Over the last couple of weeks I built a system that keeps an eye on how search engines see a website. Every week it checks the site, notices anything that changed, and once a month sends a report explaining in plain English what’s holding it back.
It’s already earned its keep. Four of the five pages on my own site were quietly telling Google they were just copies of a fifth one — one small mistake in the way the site was built. You’d never spot it by looking. It was capping everything else I did, and the system found it in its first proper run.
What I want now is to run it where it counts. So far I’ve only pointed it at my own portfolio and a couple of design pieces — sites built to show off work, not to bring in customers. The part that checks how a site is built works well on those. The part that studies what real customers are searching for needs a site real customers are actually looking for.
So I’m running it free for six months for a few of them.
What it does
Once a week it goes through your site page by page and checks the unglamorous things that quietly cost you visitors:
- Whether each page has a clear title and description, the text people see in Google’s results
- Whether any pages are broken, missing, or erroring
- Whether pages are accidentally telling Google they’re copies of each other
- Whether Google and Bing can actually find and list your pages at all
- Whether your business details are set out in a way search engines understand
It remembers every check, so it can tell you what changed since last time, rather than handing you the same list of problems you already saw last month.
It also reads the reports Google and Bing already keep about your site: how often you turn up in search, how often people click, and what they typed in to find you. Over a few months that builds into something more useful — which of your pages are gaining ground, and which are slipping.
Once a month you get an email. Written for a business owner, not a developer: “your homepage doesn’t clearly tell Google what it’s about” — not a list of error codes.
That’s what this is good at. The kind of problem that’s silent and invisible until something tells you it’s there.
What it doesn’t do
It tells you what’s wrong. It doesn’t fix it.
I want to be blunt about that, because an unspoken assumption is the fastest way for a free offer to end badly. You’ll get a clear list of what’s hurting you, in priority order. Doing something about it is either your web person’s job, or a separate conversation with me. Nothing here includes the fixing.
The deal
Six months of monitoring, free. No card details, no contract.
What I want back is honest feedback — were the reports useful, did you act on any of it, what was confusing or wrong. If it genuinely helped, a short testimonial.
And I’ll be straight with you about where this is going: if six months in you’d rather keep the reports than lose them, I’ll ask you to start paying for them. The free run is how I earn that, not a trick to get your details.
What I’d need from you
- Your website address
- Five to ten things you’d like to be found for — the one thing I can’t work out for you
- View-only access to your Google Search Console, which is Google’s free tool showing how your site does in search. If you don’t have it, I’ll set it up with you
- An email address to send the reports to
To be clear about access: I read the search figures Google keeps about your site, and I look at your public pages the same way any visitor could. That’s it. No access to your hosting, and nothing I run can change your site.
The honest caveats
This is experimental, and I’d rather you hear it from me now than notice later.
I run it myself rather than renting space from a big hosting company. That keeps it free, but it means there’s no uptime guarantee, and my backups aren’t yet kept in a second location. I get an alert if a week’s check doesn’t run, but I’m not going to promise you a level of service I can’t stand behind.
One piece isn’t finished yet: checking your exact position in Google’s results. Right now the position figures come from Google’s own reports rather than from looking at the results pages directly. I’d rather tell you that than let you assume it’s done.
And I’m building this out in the open, so month one will be rougher than month six. That’s the trade for it being free.
Questions you might have
Is it actually free, or does it start charging later? Free for the six months. No card details, no contract, nothing to cancel — and if you forget all about it, I won’t bill you for forgetting.
What happens at the end of the six months? Nothing automatic, and nothing sneaky. What I’m hoping is that by then the reports have become something you’d rather keep than lose, and that’s the point where I’ll ask you to start paying for them — it’s what makes running this sustainable for me. I’ll tell you the price well before the six months are up, so it’s never a surprise. If it hasn’t been worth it to you, say so and we’ll part on good terms; I’ll have learned something either way.
Do I need to understand any of this? No. The reports are written for a business owner. If you’d rather forward them to whoever built your site, that’s fine too.
What if I’ve never heard of Google Search Console? Most people haven’t. It’s free, it takes about ten minutes, and I’ll walk you through it. The weekly checks work without it — you’d just be missing the search figures until it’s connected.
Will you change anything on my site? No. I only look. I can’t edit, publish, or break anything, and I don’t need access to your hosting or your website editor.
How much of my time does this take? About fifteen minutes at the start. After that it runs on its own and you get one email a month.
Can I stop partway through? Any time, no notice, no explanation needed. Just tell me and I’ll take your site out.
What if I want the problems fixed, not just found? That’s a separate paid conversation, and there’s no obligation to have it with me. A lot of these fixes are things your existing web person can do in an afternoon once they know what to look for.
If you’re interested
Get in touch — tell me your website address, roughly what you sell, and whether you’ve got Google Search Console set up. If it looks like a reasonable fit I’ll get you set up and you’ll have your first report inside a month.
I’m only taking a small number of sites so I can give each one real attention, so if it isn’t a fit I’ll tell you straight rather than leave you waiting.