Key takeaways
- Start with a phone test at night: search a water damage term from a town you serve, then call your own listing and see who answers.
- Search Console shows whether your water, fire and mold pages are indexed and which searches they appear for. It is free, and it should be in your name.
- The most common restoration problems are one page covering every loss type, a buried emergency number and town pages with the name swapped.
- End the audit with a dated fix list, starting with anything that loses a call tonight.
An SEO audit for a restoration company website answers one question: when a homeowner nearby searches for help with water, fire or mold, does your site show up, load fast on a phone and get them talking to you? You can check most of it yourself in an hour, with free tools, before you pay anyone to tell you.
What an audit checks
A useful audit checks five things, and each one either costs you calls or it does not.
Indexing : Whether Google has your pages in its index at all. A page that is not indexed cannot rank, however good it is.
Speed and phone layout : Whether the page loads quickly on a phone with weak signal, in a wet basement, and whether the number is tappable without zooming.
Pages and content : Whether each loss type has its own page that answers the caller's first questions: how fast you come, what happens first, and how the insurance claim works.
Local signals : Whether your Google profile, categories, service area and listings agree with each other and with the site.
Tracking : Whether you can tell how many booked jobs came from search last month. If nobody can answer that, the other four checks are guesswork.
What an audit checks
Google profile
- Categories and services
- Service area and hidden address
- Photos and review replies
Website
- Speed on a phone
- A page for each service
- Titles and descriptions
Reviews
- How recent they are
- Whether each one is answered
Listings
- Name and phone consistent
- Duplicate listings
Tracking
- Calls tracked by source
- Forms tracked to bookings
Run a quick self-audit
- Minutes 0–10: the phone test. On your phone, away from the office, search "water damage restoration" and "burst pipe cleanup" with the name of a town you serve. Note who appears in the map and below it. Tap your own listing, tap Call and see what happens. Repeat it one night this week, because that is when your emergency calls arrive.
- Minutes 10–25: Search Console. Open the pages report and check that your water, sewage, fire, mold and storm pages are indexed. Then open the performance report and filter queries for "water", "mold" and "fire" to see which searches find you (Search Console). If you cannot log in, write that down. It is your most important finding.
- Minutes 25–35: PageSpeed Insights. Test the home page and the water damage page on mobile (PageSpeed Insights). Note the Core Web Vitals result for each, and any warning about a large image or video at the top of the page (Core Web Vitals).
- Minutes 35–45: the page check. Open each service page on your phone. Is the emergency number at the top? Does the page say how fast a crew arrives? Is each page title different, and does it name the loss?
- Minutes 45–55: the profile check. Confirm the primary category, the services list, the hours, the hidden warehouse address and which page the profile's website link opens.
- Minutes 55–60: the tracking check. Look in your job management software and count last month's jobs whose source was Maps or organic search. If the field is blank or missing, that is the finding.
Most common problems for restoration companies
Most restoration sites fail on the same handful of problems, and nearly all of them are fixable within weeks.
| Problem | How it shows up | The fix |
|---|---|---|
| One "Services" page for water, fire, mold and storm | You rank for none of them outside your company name | A page per loss type, each written for its own caller |
| Franchise or template copy | Search Console shows few non-brand searches | Rewrite with your own crews, equipment, arrival times and jobs |
| The emergency number only in the footer, or inside an image | Visits but few calls from phones | A tappable number at the top of every page |
| A redesign left pages blocked from search | Search traffic dropped sharply the month the new site launched | Remove the block and resubmit the pages |
| Town pages with the name swapped | Dozens of pages, almost none indexed or clicked | Merge them into fewer pages with real local jobs |
| The profile links to the home page | Emergency callers land on a slideshow, not an answer | Point it at the water damage page |
| Search Console or the domain is owned by a former vendor | You cannot check any of the above | Get both moved into your name first |
The last row is the one owners most often find. If a past agency set up your tools under its own login, you have been relying on their reports with no way to check them.
What to do after the audit
Turn the findings into a short list with a date and an owner on every line, ordered by how soon each problem costs you a call.
- This week: anything that stops a call tonight. That means the phone path at night, a number that cannot be tapped, pages blocked from search and missing access to your own accounts.
- This month: the profile link and category, and the most important missing service page, usually water.
- This quarter: the rest of the service pages, merging thin town pages, and a lead source on every job.
Then run the same phone test again in thirty days. If you want a checklist to work from, use the local SEO checklist for restoration companies. For the page layout that turns visits into calls, see what a restoration company website needs to convert.
How VETS Growth Marketing helps
We run this audit live with you, on your phone and in your own accounts, so you see every finding yourself instead of reading it in a report. Then we turn the findings into dated fixes, starting with whatever is losing calls tonight. Every account stays in your name, there is no long-term contract, and we measure the fixes in booked jobs. Book a growth consultation and leave with the five fixes that matter most for your site.
Sources
- Google Search Console, Google
- PageSpeed Insights, Google
- Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results, Google Search Central
- SEO Starter Guide, Google Search Central