We audited 227 Whatcom County small-business websites. Here's what Google sees.
We ran an automated technical audit — the same one behind our free website scorecard — across 227 real small-business websites in Bellingham and the surrounding Whatcom & Skagit County area, scoring each out of 100 on the signals that decide whether Google ranks a local business: speed, mobile, security, structured data, and on-page SEO. The results are aggregated and anonymous — no business is named — but the pattern is clear: most local sites are leaving customers on the table.
How the 227 sites scored
The most common problems
Share of the 227 audited sites that fail or only partially pass each check:
The single strongest signal Google uses to rank a local business — and 85% of sites don't give it properly.
Hurts accessibility and image search; a quick, cheap fix most sites skip.
Consistent NAP is foundational to local trust and map-pack ranking.
Every extra second loses mobile visitors — where most local searches happen.
Google can't show your hours in results if it can't read them.
The snippet under your link in Google — half leave it to chance.
Tells Google and readers what the page is about; often missing or duplicated.
Browsers warn visitors away and Google ranks insecure pages lower.
What it means for your business
The headline isn't that these sites look bad — many look fine. It's that they're invisible to Google in ways their owners can't see. When 85% of local sites are missing the structured data Google uses to understand a business, the few that get it right win the map pack and the top of the results by default.
None of this requires a bigger marketing budget — it requires a site built correctly. Structured data, fast mobile performance, HTTPS, and clean on-page SEO are one-time engineering, not an ongoing ad spend. Get them right and you compete with businesses far larger than you.
That's exactly how we build every nsite.tech site: hand-coded, fast, secure, and structured to rank — and you own it outright.
How does your website score?
Get the same audit, free, for your own site — no signup, results in under a minute.