The Softest Check on a New York Website Is Also the Free One

You already know something on your website is off.

You don’t need me for that part. What you want is which thing, in what order, and what you can safely ignore, because the last person to tell you was a New York agency, and he was holding a proposal while he said it.

So let’s do it the way I’d spend it if the money were mine and there wasn’t much of it.

First, second, third, and one job I’d leave alone.

None of it is a rebuild. If you came here hoping I’d say the whole thing needs replacing, so you could file that under next year and get on with your day, I’m sorry.

Of everything I check across New York City, the softest result is the canonical tag, carried by 82.5% of the pages I opened up there against 84.9% across everything I audit.

Charleston and Raleigh handle it better than any city I opened. New York keeps company down at the other end with Windsor and Montreal, which is a strange place for a city like this to be standing.

And it’s free. Not cheap. Free.

Dallas gets its best showing anywhere off a different line of text that costs an owner nothing, which is a pattern by now. The free jobs are the ones nobody does.

Most owners have never heard of it either, which is the only reason it stays broken for years at a time.

First: the line she never had

A client of mine teaches piano out of two rooms in Queens.

Her lessons page could be reached three ways: with the www on the front, without it, and through an old link from a flyer someone printed for her in 2019.

One page, three doors, and Google was free to treat them as three separate pages. So the links from the school newsletter and the small amount of history that makes Google trust a page at all got spread across copies of the same thing.

A canonical tag is how a page tells a search engine that the other versions of itself aren’t other pages. Hers didn’t have one, and the copy Google chose to show carried a phone number she’d stopped answering two years earlier.

Fixing it took the man who looks after her site about as long as it takes you to read this paragraph, because on most software it’s a setting that got switched off rather than anything anybody has to build.

It sits on the list I walk before a site of mine goes live, down in the boring middle, which is where the free jobs tend to hide.

You don’t have to take my number on faith either. The report has a pair of dropdowns near the bottom, and choosing New York City on its own, with the second box left on all, rolls the whole city up and prints every check beside the number of sites it ran on.

How many different ways can a customer land on your homepage right now? Most owners tell me one, and most owners are wrong.

I see it worst on businesses that other people have listed. A delivery app here, a neighborhood guide there, a directory that scraped you in 2020, and each one hands out a slightly different version of the same link.

Ask whoever built your site whether your pages carry that line. The answer arrives fast, or it doesn’t arrive at all, and both of those tell you something.

Second: something that writes it down

A man who runs a shop in Brooklyn called me in March to ask whether his website was working.

I asked him what happened on it in February. Neither of us could answer, because nothing on that site had written anything down since the day it went live.

Analytics is the part that keeps the record, and 55.7% of New York sites run any at all, against 58% across my whole sample.

Could you tell me which page a customer read before she picked up the phone? Or which week your traffic fell off a cliff?

Without a record, every argument about the website comes down to whoever sounds most sure of himself in the room, and that is almost never the person paying.

It costs nothing, it takes an afternoon, and it has to go on before you change a single other thing. Otherwise you’ll never know whether the changing worked.

He put it on in April. By June he could tell me that most of his visitors were arriving on one page he’d forgotten he owned, which is not a thing either of us would have guessed over the phone.

Third: five minutes in the footer

A stranger who likes what she reads wants one more thing before she calls, and it isn’t another testimonial.

She wants proof you were open this week. The fastest proof anyone has is the feed you posted to on Tuesday.

Owners here tell me everybody already knows where they are, and they’re right about the neighbors. The stranger three trains away is the one this paragraph is about.

Which is why the missing links bother me. 63.4% of the sites I audited in the city link a social profile, where 66% manage it across my sample, and this is a city that lives on its phone.

Adding yours is five minutes and a copy and paste. Often the icons are already down there, pointing at an account nobody has touched since 2018, which is worse than having none at all.

The job I’d leave alone

Your stars.

90.7% of the businesses I sampled in New York hold at least one Google review, one of the healthiest results anywhere I looked, and you got there without a consultant.

So when someone offers to sell you a reputation package, you’re being sold something you already own.

And when did a new color scheme last make your phone ring? I’ve been doing this for over a decade and I still can’t name the week it happened.

I’d leave the design alone as well. Not because yours is good, since I haven’t seen it, but because not one of the three jobs above is a design job, and a redesign is the most expensive way in the world to not do them.

The quickest pages in this city got quick the same way. Every habit behind that speed was a decision to leave something off, not a thing anybody bought.

Most of what I get asked for in this city is a rebuild, and a fair bit of what I end up doing is these three, in this order, on a site that was fine.

If you’d rather have someone look before you spend anything, my audit form is where that starts.

Tonight, before you go to bed

Do one thing.

Open your Google listing on your phone and tap the button that goes to your website. Then copy the address sitting in the bar when it lands.

Now open your site the way you always open it, from your bookmark or by typing it in.

Do those two addresses match, character for character, www and all?

If they don’t, you just found the exact sentence to send the person who built it, in under two minutes, without paying anybody a dime for the privilege. Go and look, then tell me which version of your own website you’ve been sending people to.