A search result is not your website. It is a heading, a web address and about two lines underneath. Somebody reads that, decides in a second or two, and either clicks you or clicks the roofer below you. Everything else on the site only matters if that bit works.
Two things fill it. The main heading on the page, the H1, which tells a search engine what the page is. And the meta description, the short bit of writing that goes under the name. Neither is difficult. Both are missing more often than you would guess.
What we found
Same 249 sites as our audit of UK trade websites: roofers, fencers, landscapers, driveway installers, builders. One row per website, the most recent audit of each, our own sites taken out.
| What we checked | Sites | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Exactly one main heading, as intended | 165 | 66% |
| More than one main heading | 46 | 18% |
| No main heading at all | 38 | 15% |
| Nothing written under the name | 41 | 16% |
| Missing at least one of the two | 58 | 23% |
A third of trade websites do not have one clear main heading. 38 have none, 46 have several, and a page with five H1s is telling a search engine five different things about what it is.
58 sites, 23%, are missing at least one of the two. Nearly one in four has something wrong with the only part of the website most people will ever read.
Why it happens
Almost never on purpose. Page builders are the usual cause: a big styled block at the top of a page is often marked as a heading because it looked right, and a template that repeats that block on every section produces four or five main headings without anybody choosing it. The other common one is a homepage whose heading is the business name rendered as an image, which is a picture as far as a search engine is concerned.
Descriptions go missing for a simpler reason. Most themes leave the field blank, nothing on the page looks broken, and nobody ever sees the empty box.
What Google does when it is missing
Here is the honest part, because it is worth knowing before you spend a Saturday on this. Google does not leave the space blank. It picks a sentence off the page and uses that instead, and it rewrites descriptions it does not rate even when you have written one.
So this is not a case of nothing being shown. It is a case of something being shown that you did not choose. Sometimes that is fine. Often it is a cookie banner, a phone number with no sentence around it, or the middle of a paragraph about your accreditation. You do not get to complain about it afterwards if you left the box empty.
The heading matters more, and differently. It is not just presentation. A page with no main heading has not told a search engine what it is about in the one place that is meant to say so.
What to do about it
- One main heading per page, and make it say the job and the place. "Block paving in Leicester" beats "Welcome".
- Write the description yourself, about 150 characters, saying what you do, where, and why somebody should ring you rather than the next one. It is one sentence.
- Check the pages you actually want found, not just the homepage. A service page with no heading is a service page that is not competing.
- Look at what is showing now. Search your business name and read the result as a stranger would.
None of this is a big job. For most of the 58 sites it is half an hour, and it is the half hour with the shortest distance between doing it and somebody clicking.
Figures from technical audits of 249 UK trade websites, one row per website, most recent audit of each, our own sites excluded. Run the same checks on any site with our free audit: no sign-up, no email, about a minute.