Only 356 of 1,222 local business homepages name their people
Content advice usually starts with blogging. Before that, there is a much cheaper question: does your homepage tell a stranger who you are?
Across 1222 South West business homepages we check three links — an about page, a page naming the people, and credentials or accreditation.
- 871 of 1222 (71%) link to an about page
- 356 of 1222 (29%) link to a page naming their people
- 270 of 1222 (22%) link to credentials, accreditation or registration
Only 101 do all three. The median Content & trust score is 49 out of 100, and 640 of 1222 businesses score below 50 — the weakest pillar after the two search ones.
Why those three links, and not word count
Section titled “Why those three links, and not word count”Because they are the questions a customer has and the questions an assessor has, and they happen to be the same questions. For a solicitor, a dentist or a builder, who will actually do this work and are they qualified is the decision. A site that never answers it is asking to be compared on price.
They also correlate with everything else. Firms with all three score a median 60 overall against 46 for firms with none — though the full analysis is careful about what that does and does not prove. The three links are almost certainly a proxy for a maintained website rather than a cause of ranking.
What to write, in order
Section titled “What to write, in order”1. A page naming your people. Three quarters of the businesses we measure do not have one reachable from the homepage. Names, roles, faces, and what each person actually does. This is the single most common gap.
2. A page for each service, not one page listing services. The most common cause of ranking for nothing is having no page competing for the thing — see keyword research.
3. Your credentials, stated and linked. 78% of homepages show none. If you are registered, accredited or regulated, say so and link to the register.
4. Then, if there is time, write things. Depth on a subject is what topical authority is built from — but it is step four, and most local sites never complete steps one to three.
How this is measured, and its limits
Section titled “How this is measured, and its limits”The three checks are parsed from the live homepage once per quarter, matched against link text and URLs. They are deliberately crude, and worth being blunt about: a site could pass all three and still be thin, and a genuinely good site could fail a check because it words a link unusually.
The credentials check was wrong until 29 August 2026 — it matched only property-sector bodies while being applied to every index, so construction, law and accountancy firms scored near zero on a signal many of them pass. It is now specific to each sector, and the changelog records the 43 scores that changed.
Figures recomputed at build time from the published datasets, 1222 businesses across the South West.