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A live website SEO audit at the San Francisco SBDC turned up the three problems that quietly wreck small-business rankings: a hacked site spawning spam pages, a 17-second load time, and 4,600 junk backlinks. Each one is invisible to the owner and obvious once you know where to look.
1,700
keywords Julie King ranks for — even after a plugin hack
17s
Punk Majesty’s homepage load — mobile PageSpeed of 35
4,600
low-quality backlinks that likely earned Saafara a penalty
This website SEO audit, run with the San Francisco Small Business Development Center and the San Francisco Public Library, walked six real sites through the metrics, the diagnosis, and the fix order. The owners were doing the hard part — building real businesses — while their sites leaked authority in ways the dashboards make plain.
Catch The Hack Hiding In Plain Sight
Julie King’s parenting site is genuinely strong — a domain rating of 32, 1,700 keywords, and a book with over 7,000 Amazon ratings behind it. That authority is exactly why hackers targeted it: outdated plugins let attackers inject thousands of spam pages about unrelated junk like “turquoise floor vases.”
Those pages now surface in Google’s search features and drag the whole domain toward a spam signal. The fix is security-first: update or remove the vulnerable plugins, purge the injected pages, add a firewall and a custom login URL, then check for backdoors before rebuilding clean.
RUN THIS YOURSELF
Search site:theirdomain.com in Google and scan the page titles. See results about topics the business would never sell — random products, foreign-language spam? That’s injected content from a plugin breach, and it’s the first thing to flag on any older WordPress site with real domain authority.
Compare The Six Sites Side By Side
Six owners, six different bottlenecks — security, speed, links, content, and platform. The audit named the single thing holding each one back.
| Business | What we found | First fix |
|---|---|---|
| Poles for Mobility | DR 15, 21 keywords, none on page 1; blog split off | Add real pages; merge the blog into the main site |
| How To Talk (Julie King) | DR 32, 1,700 keywords, but hacked with spam pages | Security cleanup before anything else |
| Punk Majesty | 17s load, mobile PageSpeed 35, CLS 0.15 | Compress images; fix layout shift |
| Gina D’Emilio | Clean design, but content hidden on embedded pages | Tell each piece’s story on its own indexable page |
| Four Seasons Estate Planning | In the local 3-pack but generic, resume-style copy | Add personal story, FAQ videos, more reviews |
| Saafara Herbal Teas | ~4,600 cheap backlinks; suspected link penalty | Disavow the junk; tell the West African tea story |
Fix The Speed That Drives Buyers Away
Alisha Amnesia’s Punk Majesty store has a real niche — eco-conscious punk streetwear — and a homepage that takes 17 seconds to load. Google’s PageSpeed put mobile at 35 against a desktop of 83, with a Cumulative Layout Shift of 0.15 that makes the page jump as it loads.
The cause is plain in the numbers: roughly 200 requests and 16MB on a single homepage, with too many products crammed above the fold. Compressing images, swapping PNGs for JPEGs, lazy-loading, and limiting the homepage to two or three collections is the unglamorous fix that keeps mobile shoppers from bouncing.
RUN THIS YOURSELF
Run the client’s homepage through Google PageSpeed Insights and read three numbers: the mobile score, the load time, and the Cumulative Layout Shift. A CLS above 0.1 means the page jumps while loading; a payload in the megabytes usually means oversized images. Both are fixable without a redesign — and both cost sales until they are.
Clean Up The Backlinks That Trigger Penalties
Ismail’s Saafara herbal tea site kept losing traffic in sudden drops, and the backlink profile explained why: about 4,600 mostly low-quality links, many bought through Fiverr gigs, with an unnatural spike around August. Google reads that pattern as manipulation, which fits the performance crash.
The move is to list the harmful links and submit a disavow file, then stop buying cheap links for good. From there, the real growth is content — telling the West African origin story these teas deserve and amplifying what works a Dollar a Day using the MAA framework. The same metric-first diagnosis runs on any site through the Quick Audit process.
THE DELIVERABLE
See What’s Quietly Wrecking Your Rankings
We’ll run the same live audit on your site — spam pages, load time, backlink quality — and hand you the fix order that gets you found again.
Dennis Yu
Dennis Yu is the CEO of Local Service Spotlight, a platform that amplifies the reputations of contractors and local service businesses using the Content Factory process. He is a former search engine engineer who has spent a billion dollars on Google and Facebook ads for Nike, Quiznos, Ashley Furniture, Red Bull, State Farm, and other brands.
Dennis has achieved 25% of his goal of creating a million digital marketing jobs by partnering with universities, professional organizations, and agencies. Through Local Service Spotlight, he teaches the Dollar a Day strategy and Content Factory training to help local service businesses enhance their existing local reputation and make the phone ring.
Dennis coaches young adult agency owners serving plumbers, AC technicians, landscapers, roofers, electricians, and believes there should be a standard in measuring local marketing efforts, much like doctors and plumbers must be certified.