Las Vegas Writes Better Headlines Than It Writes Code

“It says our name. Should it not say our name?”

She runs a heating and air company in Las Vegas, out past Nellis, and I’d asked her to open her own homepage while we talked about something else. I wanted the biggest line of text on it, read out loud.

“What would you rather it said?” she asked.

What she does. Who she does it for. Where she is.

Long pause on her end. “Everyone knows what we do.”

Everyone who already knows her does. A stranger comparing three companies at ten at night, on a phone, in a hurry, does not.

How many of those strangers landed on your homepage this week without the faintest idea who you are?

What was on my screen while she talked

I had her page loaded on the other monitor with my checks running down the side of it, a narrow column of little rows saying yes or no.

The line she read me came back flagged as the H1. A page can carry a thousand words, and exactly one line in the code gets tagged as the one the whole page is built around, so that tagged line is the one I check.

Hers held the company name and nothing else.

“Is that bad?”

Less bad than I expected, and this city is most of the reason. 75.7% of Las Vegas websites have an H1, against 73.7% nationally.

That’s 4 of 24 cities, and no other check I run places Las Vegas any higher. A strange thing for a town to be best at, and I’ll take it.

“So we’re fine.”

She has a headline, and the headline is technically present in the way a receptionist is technically present when she never looks up from her desk.

The thing her last developer told her

“He said we needed exactly one, and the numbers had to go in order.”

He was repeating something everybody repeats. Google’s own starter guide says close to the opposite, telling you plainly that heading order doesn’t matter from Search’s perspective and that there’s no ideal number of them.

The same page adds that headings in a sensible order are fantastic for screen readers. So the tidy structure earns its keep with a blind customer rather than with a crawler, which I’d call the better reason anyway.

Which leaves the audience that was always going to decide this. A person, at ten at night, working out whether to keep reading or go back to the map.

Going back to the map is her default, and a thin headline is only one of the reasons I have watched send people back.

Where the city is quietly strong

Her headline was thin, but the sentence underneath it wasn’t.

79.5% of Las Vegas sites write a meta description, against 77.9% nationally. On my screen that one comes back as a single line of grey text. It’s the only thing I check that a customer ever reads in full, since a search engine hands her that sentence before she has clicked on anything.

Hers was there, and it was good. Someone in that office had sat down and written it on purpose, which is more than I can say for most of the sentences I read in a working week.

Most homepages here clear the headline bar as well. The rest open with nothing at all at the top, which is a stranger arriving at a building with no sign over the door.

“So we’re fine,” she said again, more cheerfully this time.

Then I scrolled down my own results

Below the checks made of words sit the checks made of code, and the window stopped being flattering.

A canonical tag is the line that nominates which copy of a page is the original, for occasions when the identical page answers to three or four different addresses. In my results it prints as a web address, and hers printed as an empty row.

82.8% of Las Vegas sites carry one, where nationally it’s 84.9%, and that empty row is one of the worst showings this city has.

“Does that break the site?”

No. Nothing breaks, and nothing looks wrong, which is exactly why the job never reaches anybody’s afternoon.

Her business answers to four addresses I could find, and every one of them shows the identical page. Without that tag, a search engine has to nominate a favourite on her behalf, and whichever address it picks becomes the one strangers land on for years.

Why she could read me one and not the other

She read me her headline in about four seconds flat. She couldn’t have read me that missing tag if I’d paid her for it.

Words have a voice. They get said out loud in a meeting, hated by the sales manager, rewritten on a Tuesday because a competitor’s version annoyed the boss.

Code has no voice whatsoever. Nobody has ever read a tag aloud to another human being, which means nobody in that office had ever formed an opinion about one, defended it, or lost an argument over it.

The visible half of a page keeps collecting attention because it’s visible, and the invisible half keeps whatever it was born with in the beginning.

Every city I audit splits along that line, and an Indianapolis customer runs into two of my checks while never once meeting the third.

Your site still works, and it quietly leaves a search engine guessing at information about your business that it should never have to guess at.

Occasionally the guess is wrong. Your opening hours get interpreted one way instead of another, and a customer drives across town on a Sunday morning to find your lights off.

When did anyone last look at what your own code says about you?

What we changed on that call

One line, in about twenty minutes, while she was still on the phone.

“Heating and Air Repair in Henderson, Same Day Callouts” is never going to win an award. It beats the company name on every day of the year, because a stranger can tell from it whether she’s in the right place.

Rewriting a headline is the cheapest work I ever do, and it’s the change clients notice first when I build sites for businesses around Las Vegas. Nothing else I do moves that quickly.

The tags took longer, and she cared about them considerably less, which is how a city ends up looking the way this one does. Everybody wants to argue about the sentence at the top. Nobody wants to spend an afternoon on the instructions underneath it.

The same neglect turns up at the bottom of the page, where Las Vegas links its own social profiles less than it does anything else I check.

Read yours out loud to a stranger

Your neighbour, your kid, the guy behind you in the coffee line. Read them the top line of your homepage, nothing else on the page, and no explaining afterwards.

Then ask them one question. What do I sell?

If it were my business, I’d rewrite that line this afternoon and pay someone an hour to fix the parts I can’t read aloud.