A few weeks after we launched our free SEO Audit Tool, we got curious about something. We had been telling clients for years that "small SEO issues add up," but we had never actually measured it across a group of real sites at once.
So we picked 10 websites we had worked on over the past year, ran each one through our own tool, and wrote down what came up. Nothing scientific, just a genuine look at what real small business websites actually have wrong with them before anyone touches the SEO side.
What We Expected vs What We Found
We expected the usual suspects: missing meta descriptions, slow load times, that sort of thing. Some of that showed up, but a few things surprised us by how often they repeated.
Missing Alt Text Was Everywhere
7 out of the 10 sites had at least a handful of images with no alt text at all. This was more common on sites that had product photos or team photos added later by the client themselves, after the site was originally built and handed over.
It makes sense when you think about it. Alt text is invisible day to day, nobody notices it is missing until a tool points it out. But it matters for both accessibility and for Google understanding what the image actually shows.
No Schema Markup on Half the Sites
5 of the 10 sites had zero structured data, no schema markup for the business, no local business schema, nothing. These were mostly the older sites we had not touched recently, built before we started adding this as a default for new projects.
Schema markup does not directly boost rankings, but it helps Google display rich results, star ratings, business hours, that kind of thing, which can meaningfully improve click-through rate even at the same ranking position.
Mobile Speed Was the Most Consistent Problem
This was the one that stood out most. Every single site scored lower on mobile PageSpeed than desktop, which is expected, but 6 of the 10 sites scored below 50 on mobile specifically. A few of those same sites scored 90 or higher on desktop, which shows how easy it is to think a site is fast when you have only tested it on a laptop.
Since most local business traffic is mobile, this is often the single biggest gap between how a site performs and how it should perform.
The One Thing That Surprised Us Most
Word count was lower than we expected across the board. 4 of the 10 sites had homepage content under 300 words. These were sites that looked complete visually, nice design, clear services listed, professional photos, but very little actual text for Google to read and understand.
This is a common tradeoff in web design. Clients often want a clean, minimal homepage, which is a reasonable design goal, but it can work against SEO if there is not enough written content anywhere on the page explaining what the business actually does, who it serves, and why someone should choose them.
What This Actually Means For Your Site
None of these issues are dramatic on their own. A missing alt text here or there will not sink your rankings. But when we added up the sites with 3 or more of these issues at once, that came to 6 out of the 10. That is a lot of small friction stacking up, and it usually happens quietly over time as a site gets updated, content gets added, and nobody circles back to check the technical side.
The good news is that most of what we found is quick to fix once you know it is there. Alt text, meta descriptions and basic schema markup can usually be added in an afternoon. Mobile speed and thin content take more work, but they are the two that make the biggest difference.
Check Your Own Site
If you want to see where your own website stands, our SEO Audit Tool is free to use and takes about 30 seconds. It checks over 30 factors across technical SEO, on-page elements, performance and content, the same categories we looked at across these 10 sites.
If the report comes back with a long list of issues and you would rather have someone else handle the fixes, that is exactly what our SEO service is for. We can work through the list with you, prioritize what actually matters for your business, and handle the technical side while you focus on running things.
Get in touch if you want a second pair of eyes on your results.