We Checked 61 Ankeny Business Websites. Here's What We Found.

In September we ran 57 small-town Iowa business websites through our free page checker and wrote up what we found. Not one passed everything. The question I got back most was some version of "sure, but that's small towns. What about somewhere with real competition?"

Fair. So this time we did Ankeny.

I spend a lot of time in Ankeny. My son goes to school at North Polk, so I'm in the pick-up and drop-off line a lot, and we work with three Ankeny businesses already. It's grown about 14% since 2020 by the Census Bureau's count, and when somebody there searches for a chiropractor, mortgage lender, or a roofer, they get a wall of options. If a website is going to matter anywhere in Iowa, it matters in Ankeny.

We pulled 66 Ankeny businesses with websites across eight trades: dentists, chiropractors, landscapers, roofers, electricians, HVAC, plumbers, and lawn care. Five sites blocked automated checks or wouldn't load, so the numbers below are for the 61 we could read. Nobody gets named. If you recognize your own site, the fixes are mostly small.

The headline: 7 out of 61 passed clean

Seven sites, 11.5%, came through with nothing flagged. That's the good news, and it's real. In the small-town study, that number was zero. Ankeny has a handful of businesses whose sites are genuinely in order.

The other side: 25 sites, 41%, had at least one outright failure. Not a "could be better." Something missing that Google or a customer's phone is looking for right now.

One in three sites has a headline problem

21 of 61 sites, 34.4%, had a heading problem, and 10 of those had no clear H1 at all. The H1 is the page's headline, one of the first things Google reads to figure out what you do and where you do it. A homepage with no H1 is a storefront with no sign over the door, and in a town where we found eighteen chiropractor websites without trying hard, that sign is doing a lot of work.

One in three can't introduce itself in a search result

23 sites, 37.7%, had a missing or weak meta description. That's the sentence under your business name in a Google result. When it's missing, Google writes one for you by grabbing whatever text it finds. Sometimes that's your tagline. Sometimes it's your cookie notice.

Eight of those sites had no description at all.

A third have thin or missing schema

Schema markup is a block of structured data that tells Google exactly what kind of business you are, in a format machines read directly. 20 sites, 32.8%, either had none or an incomplete version. 12 had none at all.

This is the fix I'd prioritize for most of them. In a suburb where the map pack decides who gets the call, Google reconstructing your identity from scraps instead of reading the label you handed it is a real disadvantage.

17 sites make you memorize the phone number

27.9% of the sites had the phone number on the page as plain text, not a tappable link. On a desktop that's fine. On a phone, the customer has to memorize your number, switch apps, and type it in. Some will. Some will hit the back button and tap the next result.

It's a one-line fix in almost any website builder.

The part that surprised me

Ankeny did better than the small towns on almost every check. More clean sites, fewer missing descriptions, fewer missing headlines. Competition does that. When several roofers are fighting for the first page, the ones with sloppy sites fall off it, and the survivors have learned to keep things tidy.

But "better than a town of 1,700" is not the bar in Ankeny. The bar is the other businesses in your trade that show up next to you. When 41% of a market has at least one hard failure, the business that fixes its basics isn't catching up. It's clearing a bar that nearly half the field hasn't, and most of the fixes are small.

Check your own site

The whole check is free at mainstreetaudit.com. It's the exact tool we used for this study, no email required. It'll tell you your headline, your description, your schema, and your phone link in one pass. The full list of free tools is at marketingmainstreet.co/free-tools.html.

If the list is long and you'd rather hand it to somebody who's already in Ankeny, or on our way there, that's what we do. Here's how we work with Ankeny businesses. Call or text (515) 422-6208.