An Events Calendar Search Cannot See

There is a shop on the South Coast that runs several recurring events in its back room almost every week of the year, including a regular evening group that has been going for a long time. I typed the name of one of those evenings, plus the name of the place, into a search box. Ten results came back, none of them this shop, and most of them were for similarly named places nowhere near Massachusetts.

The events are real. They simply do not exist anywhere a search engine can read them.

This was one of the free audits I run for an independently owned South Coast business every weekday. What follows is the anonymised version.

What an audit actually examines#

A social media audit is not somebody looking at your feed and telling you to post more. It is a structured pass over everything a stranger can find about you, scored the same way every time, so the result is comparable and so you can check my work yourself.

Twenty two components, in five groups.

Presence and coverage. Which platforms you are on, whether each account is a real business account, whether it is complete, and whether the ones you are absent from actually matter for your category.

Consistency and cadence. How often you publish, and whether your name, address, phone number and opening hours say the same thing everywhere they appear. This group catches more problems than any other.

Content quality. What you actually post. The mix of promotion against teaching against showing people the place. Whether the photography is yours or bought. Whether video exists at all.

Engagement and community. Reviews, ratings, whether the recent ones are recent, whether anybody from the business ever replies, and whether local pages and press mention you.

Discoverability and conversion. The part most owners never look at. Whether your website links your profiles and your profiles link back. Whether your listings are claimed. Whether anything in your code tells a search engine what you sell. Whether a person who wants to buy, book or ring you can do it in one tap. And, most useful of all, a set of searches run word for word the way a customer would type them, to see who shows up where you do not.

Three findings sit outside the score because they are hygiene rather than strategy: accessibility, abandoned profiles still ranking, and unclaimed or duplicate listings. Those three are usually free to fix and usually the most expensive to ignore.

What the audit found#

Start with what was working, because it was more than the score suggests.

Every social link on every page of the shop's website pointed at its own accounts. That sounds like the lowest possible bar until you have audited enough small business websites. The strangest thing this series has produced was a shop whose social icon, on every page, pointed at the website builder's own corporate account, because the template shipped that way and nobody ever clicked it. This shop's handle and display name matched across both platforms it runs. Every photograph on the site was its own, camera originals of the real room, with no stock imagery anywhere. Ratings were strong on every review surface that could be read.

Then the other side.

Twelve category searches, zero appearances for the shop's own website#

I ran twelve searches word for word the way a customer would type them. The shop's own website ranked in none of them. It appeared at all in four, and every time through a directory, a map listing or an encyclopedia entry rather than through anything it owns. On one of those searches a competitor's own website took two of the visible slots and this shop took none.

Underneath that sat three mechanical causes. Not one of them is a creative failure.

The events had no dates anywhere a machine could read#

The homepage told visitors to check the social feed for the calendar. Social feeds are not readable by search engines. The entire programme was invisible by construction, not by accident.

The website carried no structured data at all#

Nothing in the code told a search engine what the business sold, where it was, or that it had an events calendar in the first place. Structured data is the small block of machine readable text that turns a page into a listing a search engine can understand. Without it, a search engine is guessing from your prose.

The listings were untended#

One unclaimed directory published the shop as open on a day it is closed. Two phone numbers that appear nowhere in the business's own material were circulating on two separate directories, one of them attached to a record that still named a previous owner.

The numbers#

It scored in the low forties out of a hundred, which is a fail on this scale. It was also the joint highest score the campaign had produced across sixteen audits at that point. Both of those are true at once, and the gap between them is the whole story. The score measures the business against what good looks like. The rank measures it against what its actual competitors do.

Five things you can check on your own business today#

Search for what you sell, not for your own name. Everyone searches their own name, sees themselves at the top, and concludes they are findable. Search the thing instead. Your trade plus your area, your category plus your area. If your own website is not on the first page for any of them, your name ranking is telling you nothing at all.

Put your events on a page you own. If your calendar lives only in a social feed, it is invisible to search. Give each recurring event a day, a time and a line of text on your own site, on a page with a real address. It costs an afternoon, once, and it keeps paying for years.

Follow every link on your site rather than counting them. Click each social icon on each page and see where it lands. Automated checks only ask whether a link exists. They never ask where it goes, and neither do most owners, because the owner already knows where their own account is.

Look yourself up the way a stranger would. Open the directories you never think about. Check the opening days, the phone number and the address on each one. A wrong opening day on an unclaimed listing will quietly turn people away for years, and you will never see it happen.

Make your phone number and email tappable. Plain text is not a link. On a phone, plain text means copying ten digits and switching apps, and a fair share of people simply will not bother.

Nothing on that list costs money. Not one item is about being better at content.

The full audit#

The complete anonymised report is here: Download the full audit (PDF)

If you want the same thing done for your business, it is free and there is no obligation. Reply to this article's author at joshua.amado@avalonpartner.com and say which business is yours.

Joshua Amado Founder, Avalon Partner AvalonPartner.com