We audited 140 Redlands service business websites

In July 2026 we went through 140 Redlands service businesses, the electricians, hairdressers, mechanics, plumbers, landscapers and beauty salons around Victoria Point, Thornlands, Cleveland and Redland Bay, and we checked the website behind every single one.

Not opinions. Not a vibe. We loaded each site and recorded what was actually there.

We expected to find a lot of bad websites. That is not what we found, and the real answer is more interesting.

The short version

Of 140 Redlands service businesses that Google lists as having a website:

• 115 (82%) have a real, working website they own. The basics are in better shape than we expected.
• 25 (18%) do not have a website of their own at all. The link goes to a booking widget, a franchise page, or nowhere.
• 15 (11%) have a link that is completely dead. It does not load. Google is still sending people to it.
• Of the sites that do work, two thirds are missing the markup that tells Google they are a local business.

Nearly 1 in 5 do not actually own their web presence

This was the finding that surprised us.

When Google says a business "has a website", that is not always what is at the other end of the link. Across the 140 businesses we checked:

Every single one of the 11 booking-page businesses was in hair, beauty or barbering. That whole corner of the Redlands has quietly handed its entire web presence to a booking platform.

To be fair to them: those platforms are good at what they do. If you are a solo beautician and Fresha takes your bookings, that is a real problem solved.

But a booking page is not a website. You cannot say who you are on it. You cannot show your work, explain your prices, or answer the question a nervous first-time customer is actually asking. You are one profile in a directory of competitors, on a page you do not own, that you cannot change, and that could put a rival's ad next to your name tomorrow.

The franchise businesses have the same problem in a different suit. Their "website" is a corporate location page. If head office redesigns it, they find out when their customers do.

1 in 9 links is simply dead

Fifteen of the 140 businesses have a website link that does not load at all.

Nine of those are dead domains. We checked twice, and they do not just fail to load, they do not resolve at all. The domain is gone. Somebody let it lapse, and nobody noticed.

These are not dormant businesses. They are trading. Their Google listing is filled in, their reviews are recent, their phone number works. It is only the website that quietly died.

Here is the part worth sitting with. Every one of those businesses is still paying, in attention if not in money, to keep a Google listing that sends interested customers to a broken page. Somebody searched for a plumber, found them, clicked, and hit an error. That person did not ring to let them know. They just rang the next plumber.

The good news, which we did not expect

We are a web studio. We had every commercial incentive to find that Redlands websites are a disaster. They are not, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.

Of the 115 businesses with a real working website:

• 92% are secure (they load over HTTPS, with the padlock)
• 96% work properly on a phone
• 97% have a proper page title
• 89% have a sitemap

Those are the fundamentals, and most Redlands service businesses have them covered. Anyone telling you that local websites are universally broken is selling something. The basics are broadly fine.

Where the real gap is

The gap is not in the plumbing. It is in what the site tells Google about who you are.

Only 34% of the working sites have LocalBusiness markup. Two thirds do not.

In plain English: there is a small, invisible block of code that sits in the background of a website and tells search engines "this is a real business, here is its name, its phone number, its suburb, its opening hours." It is not visible to a human visitor. It is written for the search engine.

Without it, Google has to guess all of that from the page. Often it guesses fine. Sometimes it does not.

Two thirds of Redlands service businesses are asking Google to guess.

A few other gaps in the same family:

• 29% have no meta description, the sentence that appears under your name in the search results. If you do not write it, Google grabs whatever text it likes from your page. Sometimes that is your address. Sometimes it is your cookie banner.
• 30% have no H1, the main heading that tells a search engine what the page is about.
• 17% do not show a phone number on the homepage. For a service business, this one genuinely hurts. Someone who wants to ring you should never have to hunt.

None of these will destroy a business. All of them are free to fix.

It varies a lot by trade

Hair and beauty is the most polished and the least independent. Every site is secure, every site works on a phone, and it is also the category that has outsourced itself to booking platforms.

Mechanics are the worst served. Only one automotive business in seventeen had LocalBusiness markup. If you run a workshop in the Redlands, your competition is not doing this. That is an open door.

How to check your own site in five minutes

You do not need us for any of this.

1. Click the website link on your Google Business Profile. Does it load? Does it load fast on your phone, on mobile data, not on your own wifi?
2. Look for the padlock next to the address bar. No padlock means visitors may see a "not secure" warning.
3. Google your own business name. Read the grey sentence under your name. Did you write that, or did Google pick it?
4. Find your phone number on your homepage. Can you tap it and have it ring? If a customer has to copy it out by hand, you have lost some of them.
5. Check the year in your footer. If it says 2019, so does the impression you are giving.

If all five are fine, you are ahead of most of the Redlands. Genuinely.

What we checked, and what this does not prove

We think you should be able to check our work, so here is exactly what we did and where it falls short.

We took 140 Redlands service businesses that Google lists as having a website. We loaded each homepage and recorded whether it was secure, whether it worked on mobile, whether it had a title, a meta description, an H1, a phone number, a sitemap and LocalBusiness markup. We wrote those criteria down before we ran the scan, so we could not move the goalposts once we saw the results.

What this does not prove:

• This is not a random sample of every Redlands business. It is 140 service businesses, weighted towards Victoria Point, Thornlands and Cleveland. Capalaba and Wellington Point are not represented.
• It only covers businesses that have a website at all. Plenty of local businesses have none, and they are not in these numbers.
• We did not measure site speed. So we are making no claims about it.
• Failing a check does not mean a website is broken. A site with no meta description still works perfectly well for its customers. These are gaps, not disasters, and we are not going to dress them up as disasters.

We are not naming any of the businesses. This is about the Redlands, not about embarrassing a hairdresser.

Who wrote this, and why you should be sceptical

We are Built Around You Creative. We are a web studio in the Redlands, and we build websites for local service businesses. So yes: we are the people who benefit if you read this and decide your website needs work.

Weigh it accordingly. That is exactly why we published the numbers that undercut our own pitch, like the 92% of Redlands sites that are already secure and the 96% that already work on a phone. If we had wanted to scare you, we would have left those out.

The data is what it is. Most Redlands service businesses have a decent website. A meaningful minority have one that is dead, or one they do not own. And most are invisible to Google as a local business for want of a bit of markup that costs nothing.