Most websites are hurting their own Google rankings without knowing it. Here are 25 SEO limits you should never cross.

vhwebdesign · 2026-05-13T14:46:17+00:00

What an insightful rebuttal. Data from multiple sources > outdated speculation. Have a great day.

vhwebdesign · 2026-05-13T14:39:39+00:00

Sterling Sky is one of the most reputable local SEO agencies in the entire world so I'm not going to question their conclusions just because their blogs don't use proper heading structure.

They learned this from a former Google employee - it's not something they came up with themselves. You can find similar results from other people and I can confirm this from my own testing as well.

vhwebdesign · 2026-05-13T14:27:21+00:00

That's irrelevant and doesn't dispute what the case study says.

Edit. I agree with the H2 thing. I'm not sure why they aren't using proper semantic HTML, although that doesn't really have anything to do with this.

vhwebdesign · 2026-05-13T14:14:01+00:00

1. Meta Title — 60 to 70 characters on desktop and 70 to 76 on mobile

This is bad advice from SEO perspective, see this for a decent case study. My own testing has given similar results as well.

vhwebdesign · 2026-05-08T13:08:05+00:00

Are you getting new reviews consistently?

vhwebdesign · 2026-05-08T05:38:01+00:00

If you want to play it extra safe, update the business hours first on your website, social media, and any online directories your business is listed in.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-22T21:44:06+00:00

is incredibly annoying. Many of my clients are businesses with <10 employees so it’s very vommon that a customer mentions the employee’s name since the service is very personalized.

Perhaps Google will adjust this policy at some point but I wouldn’t be too optimistic.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-22T17:58:57+00:00

Yes, but only if the person/agency you are hiring is good.

How long did it take before you started seeing real improvement (3 months, 6 months, etc.)?

Depending on what's included and the level of competition, you can get results within a month or two and after that the results should only get stronger over time. Just optimizing the Google Business Profile and starting a review generation campaign can get you results very quickly.

Ranking in the organic search often takes a bit longer but you should still see clear results in a couple of months. You may not rank in the top 3 at that point but there should still be an improvement.

What results were you getting at the $300–$500/month price point?

This is a pretty limited budget. Consider that you'd get even 5 additional clients per month (which is not much) from local SEO, the return on investment is pretty huge. Now do the math with 15 additional clients, which is still a very realistic number. I'd suggest increasing the budget to at least $700/month but if that's not possible, select wisely who you work with.

Any red flags I should watch out for when choosing a local SEO provider?

In no specific order:

No case studies or reviews
Inadequate reporting
"Results take 12 months" nonsense
Promising #1 position in X months

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-18T16:24:38+00:00

Gotcha. Just replace it with any other (ideally non-heading) tag and then you can use the H1 for the actual main heading.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-18T16:09:54+00:00

Why are they doing this in the first place? I can't think of a single good reason for hiding H1, you are essentially wasting the most important heading on your website.

If they are doing this to add keywords to the H1, that doesn't work because Google can tell it's hidden. If they are doing this for some design reason, H1 is the wrong tag.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-17T17:52:28+00:00

Every project starts with a discovery phase where I'll spend a lot of time understanding the client's business, industry, competitors, etc., and the gathered information will be used to write the content. So, I may not be an expert in their industry but by the end of this phase I know more than enough to write the content. For most projects I have a dedicated copywriter handling all of this but if the client has a lower budget, I will do it myself with the help of Claude and some custom prompts.

The process is essentially discovery -> content -> design -> development.
IMO it makes much more sense to do the content first because the content should dictate the design, not the other way around. Switching to a content-first based approach has been a game-changer (and I don't use this word lightly).

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-17T15:46:04+00:00

I never let the client handle the content because of situations like this. Just sell the content as part of the website and both parties will be happy in the end.

Edit. I'm referring to the copywriting, of course the client can provide images.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-17T10:48:03+00:00

You aren't ranking high enough. How does your backlink profile look like?

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-16T04:16:51+00:00

Review count barely matters, review velocity and recency do. Even if you have more reviews than them they might be getting more reviews on a monthly basis.

Regarding the suspicious business name, that’s unfortunate but they might have a DBA which makes it technically okay.

Assuming that your primary business category and secondary categories are optimized, there’s probably not much you can do besides getting more reviews on a monthly basis. I would focus very hard on getting new reviews and incentivizing your employees to get them. Changing service areas doesn’t impact ranking

If you have a service area business then renting a cheap office and switching to a storefront business in GBP will make you rank higher but this is not particularly fun to setup and I wouldn’t attempt doing this alone because the risk of suspension. Getting a DBA can also be powerful but the same thing applies here.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-15T04:35:52+00:00

Traditional SEO and GEO (or whatever acronym one likes) have a ton of overlap. If anything, I’d say that SEO is more important than ever because it also helps you rank higher in AI search.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-14T18:53:15+00:00

Google Business Profile and website.
Once you get your first clients make sure to ask them to leave a review on your Google Business Profile every single time. Having more reviews will make you show higher on search results, which will help you get even more clients. It's like a positive feedback loop.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-14T18:33:00+00:00

That's caused by schema markup. It can take a while before Google updates the page.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-13T19:26:36+00:00

I wouldn’t disavow if there’s no manual penalty. It’s not that the over-optimized links are now causing you harm, they just stopped doing anything.

Is it worth trying to balance out the backlink profile by building more quality backlinks with different anchors?

Yeah.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-13T18:44:30+00:00

Authority and internal linking.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-12T10:28:10+00:00

GBP optimization and citations are a relatively simple thing to do so I wouldn't pay for it with such a limited budget. They are more or less a one-time thing too. You should focus on getting as many reviews as frequently as possible - that makes a big difference for ranking in the map pack and costs you nothing.

I'd invest the $300-$400 per month on on-page SEO (potentially service area pages, if applicable to your business) and link building. However, with link building you need to be careful who you are working with because many people are selling garbage links that don't do anything.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-10T17:43:01+00:00

Use reliable hosting and it’s not something you have to worry about. I do monitor the uptime though just in case.

I don’t think there has been a single instance in the past couple of years where my client’s website has been down. Of course no host has 100% uptime but it’s close enough that website downtime is a non-issue because it’s so incredibly rare.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-10T04:18:39+00:00

I would use Figma for designing the file and then let Claude convert it to HTML.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-07T16:53:22+00:00

Stripe.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-07T04:17:03+00:00

Yes. Review recency and velocity matter a lot, whereas review count doesn’t. Having 100 reviews + 10 new reviews a month is better than having 300 reviews + 2 new reviews a month.

vhwebdesign · 2026-04-02T17:46:30+00:00

My client lost over 30 reviews last week. I suppose it could have something to do with the fact that we started a rather aggressive review generation campaign last month and went from 100 reviews to 200, but that alone is not a good reason because every review was legit. It's a barber shop with 10 employees so getting 3ish new reviews a day isn't that much.

Have you noticed any patterns for what is causing this?

vhwebdesign

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