What your website needs to be found
Twelve things, in the order they matter. Most of them take a minute each, and none of them is a keyword.
A real Clay site, built from a Google listing
Almost everything written about SEO for a small business is written for somebody with a marketing budget. You do not need a content strategy or a backlink campaign. You need a page that answers, in text, the four questions a stranger asks about your business, and a handful of details that are missing from most sites we look at.
This is our own list, not a general one. It is the twelve things Clay checks on every site it hosts, once a week, and reports back to the owner. You can run it on a site we did not build, the list is below in full, with what each one actually does and why it is on the list.
The three that stop everything else
A site nobody can index is a site with no SEO at all, and it is far commoner than it sounds: a "hide from search engines" switch left on after a redesign, a staging site that outranks the real one, a robots file copied from somewhere else.
After that come the two lines a search result is made of. The title is the blue line somebody clicks, thirty to sixty characters, with what you do and where you are in it. The description is the two lines under it, and if you have not written one, Google picks a sentence off your page. Sometimes it picks the cookie banner.
Nothing further down this list moves anything while one of those three is wrong.
The five a search engine reads as a business
An address, a phone number, opening hours, photographs and reviews are not decoration, they are the fields that turn a page into a local business as far as a search engine is concerned, and they are what a map result is built out of.
The address is also what puts you on a map on your own page. The hours answer the commonest question anybody has about a business. And four photographs is a floor rather than a target: the room, the thing you sell, the people and the front door.
All five of these are on your Google listing already. That is why Clay reads it first, not to save typing, but because the fields are the same fields.
The four nobody thinks of
Your questions, marked up as questions
The things customers actually ask, answered in text, with FAQ structured data around them. It is the cheapest structured data there is and almost nobody small has it.
A logo, for the tab and the shared link
It is the little picture beside your name in a browser tab, in a bookmark and in every link anybody pastes into a chat. A blank one reads as an unfinished site.
Your Instagram, linked from the site
The people who already follow you are the ones most likely to book, and the two pages should point at each other rather than compete.
One address, not three
A domain of your own, one canonical version of every page, and a sitemap that lists only pages that exist. Three addresses for one site is three sites competing with each other.
What it looks like when it is live
Drawn rather than described, the page, the address, and what it can switch on.
Questions
Do you really run this every week?
Yes, on every Clay site, and the owner gets one email with what it found and how many people came that week. It is one letter, not three, and it stops if nobody has visited the site for six weeks running.
Can I run it on a site you did not build?
The list above is the whole check, nothing is held back, so you can go down it on any site. What we cannot do is run it for you: it reads a site's own record, not a stranger's HTML.
What about keywords and backlinks?
Not on the list, deliberately. For a business that serves people who live nearby, the thing that moves is being complete and correct in the fields a local result is built from. Keyword work is real, and it is the next thing after these twelve, not before them.
How long does the whole list take?
Most of it is minutes. The two that take real time are photographs and reviews, and both are worth the afternoon: they are the two a stranger decides on.
Does Clay do these automatically?
The ones it can. A Clay site is built from your Google listing, so the address, the hours, the phone number, the photographs and the reviews are in place before you have typed anything, and the structured data, the sitemap and the canonical addresses are not optional extras, they ship. What is left for you is the title, the description and the things only you know: how a Clay site gets built.
Real sites, made with Clay
Open one. It is the live site in a frame, not a screenshot, so what you see is what it looks like right now.
Try it with your business
Search your business name and look at what comes back. If any of the twelve are missing, they are missing on the page most of your customers already see.