The same clinic, built twice. Only one can be read.
We build your site before we talk, and that build is the reference. Here is one, made before there is a client to point at: a clinic homepage in the shape the audit kept finding, and the same content rebuilt the way we build. Both are real pages you can open. What separates them is counted further down.
A specimen, not a case study. We have written both sides, and we say so at the top.
Open them both. They say the same thing.
Same practice, same six services, same hours, same headline. One of them hands all of that to a machine. The other hands over an empty box and a slider that is still empty when it arrives. Both are a single page on purpose — a real build follows the structure of the site it came from, and each says so at the top.
Before. The headline is a picture. The six services are not in the page when it arrives — a script drops them into the slider a moment later. And nothing on the page answers a patient question.
After. The headline is real text, styled to look exactly like a headline. Every service has its own section title. The four questions patients actually ask are answered on the page, in the format Google recognises, so they can be quoted.
A patient sees two good websites. A machine sees one.
The same practice and the same question, put to an assistant before the build and after it. The only thing that changed in between is what the page hands over.
How the layer works
I found Specimen Dental in Anytown. A line of text mentions Saturday hours, but nothing on the page states them as a record, and it lists no services. I could not confirm either.
Yes — Specimen Dental in Anytown is open Saturdays, 9am to 1pm, and 9am to 6pm on weekdays. It lists 6 treatments including emergency visits, and holds same-day slots for pain.
Both answers are ours, and labelled as simulated on both cards. Whether an assistant names a practice is its call; what the build changes is whether it has anything to name it from.
Counted on arrival
Five counts, taken from each build exactly as it arrives.
Section titles Google can actually read
17of 17
Section titles that are picturesfewer is better
0pictures left
Patient questions in the format Google recognises
4questions
Summaries of the practice written for machines
2blocks
How much of the page a search engine actually receives
3.7×more text
How each of these five was counted, and the one thing to be fair about
A specimen, not a case study. Both builds are ours; Specimen Dental is invented, and no real practice’s content appears here. Every count on this page is read out of the two builds by a build-time script, so it cannot drift from them.
What each build hands to a machine.
Five counts, taken from each of those two pages exactly as it arrives — before anything on the page has had a chance to run. That is where a search engine starts, and on the before build it is also where it stops. Three of the five are given against the total on the page, so you can see how much is being lost and not only which way it goes. The exact definitions are underneath the table.
Section titles Google can actually readTitles that are real text rather than a picture, counted against every title on the page.
3 of 5 titles
17 of 17 titles
Section titles that are picturesTitles holding an image where the text should be, against the same total.
2 of 5 titles
0 of 17 titles
Patient questions, in the question-and-answer format Google recognisesWhether the page carries its questions and answers in the standard form search engines and assistants look for.
None
Present
Summaries of the practice written for machinesShort records that sit inside the page and are never shown to a visitor. In the after build: the hours, address and services, and the four questions.
0
2
How much of the page a search engine actually receivesCharacters in the page as it arrives, against every character a patient can read once it has finished loading.
716 of 1,506 characters
2,629 of 2,629 characters
How these five numbers were counted
Every row was measured the same way on both pages: we look at each page exactly as it first arrives to a search engine — before anything loads or runs — and count what is actually there. In plain terms:
- Section titles Google can actually read
- Of all the section titles on the page, how many arrive as real written text.
- Section titles that are pictures
- Titles a visitor sees perfectly but which arrive as an image with no text behind it — in the before build, that includes the headline itself.
- The question-and-answer format
- Whether the page answers patient questions in the structured form search engines recognise and can quote.
- Summaries written for machines
- Whether the page carries a machine-readable summary of the practice — hours, services, answers — that a search engine can pick up directly.
- How much the search engine receives
- The words that arrive with the page itself, compared with everything a patient can eventually read. In the before build, the six services are only added after the page loads — a patient swipes through them, but they were never handed to the machine.
One thing to be fair about. 878 of the after build's 2,629 characters are the four patient questions and their answers — content the before build never carried in any form. Set those aside and it is still 1,751 characters against 716: the same services, the same hours, the same headline, and nearly two and a half times as much of it reaching the machine.
Nothing in the before build is broken. That is the problem.
It loads fast, it reads well, it works on a phone. Every one of its problems is invisible to the person who owns it, because every one of them is in the code underneath — and that code is the only part a machine ever sees.
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The headline is a picture
Custom type, exact spacing, perfectly on brand — and set into the page as an image with nothing written behind it. A patient reads it. A search engine receives a title with nothing in it. This is not the most common fault we measured in the US, but where it happens it removes the single most important sentence on the page.
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The services arrive after the page does
Six services, one at a time, in a slider a patient swipes through. The words live in a script and are put into the page only once it has loaded. What the patient swipes through, the search engine was never handed.
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Nothing answers a question
Cost, how long it takes, whether you can be seen today, where to park. The before build never answers any of them, so nothing can quote it on any of them. In every group of clinic sites we measured, at least two in three never answer a patient question on the page.
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Nothing tells a machine what the practice does
No questions answered in the format search engines recognise, no summary of the practice, no opening hours anywhere a machine can pick them up. Organised to a patient, one undifferentiated block of text to a machine.
Two of the patterns we describe in the checklist are not reproduced here — answers locked inside a PDF, and having no way to measure what visitors do. Those need a file and an audience, not a change to the code, so a specimen cannot honestly show them.
Yours is the one that counts.
This page is a specimen, and a specimen only proves we can build. We build your site first — from what you already have, or from scratch. This one is a rebuild because there was a site to start from; when there is no site, or nothing on it can be reached, we build from nothing instead. Either way it is the build we send you, not this page, that you should judge us on.
A link if you have one, the name of the practice if you don't. Back to the clinics page →