These five tags are what tell search engines and AI engines what your page is, who you are, and how you should be linked to. They’re cheap to add, take 20 minutes per page, and they materially change how a local site is interpreted by every modern crawler.
1. LocalBusiness schema (or Service / Organization)
Of 100 sites: 12 had it. The other 88 are leaving structured-data-driven features on the table — knowledge panel, rich results, AI citation eligibility. It’s a JSON block in the head; it has no rendering cost. There’s no excuse.
2. Canonical link
Of 100: 41 had it correctly set; 12 had it pointing to the homepage on every page (broken); 47 didn’t have it. Without canonicals, your /services and /services/ are competing duplicates. Multiply that by every parameter and you have a long-tail SEO problem.
3. Open Graph image + title
Of 100: 23 had a real OG image. The other 77 share to Slack and look like a stock placeholder. Social referrals from a real OG image convert at 2-3x the rate of a default — small lift on small volume, but free.
4. Robots / x-robots-tag
Of 100: 9 had a noindex on a page that shouldn’t be public (staging, internal, /thanks); 4 had a noindex on the home page (someone left it on after launch). The other 87 were fine. The 9 are losing rankings to nothing, by accident.
5. hreflang or geo-targeting
Less common, but if you’re a Missouri business with Illinois locations: a geo tag in the schema and explicit hreflang where you have multilingual content. Of the 23 with multi-state operations, 0 had it set correctly.
“Of 100 sites, 1 had all five correct. The other 99 had at least one missing or misconfigured.”
How long this takes to fix
An afternoon for a small site. A day for a 30-page site. Most CMS platforms have plugins; on a custom build it’s a single edit to the head template and a JSON block per route. The result lands in the index within two crawl cycles, usually a week.