Oh hey Reader-
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I’ve had my head down for the last two months, living through the busiest quarter of my business so far.
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The kind of busy I’m grateful for, even if I’m slightly cross-eyed from staring at websites all day.
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And when I look at websites in bulk, patterns start popping out the way they did in those old Magic Eye puzzles.
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Relax your eyes, lean back a little, and boom: there it is.
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This quarter, the same issues kept showing up again and again.
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So after a week of being clobbered with sales emails, I figured a few genuinely useful tips might feel like a palate cleanser.
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👉 These are those things that keep popping up in my audits right now. ​
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I’m sharing them with you today because I really like you and I want your website to actually get found.
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So, here we go:
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1) Use your full name everywhere you show up. ​
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Google builds your online identity from everything it can find about you. Using your full name makes that process a whole lot easier and helps build trust with actual humans.
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People want to know who they’re buying from.
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They want to creep you.
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Can you get found for your business name alone? Sometimes. ​
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Will pairing it with your full name help? Almost always.
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And please pick one version of your name and stick to it across your platforms so Google doesn’t have to puzzle-piece your identity together.
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2) If you want to show up in local search, your website has to say where you are.
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Your Google Business Profile is only one piece of the puzzle.
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Your SEO titles, headlines, About page, and body copy should also naturally include your location.
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And for the love, please don’t put "[service] near me" on your actual website.
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That’s a search operator people type into Google, not a phrase to stick in your copy.
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3) Use Google Search Console to its fullest.
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It’s more valuable than most people realize, and it’s where I keep seeing the same problems pop up over and over again.
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Start with the basics:
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• Submit your sitemap.
• Watch the Pages report for anything stuck or falling out of the index.
• Paste new URLs into the Inspection tool so Google actually notices them.
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  ​Low-traffic sites, in-particular, need that nudge. Publishing doesn’t guarantee Google has seen the page.

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These are specific issues that I'm seeing over and over:
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• Unindexed blog posts because they were never submitted to the crawl queue and Google isn’t crawling the site often.
• Thin content that Google flags as low-value, so it skips indexing.
• Orphaned pages with no internal links pointing to them, leaving Google no pathway to discover them and the impression that they aren't high-value pages.
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Once you know which pages aren’t indexed, you can fix them:
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• Submit them to the crawl queue.
• Flesh out the content.
• Add internal links.

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Google can’t rank what it doesn’t know exists.
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4) If you have an SEO plugin, actually use it.
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Installing Yoast or RankMath doesn’t improve anything by default. ​
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Most of the help they could give you only kicks in once the fields are filled out and accurate.
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And wrt Yoast, their red-yellow-green scoring system is based on older keyword rules. It’s fine to use, but know it’s not the gold standard measure of whether a page is actually optimized.
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Reader, if you're up for it, I'd love to know which of these hit home for you (--> hit the ol reply).
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And a heads-up: this month I’m part of three collaborations (two bundles and a summit). Over the next three days, I’ll share the details so you can see if there’s anything that’ll make your 2026 feel a little lighter.
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Have a great weekend!

Laura