Taking Stock of the Site

1The established small business scenario

Search engine optimization (SEO) is the work of making our pages the ones Google shows for the searches that bring a Richmond business to a managed service provider (MSP). Where that work starts depends on the state of the site: unlaunched, newly launched with little visibility, a large corporation's, or an established small business. The last is a privately held company, a domain with years of history, a site somebody else built, and earlier SEO work of unknown quality.

Hermetic is the established small business. The site runs WordPress with the Beaver Builder theme and page builder, Yoast SEO is installed, Cloudflare sits in front of it, and the agency Tech Pro Marketing built it. The sitemap lists 392 web addresses (URLs). Nobody at Hermetic knows which searches the site appears for, how many visits any page gets, whether a Google Search Console property exists, or who owns the Google Business Profile. Three things follow. Somebody already did SEO here, so the first job is documentation, because a change you cannot tie to a date cannot be tied to a result later. A site live for years is where leftover tactics accumulate, because practices common five years ago are now named in Google's spam policies. And the person doing this work also runs the company, so the plan has to favor steps that show progress month over month.

The obvious objection is that the Rank Math course rebuilds the site anyway. They need this work first: the page map needs every URL that exists today, and judging whether the rebuild worked needs the numbers from before it.

2Previous work and account access

The previous work is everything the agency did to the site that affects how Google reads it, whether or not anyone called it SEO at the time. Most of it is visible from outside, in the page source, the sitemaps and the URLs, and the crawl of 2026-09-29 already lists it. Reading that list as evidence of a strategy is the first tab.

Two more sources fill in what the site cannot show. The first is the agency's paperwork: statements of work, monthly reports, keyword lists, and any invoice line that says link building, guest posts or citations. Ask for all of it in one email and record the date. The second is the Wayback Machine at web.archive.org, an archive that stores copies of web pages on the dates it visited them. Enter the homepage URL and note the year the tourism pages first appear and any snapshot where the design differs from today's.

From today, keep a change log: a sheet with the columns Date, URL, What changed, Who, Why, and Result checked on. Every edit to the site goes in it, including theme updates and plugin installs, so that when traffic drops you know which of the last twenty changes to undo.

Account access

Six accounts decide whether the rest of this course can happen. The level you need is the top one in every case, because an agency relationship ends and the accounts have to survive that.

Search Console matters most. A Verified owner is someone Google has confirmed controls the domain, and you can become one by adding the DNS record yourself regardless of who else is verified; a monthly report from the agency is a summary that stops when the contract does. The connection to the plugin is done in Rank Math module 06.

3Manipulation left behind

Manipulation, in Google's vocabulary, is anything on a site built to influence ranking instead of serving the person reading the page. Google's spam policies name the kinds, and a site that carries them can rank lower or be removed from results. This tab records what you find, with a URL and a date, in language that describes what you saw: the agency most likely did what agencies did at the time, and "these 13 pages share the same body text with the city name changed" is a fact that can be checked, where "doorway pages" is an accusation. Five kinds account for most of what gets left behind, and each has a check you can run from a browser.

The fifth kind is scraped or spun content: text copied from another site, sometimes with words swapped by a script to evade duplicate detection. Copy one distinctive sentence from the page and search for it in quotation marks. If it appears on an older page elsewhere, record both URLs.

The 57 tourism pages as the case

Open the Maymont page, either of its two URLs, and read it as the office manager of a Richmond law firm would. Someone searching for Maymont's hours wants Maymont's own site. Count how many times the page says Richmond or Henrico, check whether it links to any service page, and run the distinctive-sentence check on one paragraph. Two Maymont pages, two Hollywood Cemetery pages and ten "henrico-virginia-city-guide" pages point to bulk production, the pattern Google's spam policies call scaled content abuse.

Each sampled page gets a row: URL, date read, which pattern it fits if any, and the evidence. The verdict for the group is one of three: content a Richmond reader could want, which can live on as blog posts; content written to repeat a place name, which is removed or kept out of the index later; or content copied from elsewhere, which is removed. What you do with the findings in this module is nothing, because removing 57 pages before a baseline exists destroys the ability to know whether removing them helped. Module 08 covers the cleanup.

4Site changes that hurt

Separate from deliberate manipulation are changes made for ordinary reasons, a redesign, a new host, a developer testing something, that alter what Google sees without anyone intending to affect search. The Site changes tab reconstructs them from the Wayback snapshots, the duplicate URLs and a few live checks.

1. A redesign that changed URLs without redirects. Every old URL answers 404, every link from another site to an old URL is wasted, and Google holds the dead addresses in its index until it drops them. Pick five URLs from the menu of a Wayback snapshot two or three years old and open each one today.
2. A theme switch. The theme produces the HTML, so a new theme changes the headings, the image markup, the menu and the speed of every page at once. Note whether any snapshot shows a builder other than Beaver Builder.
3. Moving hosts. A move changes the server address, the HTTPS certificate and the response time. Record the current host and any move you can date.
4. A temporary redirect left in place. A 301 tells Google a page has moved permanently, a strong signal to index the new URL. A 302 says the move is temporary, a weak signal, so the old URL can stay in the index as the one Google shows. Open each duplicate's old URL with the browser's network panel open and read the response code.
5. A staging site that got indexed. A staging site is a copy of the site at a second address, such as staging.hermeticnetworks.com, used for testing. If it can be crawled, Google indexes a duplicate of every page. Check with the search site:hermeticnetworks.com -inurl:www.
6. A robots.txt or a setting that blocks everything. The file robots.txt at the root of the site tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. A staging copy often blocks all crawling, or has the WordPress setting "Discourage search engines from indexing this site" switched on, and when that copy is pushed live the block comes with it. Read on 2026-10-01, Hermetic's robots.txt allows everything except /install and carries a Crawl-delay of 10, which Google ignores. Record that, then open Settings, then Reading, in WordPress and confirm the box is clear.

5Technical checks

The technical checks record how the server and the pages behave, as distinct from what they say. Module 07 does the work of fixing them; this tab gives it a list and a before-figure. Five checks are enough for a site this size.

The fourth check is the mobile layout. Google indexes the mobile version of a page, which its documentation calls mobile-first indexing, so what the site looks like on a phone is what Google ranks. Open the homepage, the managed IT page and one blog post on your own phone and record anything that overlaps, is too small to read, or cannot be tapped. The fifth is the hostname: confirm that http://hermeticnetworks.com and https://hermeticnetworks.com each redirect to https://www.hermeticnetworks.com, the canonical hostname.

6The asset inventory

An asset, for this work, is anything Hermetic already owns that can earn search visibility without being built from scratch. Small companies own more than they realize, because most of it was never thought of as marketing material. The Assets tab lists six groups.

Domains

The main domain is hermeticnetworks.com, and the canonical address is the www version. Companies often hold other domains: an earlier company name, a .net, a misspelling bought defensively. Ask Jeff and check the registrar account. Before any old domain is pointed at the main site with a 301, add it to Search Console as its own property and read its Manual actions report, because a redirect ties that domain's history to ours.

Buyer personas

A buyer persona is a written description of one kind of person who buys from Hermetic: their role, what prompted them to look, what they type, which device they use and what they need to see before they call. Module 05 turns the differences between personas into the keyword list. Two cover most MSP deals. The office manager at a Richmond professional firm searches when something has broken, on a phone during the working day, with "IT support Richmond" or "IT company near me", and needs a phone number and a reason to trust the company within one screen. The owner searches when deciding to outsource IT altogether, on a desktop, with "managed IT services Richmond VA" or "how much does managed IT cost", and opens three sites and reads reviews before contacting anyone. Build both from evidence: open the last ten won leads in Nutshell and record the contact's title, the company's size and what the first note says triggered the conversation.

Existing and offline content

The site holds 148 posts, 4 industry pages, case studies, testimonials and 51 service pages, many of them duplicates: material to keep, merge or rewrite. Offline, the Sandler-trained sales conversations are the richest asset nobody has used: the pain questions a prospect answers in a discovery call are, in the prospect's own words, the problem searches module 01 described. Case studies inside proposals, ticket subjects in Syncro and photographs of the team have never been indexed, and for search purposes content that was never indexed was never published.

The Google Business Profile

The Google Business Profile (GBP) is Hermetic's listing at business.google.com, and it feeds the local pack, the map with three businesses that appears for a search with a place in it. Whether it is claimed, which Google account holds it, the primary category, the phone number and hours, and the review count and rating today are all not known yet. Record each; the review count is a baseline figure in its own right. Rank Math module 08 covers the profile and the website agreeing with each other.

7Competitor analysis

A competitor, for search purposes, is a site that appears for the searches Hermetic wants to appear for. That list overlaps with the companies Jeff loses deals to and is rarely identical to it, because a strong sales rival can have a weak site. Only the first list belongs in this tab.

Pick the three from the actual results page. Open a private browser window, which removes the influence of your own search history although Google still uses your location, and search "managed IT services Richmond VA". Write down the three businesses in the local pack and the first ten organic results in order, then repeat with "IT support Richmond VA". Choose, in order of preference, a site in both the local pack and the organic results for both searches, then a site on the first page for both, then a site on the first page for one. A sales rival who appears for neither goes on a separate list.

A competitor that ranks first is evidence about what Google is showing and weak evidence about what to copy; their position may come from a domain that is fifteen years old and links from a hundred local organizations. Module 06 uses the table to decide which searches are reachable.

8Information architecture

Information architecture (IA) is how the pages of a site are named, grouped and linked to one another. It matters for search because Google discovers pages by following links, judges a page partly by what links to it and with what words, and treats a page five clicks from the homepage as less important than one reached in two. A visitor who cannot find the cybersecurity page in two clicks calls somebody else.

Hermetic's natural hierarchy has five branches. Home leads to Services, and Services leads to one page per service: managed IT services, IT support, cybersecurity, backup and disaster recovery, VoIP, Microsoft 365, phishing protection, vulnerability assessment, co-managed IT and IT consulting, the ten services in the site's menu today. Home leads to Areas we serve, which names Richmond, Henrico and Chesterfield, with Virginia Beach and Lynchburg pending Jeff's decision. Home leads to Industries, with four pages; to About, with the team, testimonials and case studies; and to the Blog. Click depth is the number of clicks from the homepage to reach a page, and every service page sits at depth two: Home, Services, the service page.

Two rules apply to the links inside that hierarchy. The words of a link, its anchor text, name the destination: "managed IT services" tells Google and the reader where the link goes, and "learn more" tells neither. Breadcrumbs, the line near the top of a page showing Home, then Services, then the page, show the position in the hierarchy; the site already emits them as BreadcrumbList structured data.

Against that hierarchy, the site today has 139 pages. The 57 tourism pages have no parent in it. The 13 city landing pages and the 21 place-in-URL service pages split the Richmond metro, which a searcher and Google both treat as one place, into pieces. The duplicate managed IT, backup, VoIP and cybersecurity pages each compete for one branch. In the Architecture tab, write the hierarchy as an indented list and, beside each branch, the count of current pages that belong to it. The page-by-page decisions, which URL survives each service and what happens to every other URL, are the page map, built in Rank Math module 02. This tab is the sketch that module starts from.

9The baseline

A baseline is the set of numbers recorded before any change is made, against which every later number is compared. Without one, a traffic rise three months from now cannot be credited to the work and a fall cannot be blamed on it. Technical repairs tend to show results quickly because they remove something that was stopping Google from crawling or indexing; growth from content and links is slower, and the baseline separates the two. Four measures, each dated.

1. Indexed page count. Search site:www.hermeticnetworks.com and record the approximate count Google shows; Google describes it as an estimate. The sitemap offers 392 URLs, and the gap between offered and indexed is itself a finding. Once Search Console is connected, the Pages report gives the real count.
2. Where the site appears for the three searches from module 01. A service with a place, "managed IT services Richmond VA"; our name, "Hermetic Networks"; and a problem, "which form of MFA is the most secure". In a private window, run each and record whether a local pack appears, whether Hermetic is in it, which Hermetic URL appears in the organic results if any, and whether it is on the first page.
3. Search Console clicks and impressions. An impression is one appearance of a Hermetic page on a results page somebody saw; a click is a visit from one. Once access exists, open the Performance report, set the range to the last three months and then the last sixteen, and export total clicks, total impressions, the top ten queries and the top ten pages for each. Record the date of connection.
4. Phone calls and form submissions. The business measure, and the one the other three serve. Count last month's calls to the main number from numbers not already in Nutshell or Syncro, using the phone system's call log, and last month's website form submissions, from the form plugin or from Nutshell leads whose source is the website.

Leave out total page views, "hits" and social media followers; each can rise while calls fall. The monthly routine in module 08 repeats these four measures, and this baseline is month zero.

10Do this now

1. Create a workbook named "SEO triage - hermeticnetworks.com" with nine tabs: Previous work, Access, Manipulation, Site changes, Technical, Assets, Competitors, Architecture, Baseline. On the Previous work tab, copy the six observations from section 2 with today's date, and add the change log columns below them.
2. On the Access tab, list the six accounts from section 2 and fill in what Jeff knows about the registrar, hosting and Cloudflare. Send the agency one email asking for statements of work, reports and keyword lists, and for Verified owner access to Search Console and Primary owner on the Google Business Profile. Paste the date sent into the tab.
3. On the Manipulation tab, open three city landing pages side by side; open one Maymont page and run the Ctrl+A check, the view-source search for display:none and the distinctive-sentence search. Record one row per page: URL, date, pattern if any, evidence.
4. On the Site changes tab, paste the contents of https://www.hermeticnetworks.com/robots.txt; record whether the discourage box in Settings, then Reading, is clear; run site:hermeticnetworks.com -inurl:www and record what appears; open /backup-disaster-recovery-old/ with the network panel open and record its response code. Note from web.archive.org the years in which the design changed.
5. On the Technical tab, run PageSpeed Insights on the homepage and on /managed-services/, Mobile tab, and record LCP, INP and CLS for each. Open the three pages from section 5 on your phone and record what breaks. List every piece of content behind a form, and the hosting provider and plan.
6. On the Assets and Competitors tabs, list every domain in the registrar account and what each does today. Write the two personas from the last ten won leads in Nutshell. Then, in a private window, run the two searches from section 7 and fill three competitor rows with every column in the table.
7. On the Baseline tab, record the site: count, the result of each of the three searches from section 9 with URLs, and last month's new-caller count and form submission count. Write the date at the top. Mark the Search Console rows "pending" with the date access was requested.

11Review questions

1. You have read six of the 57 tourism pages and every one fits the pattern of content written to repeat a place name. What do you do with them this afternoon?

   A.Delete them. Six of six fit the pattern Google's spam policies name, and every day they stay live is a day the site carries scaled content. B.Give each sampled page a row in the Manipulation tab with URL, date, pattern and evidence, and decide the group's fate after the baseline exists. C.Set them to noindex today, which keeps the pages on the site while taking them out of Google's index, and record the change in the change log. D.Write nothing down yet. Six of 57 is too small a sample to judge the group, so read all 57 before the Manipulation tab gets a row.
   Answer

   No baseline exists yet and Search Console access does not exist yet. Deleting the pages now removes the ability to know whether deleting them changed anything, and discards whatever traffic they bring before anyone has seen the number. They get rows in the Manipulation tab today and a decision after the baseline exists.

   Show the answer
2. The agency replies that it will keep sending the monthly Search Console report and sees no need to add Hermetic as an owner. What do you do?

   A.Accept the report for now and raise the question again when the contract comes up for renewal, since the data in it is the same either way. B.Ask the agency to add a Hermetic Google account as a Full user on its property, which lets Hermetic open the reports directly. C.Create a GA4 property Hermetic controls and take the traffic numbers from there, so the Search Console question can wait. D.Add the DNS record at Cloudflare yourself and verify a Domain property, so Hermetic is a Verified owner whatever the agency decides.
   Answer

   The report is a summary at one moment, and it stops when the contract does. A Verified owner has the data itself, including the Manual actions report and the Pages report. Hermetic can become a Verified owner by adding the DNS record at Cloudflare without the agency's cooperation, so the request is a courtesy and the verification is the action.

   Show the answer
3. Jeff names the company he loses the most deals to, and it appears nowhere on the first page for "managed IT services Richmond VA" or "IT support Richmond VA". Where does it go?

   A.On a separate sales competitors list, outside the Competitors tab, with a note of which deals it took. B.In the Competitors tab as the first of the three, because the company that takes the most deals is the one to study closest. C.In the Competitors tab as the third row, after two sites from the results page, so the tab holds both kinds of competitor. D.In the Competitors tab once you have searched its brand name and confirmed the site ranks for it, since a first-page miss on two searches may be an off day.
   Answer

   It goes on the separate sales competitors list. The Competitors tab answers the question of what Google is rewarding in this market today, and a company that wins deals through referrals tells you nothing about that. A strong sales rival can have a weak site, which is why the two lists are kept apart.

   Show the answer
4. When the backup page was rebuilt, the old URL was pointed at the new one with a 302. The content on both is identical. Does the response code matter?

   A.No. The visitor lands on the new page either way, and Google follows the redirect the same way a browser does, so both codes end at the same URL. B.No. Google chooses which URL to index from the content, and identical content means it settles on the new URL whatever the code says. C.Yes. A 302 says the move is temporary, a weak signal, so Google may keep the old URL in its index while visitors land on the new one. D.Yes. A 302 carries none of the links pointing at the old URL across to the new one, so the new page starts with no history behind it.
   Answer

   The code matters. A 302 tells Google the move is temporary, a weak signal, so Google may keep the old URL as the one it indexes and shows while visitors land on the new one. A 301 is the strong signal that moves the index to the new URL. The finding goes in the Site changes tab, and the change to a 301 is part of the redirect work in the Rank Math course.

   Show the answer
5. A case study is offered as a download behind a form. Why does it go on the Technical tab?

   A.Because the form plugin adds scripts that slow the page, and server response time is one of the five technical checks. B.Because content behind a form counts as hidden text, one of the five kinds of manipulation Google's spam policies name. C.Because Google does not fill in forms, so the content behind one has never been read by Google and cannot rank. D.Because the download is a PDF, and a file that is a download and a web page at the same time confuses which URL Google indexes.
   Answer

   Google never reads it. Google does not fill in forms, so the content behind one is invisible to search however good it is. The technical fact is that the content is unreachable; how much of it to publish openly is a content decision that comes after.

   Show the answer
6. Search Console clicks rise over three months while calls and form submissions stay flat. Which number does the monthly review lead with, and what does the gap suggest?

   A.Clicks, because they are the measure the SEO work moves directly; the gap suggests the sales follow-up on new enquiries is where the problem lies. B.Calls and forms, the business measure the other numbers serve; the gap suggests the new clicks land on pages that do not lead to contact. C.Impressions, because clicks rising with flat calls means the site is shown for the wrong searches; the gap suggests the query list needs reworking first. D.Calls and forms, and the gap suggests three months is too short for clicks to turn into calls, so the review waits another quarter before reading it.
   Answer

   Calls and forms, because they are the business measure the other numbers serve. The gap suggests the new clicks arrive on pages that do not lead to contact, most likely the tourism pages or problem-search blog posts. The page export from Search Console shows which.

   Show the answer

12Glossary

Triage

The ordered first pass over an existing site: documenting previous work, finding problems, listing assets and recording a baseline before anything changes.

Verified owner

The Search Console role Google grants to someone who has proven control of the domain, for example by adding a DNS record.

Doorway page

One of many near-identical pages created to rank for a set of similar searches and send every visitor to the same offer.

Keyword stuffing

Repeating a target phrase, or listing places and services, far beyond what a reader would tolerate.

Hidden text

Text a visitor cannot see and Google can, such as white text on white or a block styled display:none.

Link spam

Links bought, traded or placed in bulk on other sites to influence ranking.

Staging site

A copy of the site at a second address used for testing. If Google can crawl it, Google indexes a duplicate of every page.

robots.txt

The file at the root of the site that tells crawlers which paths they may fetch. Hermetic's allows everything except /install.

Temporary redirect

A 302 response saying a page has moved for now. Google treats it as a weak signal and may keep the old URL in its index. A 301 is the permanent version.

Gated content

Content shown only after a form or login. Google does not fill in forms, so gated content cannot rank.

Buyer persona

A written description of one kind of buyer: role, trigger, device, what they type and what they need to see before they call.

Baseline

The numbers recorded before any change, with the date, against which every later number is compared.

13Sources

• Google Search Central, Spam policies for Google web search and Google Search Essentials: doorway pages, keyword stuffing, hidden text, link spam, scaled content abuse.
• Google Search Central, Redirects and Google Search: permanent redirects as a strong canonical signal, temporary redirects as a weak one.
• Google Search Central, Introduction to robots.txt and Block Search indexing with noindex: what each blocks, and that Google ignores crawl-delay.
• Google Search Central, Mobile-first indexing best practices.
• Google Search Central, Understanding Core Web Vitals and Google search results and web.dev, Web Vitals: LCP 2.5 seconds, INP 200 milliseconds, CLS 0.1. Measured at PageSpeed Insights.
• Google Search Central, Get started with Search Console, and Search Console Help, Managing owners, users, and permissions, Links report and Manual Actions report.
• Google Business Profile Help, Add and remove owners and managers.
• Google Search Central, SEO Starter Guide: site organization, descriptive link text, and the site: count as an estimate.
• Internet Archive, Wayback Machine.
• Stephan Spencer, Eric Enge and Jessie Stricchiola, The Art of SEO, 4th edition (O'Reilly, early release 2021), chapter 3.
• Site facts from a crawl of www.hermeticnetworks.com on 2026-09-29; robots.txt and the response of /backup-disaster-recovery-old/ read on 2026-10-01.

Documentation read 2026-10-01. Google changes often; where this page and the documentation disagree, the documentation is current.