I've audited dozens of websites for businesses in Redding and Shasta County. Every single audit turns up the same five problems. They're not rare or complicated — they're embarrassingly common. And every one of them is costing the business calls, bookings, and revenue.
Here's what I find, and what to do about it.
Mistake #1: Not Mobile-Optimized
Most Google searches now happen on a phone. In Redding, where a significant portion of your customer base is tradespeople, contractors, and working-class customers searching from their phones on a jobsite, that share is likely higher.
A site that isn't mobile-optimized fails in multiple ways:
- Text is too small to read without zooming
- Buttons are too small to tap accurately
- Forms are impossible to fill out on a phone screen
- Images overflow the screen or take forever to load on mobile data
Google penalizes poor mobile experiences directly in rankings. A site that looks okay on a desktop but breaks on a phone will rank lower than a mobile-first site, full stop.
Mistake #2: Slow Load Time
Google's own research found that most mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load. Every extra second costs you people who were ready to call.
The most common culprits I find in Redding business websites: uncompressed images (a 4MB hero photo that should be 200KB), bloated WordPress themes with dozens of plugins, and cheap shared hosting that can't handle even moderate traffic. The fix is almost always switching to a faster build approach — modern frameworks like Next.js load in under a second — and addressing images and hosting.
Mistake #3: No Local SEO Signals
This is the one that kills the most businesses. A site can be beautiful, fast, and mobile-friendly — and still be completely invisible on Google locally because it never tells Google where it operates.
Local SEO signals include:
- Your city and state in the page title (e.g., "Plumbing Services — Redding, CA")
- Your city mentioned in the H1 headline
- Your city and service mentioned in the first paragraph of your homepage
- LocalBusiness schema markup in the page code
- Consistent NAP (name, address, phone) in the footer of every page
I've seen businesses ranking #1 for national keywords but not showing up when someone in Redding searches for them specifically — because they never built in local signals. Don't be that business.
Mistake #4: Generic Copy That Doesn't Speak to the Customer
"We are a family-owned business dedicated to providing quality service to our valued customers." This sentence is on probably a thousand websites within 100 miles of Redding. It says nothing. It differentiates nothing. It converts no one.
Your customers come to your website with a specific problem: the pipe is leaking, the car won't start, they need their taxes done by Friday. Good copy speaks directly to that problem, names the specific service, and tells them clearly what to do next.
Compare: "Quality HVAC services for Northern California families" versus "Your AC went out in Redding in July. We fix it today. Call now." One of these converts. One of these is forgettable.
Mistake #5: No Clear Call to Action
Your website visitor has a few seconds to decide if they're going to contact you. If your homepage doesn't tell them clearly and immediately what to do, most of them will leave.
- Phone number should be in the top right of every page, clickable on mobile
- Primary CTA button above the fold (before scrolling) — "Call Now," "Book Online," "Get a Free Quote"
- One action per page — don't give people five things to do. Pick the most important one and make it obvious.
What to Do Next
Run your site through Google's PageSpeed Insights tool right now. If you score below 80 on mobile, you have a problem worth fixing.
If you want a full audit — speed, SEO, mobile, copy, and conversion — I offer website auditing services specifically for Redding and Northern California businesses. I'll tell you exactly what's wrong and exactly how to fix it.