You will record a baseline of how Google currently crawls, indexes and shows your site.
Three months from now you will change your titles, fix a page Google cannot index and add a new service page. Then someone will ask whether any of it worked. If you did not write down where you started, you will be comparing against your memory, and memory is generous.
This exercise records a baseline: a snapshot of how Google crawls, indexes and shows your site today. It takes about half an hour, needs only a phone, a laptop and a spreadsheet, and you will come back to it in module 9 when you run your first monthly review.
Make a spreadsheet with four sections, either as separate tabs or stacked on one page: the site: check, your brand search, your service searches and your snippets. Put the date at the top, since every number here only means something next to the day it was taken.
Do every search in a private or incognito window, signed out of Google, so your own history does not tilt the results. Lesson 1.2, What Google says its ranking systems look at, explained why. Use your phone if that is how your customers search.
Start with the site: estimate. Type site: followed by your domain into Google, with no space, as you did at the end of lesson 1.1. Write down the rough number of results Google shows, then the number of pages you expect your site to have. If you are unsure, count the pages in your website builder's page list.
Google says this count is an estimate, and it can move from day to day, so you are looking for big gaps. If your 30-page site shows about 25 results, that is probably fine. If it shows three, module 4 will help you find out why. Scroll through the results too, and note any pages that should not be there: old test pages, tag pages with one post each, a staging copy of the site.
Next, search your business name exactly as a customer would type it. Record whether your site comes first, whether a business profile appears on the right or at the top, and what else is on the page, such as review sites, directory listings, social profiles or news articles. If a competitor or an unrelated business with a similar name sits above you, note that too.
Choose the three searches that bring you the most valuable customers, written the way a customer would type them rather than the way your brochure reads. For each one, record your position if you can find yourself in the first few pages, whether you appear as a normal result, a map listing or both, and the top three sites above you.
Counting positions by hand is rough. Ads, map packs and other boxes crowd the page, and two people in different places can see different lists. Pick a rule, for example "count only the normal blue-link results, ignore ads and maps", and write it on the sheet so that next month you count the same way.
Then pick five pages that matter most, usually the homepage, your main service pages and your contact or booking page. Find each in Google, either through one of your service searches or by typing site: followed by the full page address. Copy the title and the short description Google shows. Then open the page's settings in your website builder and copy the title and meta description you actually wrote. Where Google shows something different, note it. Lesson 3.1, Title links and snippets, explains why Google rewrites these and what to do about it.
Here is Priya's baseline for her Tampines maths centre, with example figures. Her site: search came back with about 9 results, though she believed the site had 14 pages. Two of the missing ones were her P5 and P6 class pages, added last year.
Her brand search was mostly good news. Her site came first with her business profile beside it, though the profile still carried an old phone number. The service searches were weaker. "P5 maths tuition Tampines" did not show her site anywhere in the first three pages of blue links, although her map listing came fifth in the map results. On "maths tuition Tampines" her site was eighth, and "PSLE maths tuition east Singapore" did not show her at all.
The snippets told their own story. Google showed "Home" as her homepage title, because that was what her builder had set by default, and the contact page snippet carried the old phone number.
So twenty-five minutes gave her four concrete problems: two pages possibly not indexed, a wrong phone number in two places, a missing title and no page that matched her best search. She found every one of them without a paid tool.
Save the sheet where you will find it in three months, and never overwrite it. When you rerun the checks, add new columns with a new date beside the old numbers.
If you spotted anything during lesson 1.4, What gets a site demoted or removed, add a short note on spam policy risks at the bottom. Then open a private window and work through your own site in the order the activity below lays out.
Fill in the baseline sheet with your site: estimate, brand search result, positions for three service searches and the snippets Google shows for five key pages.
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