How to Check Your Website in Google in 15 Minutes

Most people first see your business in Google, before they visit your website. They see a title, a web address and a short description. Those few lines help them decide whether to click.

Business owners rarely look at those lines. They open their site from a bookmark or search for it by name. Mistakes in the results can sit there for years without anyone noticing.

Articles about checking a website in Google usually cover indexing, robots.txt and Search Console. Those are useful topics, but this check is simpler: read your search results as a customer would. You need a browser and 15 minutes.

Step 1. Search site:yourdomain

Open Google in an incognito window and type this, with no space after the colon:

site:yourdomain.com

Google will show pages from your website that appear in search. It is not a complete list or a ranking, as Google explains in its documentation. That is fine for this check. You are looking at what the results say.

Go through 2-3 pages of results. Keep a note open and write down anything below that looks wrong.

Step 2. Read the descriptions under the titles

Google takes the description under a title from the page text or from a meta description set for that page. A customer may read it as a promise from your business.

Look for:

• Wrong opening hours. I checked a dental clinic’s site that said “24/7 support” in its description. The clinic closed at 6:30 p.m. and was shut on Sundays. Someone with a toothache on Sunday might click that result expecting help.
• Old prices, addresses or phone numbers. The business has moved, but the description still gives the old street address.
• A random piece of text. If there is no meta description, Google may pull text from the page. Sometimes that means menu buttons or “All rights reserved.”
• Text in the wrong language or left over from a template. For example, “Just another WordPress site” or untranslated text from a theme.

Step 3. Look for identical titles

Scroll through the results and compare the titles. If two or three results sound the same, you may have duplicate pages: one service appearing at several addresses.

On that dental clinic’s site, the “Children’s Dentistry” page existed three times, each with the same title and description. Two other services had two copies each, and the blog had three articles about myths surrounding tooth decay. The pages had been redone, but the old addresses had stayed online.

Google then chooses which version to show, and it may choose an old one instead of the page you updated. A customer could land on outdated prices. The fix is to redirect the old address to the new one with a 301 redirect. Over time, Google should show one version.

Step 4. Find outdated dates

Search site:yourdomain.com 2024, then repeat with 2025. This can reveal pages where those years appear in the title or text.

The dental clinic had an article titled “Braces or aligners: which should you choose in 2025?” In 2026, that title can make the site look neglected. Offers “until 1 September,” New Year discounts and “enrolment for 2024” have the same effect.

The fix may take a minute: remove the year from the title or update the article.

Step 5. Open the results on your phone

Open 5-6 results on your phone. Check three things:

• A “page not found” error. The page was deleted, but Google still shows it. On the dental clinic’s site, an internal link also led to one of these missing pages.
• A button that leads nowhere useful. “Book an appointment” takes people to a contact page where they have to find the phone number themselves.
• Social media links. Tap the icons at the bottom of the site. That clinic had two different TikTok links, and one probably did not lead to its account.

Step 6. Compare a competitor

Search for your service and city, such as “dentist [your city],” and look at the first 3-4 results. Focus on the lines in Google for now. Do not open the sites yet.

Ask yourself: if you were the customer, which would you click first, and why? Often, the clearer result names the service and city in the title, then gives a starting price or a specific benefit in the description. If your result is less helpful, you can rewrite its text in an evening.

What this check found in practice

On the dental clinic’s site, this check found six things any visitor could see:

What I found	Why it hurts	Difficulty
“24/7 support” in the description	People arrive with the wrong expectation	Easy
One service at 2-3 addresses	Google may show an old version	Easy, with redirects
Three articles on one topic	The articles compete with each other in search	Easy, combine them
“…in 2025?” in a title	The site looks neglected	Easy
A link to a missing page	People see an error instead of the service	Easy
Two different TikTok links	Some people end up in the wrong place	Easy

None of these mistakes calls for a new website. They are a few hours of fixes. The site had technical issues customers could not see, including heavy pages and images without descriptions. Still, the search results were a sensible place to start.

A message you can send your developer

If you found any of these issues, copy this message and send it to whoever looks after your website:

Hello! I checked how our website appears in Google using site:ourdomain.com and found the following:

1. [page]: the Google description says [what it says], but the correct information is [what is true].
2. [URL 1] and [URL 2] are the same page. Can we keep one and redirect the old address?
3. The title of [page] still includes [year].
4. [link] opens a “page not found” error. How long will these fixes take, and what will they cost? Please give me a price before starting.

That last sentence matters. Small fixes can turn into “one more hour” if you have not agreed on the price first.

If you do not have a developer

Sometimes a friend made the site and is no longer available. You have two options.

First, make the fixes yourself. In WordPress, you can change page titles and descriptions through an SEO plugin such as Yoast or Rank Math. In builders such as Tilda or Wix, look in each page’s settings. The Redirection plugin can handle redirects in WordPress.

Second, ask me to do it. I charge a fixed price for these fixes: $100-160 for a package or $20 per hour. I give you the price before starting, after I have looked at the site. If there are many issues and the site needs more thorough work, see what is included in website SEO optimisation. If you eventually need a new site, you can estimate the cost with the calculator. If you are unsure where to start, send me your address for a free website review. I will record a short video showing what I see in Google and on the site itself.

For a few more checks on the website itself, use the 15-point checklist. If it is time to rebuild, you can look at my website portfolio and read how to check a web developer before paying.

Sources

• Google’s guide to the site: operator: what the search shows and why the list is incomplete.
• How Google creates search result descriptions: where the text under a title comes from.
• Duplicate pages and canonical URLs: why a redirect is a strong way to keep one page.
• URL Inspection tool in Search Console: a next step if you want to investigate further.