Your page title is costing you customers: the ten SEO checks we run

Ten checks, one page of HTML, and nine of them you can fix tonight without a developer.

Our free audit grades every page on the same ten on-page checks. Below is all ten: what each one actually tests, and what to type to pass it. We wrote the code, so we can tell you exactly where each bar sits — including the one check we pass without measuring anything at all.

Start with your homepage. That is the page most of your visitors land on.

Start here: open your page source

Open your homepage in Chrome and press Ctrl+U (⌘+⌥+U on a Mac). That is your page source — the HTML Google reads. Nine of the ten checks are visible there. No tool, no login, no purchase.

Then press Ctrl+F inside that page and search for the tag named in each row.

The title carries the most weight of the ten — 12 points out of 100. Start there.

The two lines Google prints

These two are the blue link a stranger taps in search results, and the grey sentence underneath it.

Check 1 — the title tag

We pass a title between 30 and 60 display columns. Columns, not characters: that difference matters the moment you write in Chinese, and it has a section of its own below.

The predictable failure is a homepage titled Home, 首頁, or the company name on its own. Google calls that "no clear main title" and writes its own instead. Title link generation is, in Google's words, "completely automated", and it rewrites a title it finds half-empty, obsolete, inaccurate, or repeated on every page.

Say what you do and where you do it:

旺角中學數學補習｜DSE 精讀班｜<your name>

Check 2 — the meta description

We pass 120–160 display columns. Google documents the description as input to the snippet, never as a ranking input, and says descriptions repeated identically across every page "aren't helpful". Leave it blank and Google writes one from your page text.

Treat it as free ad copy: one line on what you do, one on why someone should tap you rather than the shop below you.

One h1 that says what the page is

Check 3. We pass a page with exactly one <h1> — stricter than Google, which says plainly there is "no magical, ideal amount of headings a given page should have".

We hold the stricter line deliberately. Six <h1> tags usually means a template wrapped every section header in one, so the page states its subject nowhere. Zero is the real failure, and it is common: 29% of pages crawled in 2025 had none.

Your <h1> is the heading a visitor reads first. It should say the same thing as your title tag, in the words a customer would use.

How your link looks when someone forwards it on WhatsApp

Check 4, Open Graph. We pass a page carrying three or more <meta property="og:..."> tags. Ship og:title, og:description and og:image and you have three.

This one pays off in Hong Kong more than search does, because your link travels by WhatsApp forward. WhatsApp's documentation says it reads those tags, wants the image 300px or wider and under 600KB, and warns that its fallback guessing is not to be relied on.

Without them your link arrives as a bare grey address. Nobody taps a bare grey address.

Telling Google what kind of business you are

Check 5 — structured data

We pass a page with at least one parseable <script type="application/ld+json"> block carrying an @type. A low bar on purpose: we check that a machine-readable description exists, not that you picked the right schema.

Use LocalBusiness. Its only required properties are name and address.

Skip FAQ schema. Google stopped showing FAQ rich results on 7 May 2026 and deleted the documentation on 15 June 2026. Most advice still online has not caught up.

Check 6 — the canonical URL

We pass a page that declares a <link rel="canonical">. A canonical names the real address when one page answers at several — with and without www, with and without a trailing slash, with a tracking parameter stuck on the end. Without one, Google picks "the best version to show to users" itself, and it may not pick the one you want.

What a phone visitor gets

Check 7 — mobile-friendly

Exactly what we test: whether the page has a <meta name="viewport"> tag. That is the whole check, and it is a weak proxy — a page can carry the tag and still be miserable on a phone.

It earns its place because Google indexes the mobile version of your site, having moved to mobile-only crawling in July 2024. Google retired its own Mobile-Friendly Test in 2023, so use your phone instead. Open the page and try tapping your own phone number.

Check 8 — HTTPS

We pass when the page loaded over https. Two honest corrections.

Despite the field being named httpsRedirect, we do not test that http:// redirects to https://. Type your address with http:// in front and see for yourself.

And Google's current page-experience documentation says aspects other than Core Web Vitals, HTTPS among them, "don't directly help your website rank higher". Fix it anyway, for a reason that has nothing to do with ranking: Chrome labels the page Not secure in the address bar, and a customer about to type in a phone number reads that.

Image alt text, and what our 70% really means

Check 9. We pass when at least 70% of <img> tags carry a non-empty alt.

That is our threshold, not an accessibility verdict. A purely decorative image — a divider, a background flourish — is supposed to carry an empty alt="" so a screen reader skips it instead of reading it aloud. That is W3C's own guidance, not an oversight. So a well-built page can sit under our 70% and be completely right, and a page that labels every spacer can clear the bar while telling a blind visitor nothing.

Alt text is what a screen reader announces to a blind visitor — WCAG 2.2 requires it — and what Google reads to understand a picture. Google's own escalation is the clearest guidance there is: alt="puppy" is better, alt="Dalmatian puppy playing fetch" is best, and keyword-stuffed alt "may cause your site to be seen as spam".

Describe the picture, in the page's own language. IMG_4821 is not a description.

The one check we pass without measuring it

Check 10, page speed. Our free audit always passes it. The code awards the full 10 points without measuring anything and labels the value "Not measured", because a real measurement needs Lighthouse and our audit does not run one.

So a green tick against page speed in our report tells you nothing. Get the real number yourself, free, from PageSpeed Insights. These are Google's own thresholds for a good result:

If your page fails these three, that is the item on this list where a developer genuinely earns the fee.

Chinese titles get cut even when the character count looks fine

Every English SEO checklist tells you to keep a title "under 60 characters". Google says something different, and that difference is this whole section: "there's no limit on how long a <title> element can be, the title link is truncated in Google Search results as needed, typically to fit the device width." Same wording for the meta description.

The unit is width, not characters. A Chinese character is full-width: it takes roughly the space of two Latin letters.

Google publishes no number, and we found none for Chinese anywhere authoritative, so the band below is our judgement, not Google's guidance. Our audit measures display width: a full-width glyph counts 2, everything else counts 1. For Latin copy width equals length, so the English rule is untouched — and a Chinese page stops being marked down for a description that was the right size all along.

Three titles, measured with the function the audit uses:

• 旺角物理治療中心｜運動創傷復康 — 15 characters, 30 columns. A character rule calls this half the minimum and tells you to pad it. It is exactly at the minimum.
• 旺角補習社｜中學數學小班補習｜DSE 應試班｜名師教學 — 27 characters, 50 columns. Comfortably inside the band.
• 旺角補習社｜中學數學及物理小班補習｜DSE 應試班｜名師教學｜免費試堂 — 35 characters, 66 columns. Passes "under 60 characters". Gets cut.

Mixed 中英 copy bites hardest, and mixed copy is what most Hong Kong service websites are: an English brand name, the service in Chinese, DSE or IG dropped in raw. One rule covers both languages.

Count every Latin letter, digit, space and half-width mark as 1. Count every Chinese character and full-width mark — ｜, 、, ，, 「」 — as 2. Keep the total under 60.

Even the separator counts: a full-width ｜ costs 2 columns, an ASCII | costs 1.

What a score of 100 still does not tell you

Do not read a perfect score as a finished website. All ten checks grade the HTML of one page, mechanically — the URL you typed in.

They say nothing about whether Google has indexed you, whether anyone links to you, whether the page uses the words your customers actually search for, or whether your Google Business Profile is claimed. For a Hong Kong clinic, salon or tutoring centre, that profile usually moves more phone calls than all ten of these together. It is not what this audit measures.

Two background numbers, if you want a sense of how common the gaps are. Across the crawled web in 2025, 32% of desktop pages carried no meta description at all, and the median site had alt text on only 60% of its images. Which of the ten fails most often in Hong Kong specifically, we will not tell you: our own audit corpus is far too small to carry that claim.

Run the ten on your own site, free

Paste your address into the free WITTI Grow audit: all ten graded, in English or 繁體中文, in about three minutes. No signup, no credit card.

Every item here is yours to do tonight. What we sell at HK$388 a month is not the knowing — it is somebody running the list again next week, for the evening your web developer pushes a change and your homepage title quietly becomes 首頁 again.

Next guide: Nobody contacts you through your website? Eight conversion checks