Before SEO or Ads: 12 Checks Your Website Must Pass

What an ad click actually buys

A Google Ads click costs the same whether your page loads in two seconds or eight, and whether the phone number on it can be tapped or is baked into an image. The auction bills for the click. Everything after the click belongs to the website.

Google’s own systems point the same way. Landing page experience is one of the three components of Quality Score, next to expected click-through rate and ad relevance. Ads policy disapproves destinations that do not work or that return an HTTP error to Google’s crawler. And conversion tracking is what allows Smart Bidding to optimise toward calls and sign-ups rather than clicks.

SEO runs on a different clock. Google’s SEO Starter Guide says some changes take effect in a few hours and others can take several months, and that you usually need to do nothing except publish for Google to find a site. So what SEO spend buys is a higher position, and a higher position only matters if the page converts when people arrive.

Then the visitor. Statcounter’s September 2026 figures put mobile at 77.3% of the page views it records in India. That is page views on Statcounter’s network, not people, but the person you pay to attract is more likely holding a phone than sitting at a desk. Run every test below on a phone, on mobile data.

The page: who you are, proof, and ways to reach you

Start with identity. Your name, address, phone, hours, what you do and where you serve belong at the top of the home page and in the footer. They must match your signboard and your Google profile. Google’s Business Profile guidelines say the name should reflect your real-world name as used on your storefront, website and stationery, and that adding unnecessary information to it can get the profile suspended. If you are GST-registered, put the GSTIN in the footer: anyone can look it up on the GST portal’s Search Taxpayer page.

Proof comes next. It is whatever a stranger can check: real photographs of your premises and work, named services with what each includes, registration or licence numbers, and reviews from real customers shown with their permission. If you have no testimonials yet, do not write any. Google’s people-first content guidance asks whether a page shows first-hand expertise, which is a good test for a service page: is it written by the person who does the work? Its structured data rules also forbid marking up fake reviews.

Contact paths are the third check. Three links do most of the work on an Indian small-business page: call, WhatsApp and map. A call link is a tel: link, and MDN notes that cellular devices dial it straight away. A WhatsApp link is wa.me/91 followed by your ten-digit number, with https:// in front: WhatsApp’s help page says to use the full number in international format, leave out zeroes, brackets and dashes, and add ?text= followed by a URL-encoded message to pre-fill the chat. Put the service name in that pre-filled message and every chat arrives labelled.

If a form emails you, send a test from a Gmail address and look in spam. Google’s sender rules, in force since 1 February 2024, require every sender to Gmail accounts to authenticate with SPF or DKIM, and unauthenticated mail may be marked as spam or rejected.

Speed on a real phone is the fourth. web.dev’s thresholds: LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP at 200 milliseconds or less, CLS at 0.1 or less, at the 75th percentile of page loads. PageSpeed Insights shows real-user data when enough visits exist, alongside a simulated lab run that is always available. A new site often has no real-user data, so the lab score is a smoke test and your own phone is the real one. Google says good scores do not guarantee rankings. The reason to be fast is the visitor, not the algorithm.

Findable: indexing, Search Console, Business Profile, markup

Indexing is the first thing to rule out, because a page can tell Google to stay away. WordPress has a Discourage search engines setting that adds a noindex tag, and it is easy to leave ticked after launch. Also check that http redirects to https, that only one of the www and non-www versions answers, that there is a sitemap, and that every page has its own clear title: Google’s guide says a good title is unique to the page, clear and concise. Google uses the mobile version of a page for indexing and ranking, so content that exists only on the desktop version is not what it reads.

Search Console is next. It is free and tells you whether Google can find and crawl the site, with alerts for indexing, spam or other issues. Verify a Domain property by adding a DNS record, which covers every protocol and subdomain, and do it from the business’s own Google account, not a freelancer’s.

Then the Business Profile. Verification can be by phone or SMS, email, live video or postcard, with the postcard taking up to 14 days and Google deciding which methods you are offered. Without it you cannot manage the profile. Local ranking rests on relevance, distance and prominence, complete information helps, and Google says there is no way to pay for a better local rank. Add UTM parameters to the profile’s website link, for example ?utm_source=google&utm_medium=organic&utm_campaign=business-profile, so GA4 can separate profile visits. Analytics is case-sensitive about these values, so pick a spelling and keep it.

Structured data comes after that. For a local business, LocalBusiness markup in JSON-LD needs a name and an address. Telephone, opening hours, geo coordinates and URL are recommended. It must describe what is visible on the page, and it makes a page eligible for enhanced results without promising them.

Last in this group is content that answers the search. One page for each service you really provide, written from experience, beats fifty pages that swap a city name. Google specifically warns against producing lots of content on many topics in the hope that some of it performs.

Measured: knowing which spend produced an enquiry

GA4 records visits by default but not enquiries. You mark the events that matter as key events: a tap on the call link, a tap on the WhatsApp link, a form submission. If an old site still carries a Universal Analytics tag, it has collected nothing since 1 July 2023.

For ads, Google Ads conversion tracking can count website actions and calls from ads or to the number on your site. Without it the account reports clicks and spend but not what the clicks led to. With it, you can see which keywords produced actions, and bidding can be pointed at them.

Tracking has a limit. A tap on a WhatsApp button is not a customer, so keep a plain enquiry log beside the analytics. Note the date, how they found you, what they wanted, whether it became work, and its value. Reconcile the log against the taps once a month.

The printable checklist

Print this page, take a phone on mobile data, and tick each row only when it passes.

What wasted ad spend looks like

Hypothetical. A dental clinic in Jodhpur that does not exist, with numbers invented only to show the arithmetic. The rates are assumptions, not benchmarks.

The clinic spends ₹30,000 a month on Google Ads at an assumed ₹30 per click, which buys about 1,000 clicks. The page has three faults: the phone number is an image, the WhatsApp link points to a number with a stray zero, and the ad for teeth whitening lands on a general home page. Cost per enquiry is the cost per click divided by the share of clicks that become enquiries.

The same ₹90,000 over three months buys 30 enquiries on the first version and 150 on the third. There is a second loss. With no conversion tracking, the account shows 1,000 clicks and no known results, so neither the owner nor Google’s bidding can tell which keywords produced the ten enquiries. The owner concludes that ads do not work. The truer reading is that the page was not ready, and the account was never set up to say so.

Order of work, and where Dwize fits

Do the page first, then findability, then measurement, then spend. Name one person who can change a phone number, hours or price on the site, and write down how fast they must do it. Most of the checks cost nothing beyond time. Dwize sells a Search Year and an Ads Year, and our advice is not to buy either, from us or anyone else, until this table is ticked.

When you do hire someone for SEO or ads, put these questions to them first:

1. Will Search Console, GA4 and the Google Ads account be created under the business’s own Google account, with them added as users?
2. Which three numbers will the monthly report lead with? Calls, WhatsApp chats and form enquiries are good answers. Impressions alone is not.
3. Which page will each ad group point to, and why?
4. What do you need from me, such as photographs, service details or a verified profile, and by when?
5. What happens to the accounts, tags and reports if we stop working together?

For reference: Dwize Site at ₹49,900 a year, GST inclusive, includes analytics, Search Console and Business Profile foundations, a sitemap, structured data and meta defaults, with updates inside the Care Year. If you are not ready for a full site, Dwize Go at ₹2,499 a year covers the identity, proof and contact basics on one page. The optional Search Year (₹1,49,000 a year) and Ads Year (₹1,99,000 a year) are listed with the rest on the pricing page. Media spend on Google or Meta stays yours.