Does Google Know What Your Bismarck Business Sells?

I’ll go first, since it’s only fair.

My own website went four years without the thing I’m about to ask every owner in Bismarck to look for, and I’d been building it into client sites the entire time, invoicing for it, explaining it on sales calls, without ever once opening my own page to see whether it was in there.

Nobody caught it, and nobody was ever going to, which is exactly the difficulty with this particular corner of a website.

It doesn’t appear on the screen anywhere, and my website looked identical on the morning I fixed the problem and on the evening before I discovered it existed.

I wondered how many other people were in the same position, so I counted. 63.9% of the Bismarck websites I audited carry schema markup at all, against 70.5% across everything I looked at.

What you’re looking for

I picture Google reading your homepage twice.

The first read is the one you can see. Your words, your photos, the big line across the top. Google works out what your business is from all of that, the way a stranger in a hurry would, and a guess is still a guess even when a machine is the one making it.

The second read is invisible to you. Sitting inside the page there can be a block of code that says it outright: this is a dental office, at this address, open at eight, these are the services, this is the phone number.

That block is called schema markup. Google doesn’t have to interpret any of it, so it can’t get any of it wrong, and when it wants to build one of those little panels of stars and hours and prices beside your name in the results, the block is where it goes shopping first.

No block, no shopping. It goes back to reading your paragraphs and hoping for the best.

I’ve watched Google file a client of mine under the wrong kind of business for two years running, all because of a missing block.

Is it getting you right? You’d have no way of knowing, and neither would I, because the only place that answer lives is in a part of your website you’ve probably never opened.

The check, start to finish

I run this on every site before I quote on it, so I can promise you it’s quick.

Grab a laptop, because it’s miserable on a phone, and give yourself about five minutes from beginning to end.

1. Open your homepage in Chrome.

2. Right click on any empty part of the page and choose View Page Source. A wall of code opens in a new tab. Don’t read it.

3. Press Ctrl and F together, or Command and F on a Mac, to open the little search box in the corner.

4. Type schema.org and hit enter.

The browser prints a count of matches next to that box, and that count is your entire answer.

So what number came up in the corner of your screen?

Zero means the code was never installed, and Google has been guessing about your business for as long as it has known you existed.

Anything above zero means something is in there, so run a second search on the same page, this time for LocalBusiness, one word, no space between them.

Plenty of sites carry a block that describes the website itself, or the theme a designer bought back in 2018, and says nothing whatsoever about the company paying the bills. A page can pass the check I run and still tell Google nothing useful about who you are or where you sit.

How often that box comes up empty

Considerably more often than I’d have bet on, before I started counting other people’s websites for a living.

Not one owner has ever raised that gap with me in a meeting, though Bismarck finished 24 of 24 cities on it.

The one argument I do get back came from a jeweler, who told me flatly that a line of code never sold a ring. His trade carries the block more often than most.

None of which means the town neglects its websites. A title tag is the line Google turns into the blue link a searcher clicks on, and 98.9% of the sites here have one written, so the visible half of the work is clearly getting done by someone.

Written and useful aren’t the same thing, mind you. Seattle fills that line in more often than any city I check and still manages to say nothing with it.

The second check, same tab

While that wall of code is still open on your screen, do one more.

Alt text is the short sentence attached to a photo for a customer who can’t see it. A screen reader says it out loud. Google reads it too, alongside the page around it, to work out what your photo of a finished basement is actually a photo of.

Search that page for alt="" (that’s alt, an equals sign, then two quote marks with nothing between them).

Every match is a photo on your website that communicates absolutely nothing, either to a customer using a screen reader or to Google.

How many of them did you count on your own homepage?

Bismarck homepages describe 50.4% of their images on average, where my whole sample manages 54.9%.

Schema and photo descriptions are the only two checks where no other city I audited came out lower. Both of them happen to be completely invisible from the outside, and I doubt very much that the two facts are unrelated.

When I walked all ten checks on this town in the order I run them, those were the two that made me stop and start again.

Why the invisible half loses

Nobody ever sat down in a meeting and decided against any of this.

Ask whoever built your site and you’ll get one of three answers. It wasn’t in the quote. It was in the quote and got cut on the afternoon the budget got cut. Or the theme was supposed to handle it, and the theme handled a version that describes a blog nobody has written a word in since the launch party.

None of those is villainy. All three of them end at the same empty box, and I’ve been on the wrong side of at least two of them myself.

Would you have spotted any of that on a quote, though, sitting in a list of line items you were never taught to read?

I’d rather you didn’t take my rates on faith, either. I audited 1,659 websites in this city, and the explorer on that report will roll the whole place up if you pick Bismarck and leave the industry box empty, printing every check with the number of sites sitting behind it. Your own trade is buried in there somewhere, either holding that figure up or dragging it down.

The visible half of a website gets fought over, because a headline gets rewritten on a Tuesday when a competitor’s version annoys the boss enough.

Code has no voice at all. Nobody has ever read a block of it aloud to another human being, defended it, or lost an argument about it, so it quietly keeps whatever it was born with on launch day.

Which is why it goes in before launch whenever I build a site for a business around Bismarck, on the same list I work through before anything goes live. Retrofitting means opening up a theme that someone else configured years ago and hoping nothing collapses on the way back out.

Five minutes, then a harder question

I can tell you whether the code is sitting in your page. I can’t tell you how it went missing, and that part matters a good deal more than the code does.

Was it quoted and quietly cut? Was it never mentioned to you at all? Or did the person who built the thing assume you’d never look, which, right up until tonight, was a perfectly safe assumption for them to make?

Go and find out which of the three answers it was, because whoever built the thing is almost certainly still answering the phone.

Then sit for a minute with what that answer tells you about every other part of your website you’ve never once been shown.