Where Does Your Google Listing Send People in Miami?

Last spring I spent a good half hour telling a Miami client, with real feeling, that the link on his Google listing led to a page which no longer loaded.

He took it better than I deserved.

Then I went and looked at my own listing, found a phone number I had stopped answering two years earlier, and stayed very quiet for the rest of the afternoon.

So this isn’t a lecture. It’s a check, it takes about five minutes, and you can do the whole thing from the couch with the phone that’s already in your hand.

I audited this city last month, and the plainest check I run usually deserves no paragraph whatsoever, because 83% of the businesses I’ve audited have a website. Miami had me running that check twice: only 76.0% of the ones I sampled here have one, which is 22nd of 24.

Only New Orleans and Corpus Christi came out lower than that.

And the number flatters everybody, including this city. Among the businesses that do list a website, 1.1% are pointing at a Facebook page or a directory profile, and another 8.2% point at a site that didn’t load when I went to open it.

A dead address and a Facebook link both land inside that website total, which is my own counting rule and the reason I treat that figure with a fair amount of suspicion. If you want to poke at it yourself, pick Miami in the explorer, leave the second list alone, and it prints every check I ran with the number of sites behind each one, and the website line is one of the softest things on it.

A listing can count as a yes and still hand your customer nothing at all. Which is why you’re going to check yours rather than take my word for it.

Right. Phone.

Step one: search yourself the way she does

Use your phone, not your laptop. Your laptop is signed into everything you own and it will flatter you.

Type your business name and your neighborhood. Do not type your web address, because you know your web address and she doesn’t. She never will.

What comes back is the card Google builds for you whether you asked for one or not. Your name, your stars, your hours, a map, and a short row of buttons.

The card assembles itself out of everything Google has gathered about you, including plenty you never typed anywhere: photographs customers took, questions strangers asked, and opening hours that a passer-by suggested and Google quietly accepted.

That card is the shop window now. Most of the people deciding about you today will look at nothing else, and when did you last look at it from the outside?

Step two: find the button that says Website

Look along the row. Call, Directions, Website.

Is the third one there?

If it isn’t, then your stars and one photograph are doing all of your selling, and the photograph was probably uploaded by a customer, on a Tuesday, in bad light.

A missing button is one of the more common reasons a business around this city ends up calling me, and the owner is nearly always shocked that it was gone.

Step three: tap it, and count out loud

Count out loud, because you’ll lie to yourself if you count in your head.

Where did you land? Three answers turn up again and again, and only one of them is any good.

• Your own website, the one you recognize. Carry on to step four.

• Your Facebook page. It counted as a website when I scored this city, it doesn’t count with me, and you don’t own a single thing about it.

• An error, a parked page covered in ads for hosting, or a wheel that spins and never resolves. Somewhere between one and four years ago, that link died, and nothing anywhere told you.

A word about the Facebook answer, because owners push back on it and the pushback is fair. A business page is a perfectly good place to put yesterday’s work in front of people who already like you, and I have never once told a client to delete theirs.

What it can’t do is sit on an address you control, turn up when a stranger searches for the thing you sell, or stay in the shape you left it after the next redesign that a company in California decides on without asking you.

A baker here was running her entire business off one, and the site that replaced it was a single page.

Did you land where you expected? Most owners do. The ones who don’t tend to go pale, because the link has usually been broken for longer than they want to say out loud.

Step four: read the page like a stranger with a problem

You’re still on your phone. Good. Stay there and don’t scroll yet.

Can you tell what the business does and where it is, from the first screen, without scrolling and without already knowing the answer?

The stranger who arrives through that button has a problem, about ninety seconds of patience, and three of your competitors open in other tabs behind you. She isn’t reading your homepage. She’s hunting it for two facts, and when she can’t find them quickly she goes back to the map instead of working harder.

Pool companies pass the phone checks better than almost any trade I audit, then leave that same woman standing there with nothing left to tap.

All of that belongs to how a page treats the person holding the phone, which has never been the same thing as how it looks.

Now scroll, and find the phone number. Call it.

I’m serious about that last one. Ask me how I know to check the number.

Nobody lets a link die on purpose

Here’s the thing about a dead website. It never rings you.

Your hosting bill goes to an email address you set up in 2014. The person who built the site moved on, or got busy, or stopped doing this for a living. The renewal notice landed in a folder you don’t open.

The whole arrangement hangs on a chain of small renewals that nobody in the business ever agreed to look after, and a chain like that breaks quietly, on an ordinary Thursday, months before anyone in the building notices.

Meanwhile your listing keeps sending people to it, cheerfully, several times a day, and every one of those people decides you’ve closed down.

Every business I have pulled out of this had the same explanation waiting for me, and it was never carelessness. Ownership had been split between a designer, a hosting company and whoever registered the address, and no one person was holding all three.

That’s the part owners find hardest to hear. Nobody complains. They don’t email you to say your website is broken, they just tap the next business on the map and get on with their evening.

How would you have found out, if you hadn’t read this?

Send it to me when you’re done

When you’ve run the five minutes, send me the address you landed on.

Paste it into my audit form and I’ll open it myself, on my own phone, cold, the way your customer does. Then I’ll write back with what I’d change first and why, in the order I’d do it.

The reason I built that report at all is so an owner can find out where they stand without hiring anyone to tell them, and the audit works the same way. I open the page, I write back, and none of it turns into a sales conversation unless you start one.

If the honest answer is that it’s fine, you’ll get that too, and you’ll get it quickly. It happens more often than you would think, and it costs me a coffee to tell you.

The one thing I can’t do is check it for you. That part is five minutes and a phone, and you have both right now.