Every month we look at websites belonging to businesses across Bengaluru and the rest of India, and the same handful of problems come up again and again. None of them are exotic. Most were introduced by accident, often by someone doing their best with a page builder, and most can be fixed without rebuilding anything.
Here are the ten we see most often, in roughly the order they cost you money.
1. Not claiming your Google Business Profile
For a business with a physical address or a service area, the Google Business Profile is usually a bigger source of enquiries than the website. It is what puts you in the map pack — the three results with pins that sit above everything else on a local search.
It is free, and a surprising number of businesses either have not claimed it or claimed it years ago and never filled it in.
How to fix it: claim the listing, pick the most specific primary category available, add your real opening hours, upload photographs that are actually yours, and list your services individually rather than as one vague paragraph. Then keep it current. A profile that says you close at 6 PM when you now close at 8 costs you evening enquiries.
2. Chasing head terms instead of searches people actually make
“Digital marketing” gets enormous search volume in India. It is also being chased by every agency in the country, and the people typing it are usually students or researchers rather than buyers.
“Digital marketing agency in Malleshwaram” gets a fraction of that volume. The people typing it are far closer to hiring someone.
How to fix it: build pages around searches with a location, a sector or a qualifier attached. Lower volume, much higher intent, and dramatically less competition. You will rank for the broad terms eventually, as a side effect of ranking for the specific ones — rarely the other way round.
3. Two of your pages competing for the same keyword
This one is invisible unless you look for it. A business writes a services page about SEO, then a blog post about SEO, then a landing page about SEO. Google now has three candidates for the same search, splits its signals between them, and often ranks none of them well.
The technical name is keyword cannibalisation. In practice it means your best page is being held back by your own other pages.
How to fix it: list every page targeting each keyword. Where two overlap, either merge them into one stronger page and redirect the weaker URL, or rewrite one to target a genuinely different search. One page, one primary keyword.
4. A slow site — measured on a real phone, not your laptop
Site speed affects rankings, but it affects enquiries more. A page that takes six seconds on a mid-range Android over 4G will lose a meaningful share of visitors before it finishes loading, and those people never appear in any report because they were never really there.
Most Indian traffic is mobile, and a lot of it is not on great connections.
How to fix it: run your key pages through PageSpeed Insights and look at the mobile score, not the desktop one. The usual culprits are uncompressed images, a page builder loading scripts it does not need, and third-party embeds. Compress images to WebP, remove plugins you are not using, and be ruthless about what loads before the page is readable.
5. A site that is technically responsive but unusable on a phone
Passing a mobile-friendly test is a low bar. It means the layout does not break, not that the page works.
The things that actually cost enquiries: phone numbers that are not tappable links, forms with ten fields, buttons small enough to need a careful aim, and pop-ups that cover the content with a close button in the corner.
How to fix it: open your own site on your own phone and try to make an enquiry. Do it while standing up, one-handed. Whatever irritates you will be irritating everyone else too.
6. Thin pages, or the same page repeated
Two versions of this. The first is a services page with sixty words on it, which gives Google nothing to rank. The second is more common: eight location pages that are identical apart from the city name swapped in.
The second one used to work. It stopped working several years ago, and at scale it now looks like exactly what it is.
How to fix it: if a page cannot say something specific and true, do not build it. A single strong page about what you do beats ten thin ones. Where you do want location pages, they need genuinely different content — the actual areas you cover, work you have done there, questions specific to that market.
7. Title tags and meta descriptions nobody wrote
Open your site’s source and look at the title tags. If several say “Home” or “Services — My Company”, or if the same description is repeated across every page, this is costing you clicks on rankings you already have.
We see sites ranking on page one with a click-through rate close to zero. That is not a ranking problem. That is being seen and ignored.
How to fix it: write a unique title for every page, around 55–60 characters, with the keyword near the front and something that gives a reason to click. Same for the description — Google may rewrite it, but a good one often survives. Prioritise the pages that already rank; those are where a rewrite pays off fastest.
8. Inconsistent contact details across the web
If your address is written four different ways across your website, your Business Profile, JustDial, IndiaMART and various directories, you are making it harder for Google to be confident it knows where you are. That confidence feeds local rankings.
How to fix it: decide the exact format of your business name, address and phone number, then make every listing match — including punctuation and whether you write “3rd Floor” or “Third Floor”. Fix the biggest directories first.
9. Ignoring the technical basics
Not glamorous, and easy to leave undone for years. The common ones: pages blocked in robots.txt that should not be, a noindex tag left on from staging, no XML sitemap, missing canonical tags creating duplicate versions of every page, and broken internal links.
A noindex left on a live site is rare but catastrophic, and we have found it more than once.
How to fix it: set up Google Search Console if you have not. The Pages report tells you exactly which URLs are indexed and, more usefully, which are not and why. Start there.
10. No way of knowing what is working
Plenty of businesses have Google Analytics installed and have never opened it. Plenty more cannot say which page produced last month’s enquiries.
Without that, every decision about where to spend is a guess, and the loudest channel wins rather than the best one.
How to fix it: install GA4 and Search Console. Set up a conversion for your enquiry form — usually a page view on your thank-you page. Track clicks on your phone number, because in India a large share of enquiries are calls that never touch a form. Then look at it monthly.
Where to start
If you fix nothing else: claim your Google Business Profile, check Search Console for pages that are not indexed, and write proper titles for the pages that already rank. Those three are cheap, fast, and usually where the largest gap is.
The rest is worth doing in order of what your own data says is broken — which is why we start every engagement by looking, rather than by selling a package.
When this does not apply
If you sell nationally and have no physical premises, the local SEO advice matters far less than the content and technical points. If you are pre-launch with no rankings at all, most of this is premature — build something worth ranking first. And if your margins cannot support the cost of acquiring a customer through search in your sector, no amount of SEO will fix that, and it is better to know before you spend.