A small business homepage can stay online while quietly becoming inaccurate. Hours change, services shift, staff leave, forms stop delivering, and search results keep showing an old description. An annual review should test the page as a customer sees it and leave evidence for the next owner or reviewer.

1. Verify the business facts

Read every visible claim as if you were a new visitor. Confirm the business name, service area, hours, appointment rules, phone number, public email address, and primary services against the current owner-approved record. Remove neither a service nor a contact route on inference alone. List conflicts for an owner decision and capture the source used for each correction.

2. Test the main customer path

Open the homepage in a private browser window on a phone and a desktop. Follow the primary call to action from the first screen through its safe stopping point. Confirm that links, forms, maps, and appointment buttons lead to the intended destination. Do not submit a real inquiry or purchase merely to test navigation; use an approved test path if one exists.

3. Check accessibility basics

Review headings, keyboard navigation, visible focus, image alternatives, text contrast, and form labels. W3C's accessibility resources recommend using labels for form controls and structuring content so people using assistive technology can understand it. Automated scans are useful leads, but manual keyboard and form checks catch problems a score can miss. Record the tested browser, viewport, and date.

4. Review search presentation

Compare the visible business identity with the page title, meta description, canonical URL, social preview, and structured data. Google says site-name signals include homepage content, the title, headings, and WebSite structured data, and recommends consistency among those signals. It also notes that search appearance is automated, so a markup change is a preference signal rather than a guaranteed display change.

Check that the homepage is crawlable if it is meant to appear in search. Google's developer guidance recommends using URL Inspection or related tests to see how Google views a page and warns that robots.txt is not a mechanism for keeping a page out of the index. Record observed status instead of guessing from configuration alone.

5. Look for stale proof and unsupported promises

Review testimonials, awards, customer counts, response-time promises, and badges. Keep only claims with current evidence and appropriate permission. Date-sensitive claims need an owner, a source, and a next-review date. Avoid inventing freshness by changing a page date without a substantive update; Google's people-first guidance specifically cautions against changing dates merely to appear fresh.

6. Confirm operational ownership

Document who controls the domain, hosting, analytics, form destination, business profile, and source repository. Do not place passwords or recovery codes in the review. Record the approved recovery process and the responsible role. Confirm that form replies reach a monitored mailbox without changing routing during the review.

7. Leave a bounded change list

Separate findings into verified defects, owner decisions, and optional improvements. For each proposed change, record the page element, current text or behavior, evidence, risk, and verifier. Re-test the public page after approved updates. The annual review is complete only when the live homepage has been read back, not when an unpublished draft looks correct.

Sources

  1. Provide a site name to Google Search — Google Search Central
  2. Get started with Search: a developer's guide — Google Search Central
  3. Design and Develop Overview — W3C Web Accessibility Initiative
  4. Creating Helpful, Reliable, People-First Content — Google Search Central

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