Record a baseline of how Google crawls, indexes and shows your site today.
Before you change anything on your site, write down how Google crawls, indexes and shows it today. Without a written starting point, you end up comparing later results against memory, and memory tends to flatter.
That written record is your baseline: a snapshot of how Google crawls, indexes and shows your site today. It takes about half an hour and needs a phone, a laptop and a spreadsheet. You don't need a paid tool. Any change you make over the next three months gets measured against this sheet, and you come back to it in module 9 for your first monthly review.
Your spreadsheet has four sections: the site: check, brand search, service searches and snippets. They can be separate tabs or stacked on one page. Put today's date at the top, because every number on the sheet 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 search history does not skew what you see. Lesson 1.2, "What Google says its ranking systems look at", explains why. If your customers search on their phones, do your searches on a phone too.
You first used the site: search at the end of lesson 1.1. Type site: followed by your domain, with no space, and Google shows results limited to your site. Google says this list doesn't necessarily include every page it has indexed, so it is not a reliable count of your indexed pages and you are only looking for big gaps.
Record the approximate result count and the number of pages you expect to have. If you are not sure how many pages your site has, count the pages in your website builder's page list. A 30-page site showing about 25 results (an invented example) is probably fine. If the same site showed three results, you would need to investigate, and module 4 helps you find out why pages are missing.
Then scroll through the results and note any pages that should not be there, such as old test pages, tag pages with one post each, or a staging copy of the site.
Search your business name exactly as a customer would type it. On the sheet, record whether your site comes first and whether a business profile appears on the right or at the top. Also note what else is on the page (review sites, directory listings, social profiles, news articles) and whether any competitor or unrelated business with a similar name ranks above you.
Next, choose the three searches that bring you your most valuable customers. Phrase them the way a customer types them rather than in brochure wording. For each one, record your position if you 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 people in different locations can see different lists. Pick a counting rule, a fixed method such as counting only the normal blue-link results and ignoring ads and maps, and write it on the sheet so you count the same way next month.
Pick your five most important pages. These are usually the homepage, your main service pages and your contact or booking page. Find each one in Google, either through one of your service searches or by typing site: followed by the full page address.
Copy the title and short description Google shows. Then open the page settings in your website builder, copy the title and meta description written there, and note any differences. Google sometimes rewrites titles and descriptions. Lesson 3.1, "Title links and snippets", explains why and what to do about it.
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 of the sheet.
Save the sheet somewhere you will find it in three months, and never overwrite it. When you rerun the checks, add new columns with the new date beside the old numbers.
Priya runs a maths centre in Tampines (an invented example, with invented figures). Her site: search showed about 9 results, but she believed she had 14 pages. The two missing pages were her P5 and P6 class pages, which she added last year.
Her brand search was mostly good. Her site came first with her business profile beside it, but the profile still showed an old phone number.
Her service searches were weaker. For "P5 maths tuition Tampines", her site was not in the first three pages of blue links, though her map listing was fifth in the map results. For "maths tuition Tampines", her site was eighth. "PSLE maths tuition east Singapore" did not show her at all.
In the snippets, Google showed "Home" as her homepage title, because that was the builder's default. Her contact page snippet carried the old phone number.
In twenty-five minutes, without a paid tool, she found four problems. Two pages were possibly not indexed. A wrong phone number appeared in two places, the business profile and the contact page snippet. Her homepage had no proper title and was called "Home". No page matched her best search.
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, your brand search result, your positions for three service searches, and the snippets Google shows for five key pages.
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