In plain words
The site has good articles and product pages, but the list of pages it hands to search engines is out of date, so most of them are never seen.
From a real audit, names removed · A manufacturer of building products that sells in its own region · audited in Sep 2026
- 65
- Pages crawled
- 11
- Dead URLs in the sitemap
- 35
- Live pages left out of it
- 13.5 MB
- Home page weight
Words this audit uses
- Sitemap:
- The list of pages a site hands to search engines.
- Indexed, noindex:
- Indexed means a search engine has stored a page and can show it. A noindex tag asks it not to.
- H1, main heading:
- The main heading of a page: the line that tells a search engine what the page is about.
- Canonical tag:
- A line in a page’s code that names the one official address of that page.
- Structured data, schema, JSON-LD:
- Labels in a page’s code that tell machines what something is: an article, a product, a business.
- Redirect:
- An instruction that sends visitors and search engines from one address to the right one.
- robots.txt:
- A small file that tells crawlers which parts of a site to stay out of.
- Meta description:
- The short summary shown under a page’s title in search results.
- Alt text:
- A written description of an image, read by search engines and screen readers.
- Search Console:
- Google’s free tool that shows how a site appears in its search results.
The audit’s short version
The website is in better shape than its search results suggest. The content is real and the products are all there. Search engines are simply being shown almost none of it.
How it was measured
A crawl of 65 pages, the sitemap checked entry by entry against the live site, and the home page weighed request by request.
What is already working
- 25 blog articles of 1,600–2,200 words each, written around the terms buyers actually search (“[product] manufacturer in [city]”), plus 14 product pages.
- Titles, canonicals and Open Graph tags are in place, and the page language is set correctly.
- HTTP redirects to HTTPS, and unknown URLs return a real 404 instead of a soft one.
- Clean, readable URLs and a single H1 on nearly every page.
What the audit found
1The sitemap points at dead pages
The sitemap tells search engines about 41 pages. Eleven of them are dead: they return 404, including the page for the flagship product line. At the same time 35 live pages are missing from it altogether: 24 of the 25 blog posts and 11 of the 14 product pages. It was generated once, every entry still carries the same date, and it was never regenerated after the page URLs changed.
Fix: Regenerate the sitemap from the live pages, with real dates, and resubmit it in Search Console. A one-time job, and the single highest-value thing on the list.
2The site exists twice over
The www address returns 200 OK instead of redirecting, and every page on it sets its canonical tag to itself. So does the non-www version. The page search shows today for the brand sits on the www version, while robots.txt and the sitemap both name the other one. Whatever ranking strength the site has is split between two addresses.
Fix: Choose one host, 301-redirect the other to it, and make every canonical tag agree. One rule in the server configuration.
3The home page weighs 13.5 MB
Measured, not estimated: 13.54 MB across 100 requests. None of the 45 images on the home page load lazily, and not one has width and height set. 36 of the images are already WebP, so the tooling exists. The eight heavy PNGs were simply never converted.
Images, including a 2.4 MB PNG, a 2.3 MB PNG and a 576 KB logo
Weight: 11.9 MB
JavaScript, across 22 separate files
Weight: 989 KB
CSS, across 34 separate files
Weight: 860 KB
What Weight Images, including a 2.4 MB PNG, a 2.3 MB PNG and a 576 KB logo 11.9 MB JavaScript, across 22 separate files 989 KB CSS, across 34 separate files 860 KB Fix: Convert the eight PNGs, add lazy-loading below the fold, set width and height on every image, then merge the CSS files.
4There is no structured data anywhere
Not one page carries JSON-LD markup: no LocalBusiness, no Product, no FAQPage, no breadcrumbs. The site already has a genuine FAQ page with 688 words on it, which could be earning an expanded result and currently earns nothing.
5Nothing is being measured
No analytics, no tag manager, no Search Console verification tag. The site has been publishing for months with no record of what any of it achieved.
Fix: Install analytics and verify Search Console first. Every decision after that is guesswork until the data exists.
6On-page details
11 pages have no meta description. 15 titles run past 60 characters and get cut off in results. 24 of the 30 indexable sitemap pages are under 300 words: product pages sit at 270–350, category and gallery pages at 20–40. One blog page carries three H1 headings. Roughly two images per page have no alt text.
7The contact details disagree with each other
Three phone numbers are in circulation, one of them without a country code, and two email domains. The full address appears only on the contact page, not in the footer across the site. Google cross-checks these against the Business Profile and directory listings, and when they disagree every local ranking signal is weakened.
8Who the site competes with
Searches for its terms are dominated by trade-directory listings, not manufacturers’ own websites. That is encouraging: a real manufacturer’s site with proper product pages can outrank a directory listing, but only once search engines can see those pages.
The order of work
- Install analytics and verify Search Console.
- Redirect one host to the other and align every canonical tag.
- Regenerate and resubmit the sitemap.
- Compress the eight oversized images, add lazy-loading and set image dimensions.
- Add LocalBusiness, Product and FAQ structured data.
- Write the 11 missing meta descriptions and trim the 15 over-long titles.
- Make the phone number, email address and postal address identical everywhere.
- Only then: keyword research, content expansion and link building.
What this audit did not check
- Search Console and analytics data: no access, and no analytics installed to have collected any.
- Keyword search volumes: these need a Keyword Planner pull.
- The backlink profile: it needs a paid tool, and nothing is reported before a number is guessed.
- The Business Profile: no link to one was found on the site.
What was removed, and what was not. The business, its website and page addresses, people, competitors, places and the search terms that would name it are removed or replaced with a word in [brackets]. The prices and the proposal that closed the audit are left out. Every figure is the audit’s own.
Your own report. This sample is the audit: what we found. SEO for Manufacturers adds the page work and schema as a record of every change, and its backlinks in a report of live links like our sample backlink report.