Step 1: Your business details - Lookout Ridge IT

Start with the facts a customer acts on. Your phone number, your address, your hours, your licenses.

We typed in what you gave us when we built the site. This step is you reading it back and filling in the rest.

It happens in two places. Your name and tagline are under Admin, then Settings. Everything else is on one tab of the SEO page, called Business info.

The Business info tab

Go to Plugins, then SEO. It sits in the Content Tools group. Click the Business info tab.

It holds four cards, one under the other: Business profile, Contact methods, Social links and Credentials. Each card saves on its own. Change a card, then click Save at the bottom of that card. Your website changes right away.

The top of each card lists checks: things search engines look for, and whether your site has them. A card also tells you if it holds changes that are not live yet. Then its Save keeps a draft, and a Publish button beside it puts the card on your website.

The checklist

1. Your name and tagline

Go to Admin, then Settings, then General. See Settings.

Check Site Title. It is your business name, and it shows at the top of every page, in the footer, and in the browser tab.
Write a Tagline. One short line about what you do. It sits under your name in the footer, and search engines may show it too.
Click Save. There is no Publish on this screen. Your website changes the second you save.

Set a favicon too. It is the tiny picture in the browser tab. Click Select Favicon and pick a small square picture, then click Save. See Settings.

If your tagline still starts with the word EXAMPLE, that is ours. Replace it.

To swap a logo, use Change Logo and pick the new one. To go back to your name in words, click Remove, then Save.

2. Contact methods

This is the list on your Contact page. On the Business info tab, find the Contact methods card and check every row. Contact Methods explains each box.

Read the phone number digit by digit.
Read the email address letter by letter.
Check the address is the one you want customers to drive to.
Check the Heading and the Intro line. Left blank, the heading reads “Contact us” and no intro line shows. Older sites may still have our stock wording here. Reword it in your own voice.
Click Add contact method for anything missing.
Click Save on the card.

Warning

One wrong digit and the calls stop. Nothing on the page looks wrong, so nobody tells you.

Save, then call the number from your own phone and let it ring once.

3. Business profile

This one is mostly for search engines. It is how Google can show your address and your hours. Find the Business profile card. Business Profile explains each box.

Pick your Business type: the closest match, such as Plumber.
Check the street, the city, the state and the ZIP code.
Under Opening hours, click Add hours for each day you are open. Pick the Day, then type when it Opens and Closes.
Leave out the days you are closed. A day with no row shows as closed.
Click Save on the card.

Type times the way you would write them: 9am, 9:30 and 17:00 all work. If the card cannot read a time, it will not save, and it tells you which row to fix.

For a day you close, such as Thanksgiving, click Add special hours instead. It takes a date, or a run of dates.

Many site styles list these hours in the footer. If yours does not, add an Hours row to Contact methods as well.

Important

More than one shop or office? Each one can have its own page, address and hours. See Branches. Once you have one, your main branch’s address and hours are the ones your site shows, and the card says so.

4. Credentials

Your license numbers and your insurance. Find the Credentials card. Credentials explains each box.

Replace each EXAMPLE license row with a real one.
Take out any row you do not need. Click Remove on it.
Check every number against the paper it came from.
Click Add badge for a claim with no number, such as “Bonded”.
Click Save on the card.

Warning

This list is a public claim about your business, and a customer may act on it. List only what you hold, with the number you hold.

The icons in your footer. Find the Social links card. Social Links explains each box.

Open each profile in your browser and copy the whole address from the address bar.
Paste it into Handle or link on the row for that platform.
Take out the rows for platforms you do not use.
Click Save on the card.

The rows arrive empty. A row with nothing in Handle or link shows no icon, so nothing looks broken while you work.

Important

Admin, then Settings, also has a Social Links row. It opens this same tab, so there is only one list of your profiles.

What done looks like

Click View Site and look at your own website.

The Contact page shows your real number, email and address.
The footer shows your name, your tagline and your licenses.
There is one icon per social profile, and each one opens your account.
Nothing on either says EXAMPLE.
Your phone rang when you called it.

Count the footer icons. One missing means that row could not make a working link, and the fix is to paste the whole web address in.

Next: Step 2: Your photos.