, say “carpet cleaning” and “Staten Island.”

4. Check your titles fit

Google cuts titles off around 60 characters. My Auction Clips fee calculator page had a 69-character title, so Google would have cut off the end. I cut it to fit.

5. Make sure Google can find every page

Your site should have a sitemap at yoursite.com/sitemap.xml that lists every page you want on Google. Two pages on auctionclips.com were missing from it. Then submit that sitemap once in Google Search Console, which is free.

What I don’t do weekly

I don’t rewrite the homepage to look “fresh,” and I don’t buy links. The weekly checks catch the boring breakage. Real growth comes from slower work: a Google Business Profile with photos of actual jobs, customers who mention your neighborhood in reviews, and pages written for the searches your customers type.

I wrote a script that runs these checks on all five sites, and I’m setting it to run every Monday. If you want me to run them on your site, email hi@artemsumin.com.