Questions we get asked

What does a website health check cost?

A website health check costs between nothing and about $150 a month, depending on how much of the work is done for you. A one-off automated scan is usually free — we run one, and so do several larger tools. Ongoing monitoring with the fixes written for you runs $29 to $49 CAD a month at Find Me First. The large SEO research suites — Semrush, SE Ranking — start around US$129 to US$139 a month, because they are built for agencies doing keyword and competitor research, not for a business owner who just needs their own site to work. Hiring a consultant to audit a small site once typically costs several hundred dollars, and you get a document rather than something that keeps watching.

Why isn't my site showing up on Google?

There are four common reasons, and they are worth checking in this order.

First, Google might not know the site exists — a brand new site with no links pointing at it can take weeks to be found, and submitting a sitemap through Google Search Console is the fastest fix. Second, the site might be telling Google to stay away: a single line in a robots.txt file, or a "noindex" tag left behind by a developer after launch, will keep a perfectly good site out of search results entirely. This is the most common cause we find, and it is usually a one-line fix.

Third, Google may have indexed the site but ranks it below everything else for the searches you care about, which is a content and relevance problem rather than a technical one. Fourth — and this is the one almost nothing catches — your pages might look fine to you but break when Google renders them, because a script rewrites the title or the content after the page loads.

A scan will tell you which of the four you are dealing with. Guessing usually costs months.

Do I need Semrush for a small business?

Probably not. Semrush is an excellent product and we say so plainly — but it is built for people whose job is search: agencies, in-house marketing teams, consultants running campaigns for a dozen clients. It costs US$139 a month for the SEO plan (verified July 2026), and most of what you are paying for is keyword research, competitor analysis and backlink data.

If you are a plumber, a restaurant, a clinic or a shop, you almost certainly do not have a keyword research problem. You have a "does my website work properly" problem. Those are different jobs, and the second one is much cheaper to solve.

The honest test: if you are going to log in weekly and act on keyword data, buy Semrush. If you want to be told when something on your site is broken and be handed the fix, that is what we do for $29 CAD a month.

What is a meta description?

A meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears under your page title in Google search results. It lives in your page's code and is not visible on the page itself.

It does not directly affect where you rank. What it affects is whether anyone clicks. When you do not write one, Google grabs a sentence from somewhere on the page — and it often picks badly, showing your cookie notice, your opening hours, or a fragment of your navigation menu instead of a reason to visit you.

A good one is about 120 to 155 characters, describes what the page actually offers, and mentions the town you serve if you are a local business. Every page should have its own; copying the same description across a whole site is worse than having none, because it makes your pages look interchangeable.

How long until I see results after fixing something?

It depends on what you fixed and how often Google visits your site. Google has to come back and re-crawl the page before any change counts, which is typically a few days to a few weeks for a small business site.

Fixes that remove a blocker — a noindex tag, a robots.txt rule, a broken canonical — can show up within days, because they let Google index pages it was previously skipping. Fixes that improve an existing page, like a better title or description, take longer to show any effect and may show none at all if nobody is searching for what that page offers.

Anyone who tells you a technical fix produces results next week is guessing. We report what changed and when Google next crawled you, and let the numbers speak.

Will you make changes to my website?

Only if your site is connected to us, and only after you approve each change.

If we host or manage your site, you can approve a fix in your report and we apply it directly. If your site is on Wix, Squarespace, Shopify, or a WordPress host we do not manage, we cannot reach in and edit it — nobody can, without your login — so we give you the exact text and tell you which screen and field it goes in on your platform.

We never change anything without you clicking approve, and we keep a record of every change made.

Do you guarantee I will rank first on Google?

No, and you should be careful with anyone who does. Nobody outside Google controls Google's rankings, and a guarantee of a first-place result is either meaningless small print or an outright fabrication.

What we guarantee is narrow and real: we will tell you what on your website is stopping search engines reading and indexing it properly, in plain English, with the fix written out. That is a technical problem with a technical answer. Where you land afterwards depends on your content, your competition and your market.

Does this help me show up in ChatGPT and AI search?

It helps with the part that can actually be controlled, and I want to be precise about where that line is.

AI assistants read the same web everyone else does. Several of them lean on Bing's index for what they find, and they send their own crawlers too \u2014 GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Google-Extended. What we do is make sure your site is not blocking those crawlers, that the pages are structured clearly enough to be quoted accurately, and that Bing is told the moment your site changes rather than finding out weeks later.

What nobody can do is promise you a mention. No one buys placement in an AI answer, and if a company tells you they can get you recommended by ChatGPT, they are describing something that is not for sale. The honest version is this: we remove the reasons an AI assistant would fail to read or quote you. Whether it chooses to is up to it.

Do Bing, Yahoo, or DuckDuckGo actually matter for my business?

More than their individual market shares suggest, because they are not really separate audiences.

Bing's index also powers Yahoo and DuckDuckGo, and it feeds AI assistants that search the web, including ChatGPT. So when we make sure Bing can read your site, you are not optimising for one search engine with a small share \u2014 you are reaching Bing, Yahoo, DuckDuckGo, Ecosia and a set of AI assistants through one piece of work. Each of those blends in its own signals, so none of them is simply Bing under a different name, but a site Bing cannot read tends to struggle across all of them.

There is a second reason, and it is the practical one. Bing supports instant notification through a standard called IndexNow, which Google does not participate in. That means when you fix something on your site, Bing can know within minutes instead of waiting for its next crawl. We do that for you automatically. For a small business that just changed its hours, its prices or its services, that gap between "fixed" and "reflected in search" is the part that actually costs you customers.

What is the difference between the free scan and a paid plan?

The free scan reads the raw HTML of up to five pages and gives you a health score plus your three biggest issues. It runs in about a minute and costs nothing.

A paid plan crawls your whole site, loads every page in a real browser so it catches problems that only appear after your JavaScript runs, checks considerably more than the free scan does, and writes out the fix for every issue rather than naming the top three. It then repeats monthly or weekly and tells you what changed.

The free scan is designed to tell you honestly whether you have a problem worth paying to fix. Sometimes the answer is no.