126 of 232 South Coast business websites never tell Google what kind of business they are

A house painter in Fairhaven does not have a marketing problem. He has a scheduling problem, a weather problem, and a lead-time-on-Benjamin-Moore problem. The work sells itself: you drive past a house on Green Street that was grey and peeling in April and is now a clean, tight, properly caulked white, and you write the number down off the lawn sign. That is a referral engine most industries would pay a fortune for, and it was built entirely out of doing good work in public.

This article is about the one line of code that decides whether a machine can read that lawn sign.

What we measured, and what we did not#

We keep a running audit of local business websites across the South Coast. Every site gets the same checks, run the same way, on the same day it appears in the sample. As of this morning that is 232 live websites across 26 category-and-town audits — Fall River, New Bedford, Dartmouth, Swansea, Somerset, Westport, Fairhaven, Tiverton and Providence.

This week's assignment was painters in Fairhaven specifically. We could not run that sample. Google's Places API refused our key with a permission error, so no painter was measured, and we are not going to publish a painter number we did not measure. Everything below comes from the 232 sites we have already checked, including 24 live Fairhaven business websites in two other categories.

An autopsy takes one signal and follows it all the way down, across every business, regardless of trade. This week's signal is LocalBusiness structured data.

What structured data actually is, in one paragraph#

Your website says "Open Mon-Fri 7am to 4pm" in a nice font in the footer. You can read that. A search engine sees a box of pixels and a string of characters and has to guess whether that is your hours, your neighbour's hours, or a line from a customer testimonial. Structured data is a small, invisible block of text in the page's code that says, in a format machines already agree on: this is a business, this is its name, this is its address, this is its phone number, these are its hours. No design change. No new page. Nobody visiting your site ever sees it.

Google's own local business documentation repeats those two sentences word for word. It also lists the required properties, and there are exactly two: name and address. That is the whole bar.

The signal, all the way down#

Every site below is anonymised by category. We never name the businesses we audit — they did not ask to be graded in public, and the point is the pattern, not the punishment.

Two categories came back clean, and both had only four live sites — too small to mean anything. In Fairhaven itself, 16 of the 24 live business websites we have measured have no LocalBusiness schema. Two in three.

The part that surprised us#

You would expect the sites missing this to be the bad sites. Old, slow, abandoned. They are not.

Speed is a coin flip between the two groups. Both are slow — that is a separate article, and Google rates anything over 4.0 seconds as poor. The star ratings are identical to the decimal. These are not worse businesses and they are not worse-looking websites. The customer cannot tell the difference. Neither can the owner. That is exactly why it goes unfixed for years: nothing on your screen ever looks broken.

Where the two groups do separate is in the other things nobody checks:

Be careful with that last row. Adding schema will not get you 86 more reviews. Nobody has shown that, we have not measured it, and any agency that tells you otherwise is selling something. What the row honestly shows is that these things travel together: the shops that had somebody competent look at the whole site got the tappable phone number, the matching NAP, the analytics and the schema in one pass, and they also tend to be the shops that ask for reviews. It is one habit, not four.

The free fix, today, twenty minutes#

Here is the giveaway. This is the whole thing. Schema.org has a business type called HousePainter, which exists specifically for you.

Paste this into your site's home page, just before the closing </head> tag, with your real details swapped in:

<script type="application/ld+json">
{
  "@context": "https://schema.org",
  "@type": "HousePainter",
  "name": "Your Painting Company",
  "telephone": "+1-508-555-0100",
  "url": "https://yourpaintingcompany.com",
  "address": {
    "@type": "PostalAddress",
    "streetAddress": "123 Main Street",
    "addressLocality": "Fairhaven",
    "addressRegion": "MA",
    "postalCode": "02719",
    "addressCountry": "US"
  },
  "openingHoursSpecification": [{
    "@type": "OpeningHoursSpecification",
    "dayOfWeek": ["Monday","Tuesday","Wednesday","Thursday","Friday"],
    "opens": "07:00",
    "closes": "16:00"
  }],
  "areaServed": ["Fairhaven, MA", "New Bedford, MA", "Mattapoisett, MA"]
}
</script>

Then check your work with Google's Rich Results Test at search.google.com/test/rich-results — free, no account needed. Paste your URL in, and it will tell you what it found. For a second opinion, validator.schema.org shows you the whole data graph it extracted.

If you are on Squarespace, Wix, WordPress or GoDaddy, you do not need a developer for this. Every one of them has a "custom code" or "code injection" field in settings that drops content into the page head. Ten minutes of clicking, ten minutes of typing.

What a Fairhaven painter should do Monday, cheapest first#

1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile — free, 30 minutes. Google's own guidance puts this first, before anything on your website. It is the only place you can directly edit your address, hours and business type as they appear in Search and Maps.
2. Add the schema block above — free, 20 minutes. Validate it with the Rich Results Test before you close the laptop.
3. Make your phone number tappable — free, 5 minutes. Change 508-555-0100 to <a href="tel:+15085550100">508-555-0100</a>. Two in five of the no-schema sites we measured fail this, and on a painting job the phone is the entire funnel.
4. Make the number on your site match the number on your Google listing. Free, 2 minutes. More than a quarter of no-schema sites we checked do not.
5. Install analytics. Free. Until then, none of the above can be proven to have worked, which is the reason most shops quietly stop.

That is roughly an hour, it costs nothing, and it is the difference between a search engine knowing you are a house painter in Fairhaven and a search engine guessing.

What we could not measure#

No painters. Google's Places API returned a permission error, so the painter sample does not exist and no number in this article describes one. Structured data was read from the HTML we could fetch — markup injected later by JavaScript would not be counted, so the true figure may be slightly better than 126. Two of the 26 audits had only four live sites, which is too small to conclude anything from. Every number here can be re-run by anyone: paste any local business URL into search.google.com/test/rich-results.

If you would rather not open your site's code at all, send me the URL and I will tell you what is in there. No charge, no pitch attached to the answer.

Joshua Amado, Avalon Partner · 774.559.8992 · Joshua.Amado@AvalonPartner.com