Why Your Business Email Goes to Spam
It leaves your outbox, nothing bounces, and it lands in a spam folder you cannot see. What SPF, DKIM and DMARC are really checking, and how to test your own domain in ten minutes.
New Jersey & Remote
Better websites.
Clearer technology decisions.
Websites, SEO improvements and practical technology advice for small businesses, with a written scope and a price you know before we start.
What's going on?
Pick one. I'll point you at the right first step, with a price.
- I need a website
- My site is down or hacked
- My site is slow
- I'm not showing up on Google
- I want more local customers
- My email is going to spam
- I don't trust my numbers
- My tools don't talk to each other
- I'm not sure where to start
No pitch until you pick something. That's the point.
Your first step
Four-Page Website Launch
A focused website with SEO built in.
Your first step
Website Rescue
Get it back up, then find out why.
Your first step
Website Speed Review & Fixes
Find what's slowing your site down, then fix what matters.
Your first step
SEO Setup
The technical and on-page foundation a small-business site needs to be found.
Your first step
Local SEO & Google Business Profile
Show up in the map results.
Your first step
Conversion Tracking Setup
Know which clicks become customers.
Your first step
Automation Discovery Sprint
Map one repetitive workflow, prototype the automation, prove it works.
Start with what your business needs.
All servicesHow customers start
Three ways in, each with a defined first step - so you always know what you're buying and what comes back.
Websites & SEO
Four-Page Website Launch, Website Rescue, Website Speed Review & Fixes, SEO Setup, Local SEO & Google Business Profile, Conversion Tracking Setup, Email Deliverability Setup, Blog Refresh, Website Care Plan
How customers start View a defined package
Technology Audits
Website Health Audit, Business Technology Audit, Audit + Implementation Planning
How customers start Purchase a scoped audit
Technology & AI Advisory
Technology Advisory, Automation Discovery Sprint, AI Workflow Pilot
How customers start Book an introductory call
What an audit actually finds
Owners describe a symptom. The work is finding the thing underneath it, which is almost always somewhere nobody thought to look.
Illustrative examples of the kinds of problem these audits surface. Not client case studies.
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Quiet failure
“Our inquiries just stopped.”
dig TXT _dmarc.example.com "v=DMARC1; p=quarantine; rua=mailto:[email protected]" Authentication-Results: mx.google.com; spf=pass smtp.mailfrom=srv42.sharedhost.net dmarc=fail (p=QUARANTINE) header.from=example.comDMARC record, then a received header from a test send What it actually wasSPF passed, so every free checker said the domain was fine. But the contact form sent as the owner's own address through the host's relay, so the envelope and the visible From did not match, and DMARC alignment failed. Gmail quarantined it silently. No bounce, no error, nothing in the site logs. The form had been working perfectly for eleven months and then quietly stopped.
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Critical
“Google shows the wrong page when you search our name.”
GET / <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/page/1"> GET /blog/page/1 <link rel="canonical" href="https://example.com/blog/page/1">Canonical tags served on two different URLs What it actually wasA pagination plugin wrote a canonical on every archive page pointing at page one, and the theme emitted the same tag on the homepage. Two different URLs claimed to be the same page, so Google chose one, and it chose the archive. Every branded search landed on a list of blog posts instead of the homepage.
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Warning
“It's fast for us and slow for customers.”
x-cache: HIT ttfb 0.11s office, repeat visit x-cache: MISS ttfb 1.94s cold, first visit LCP 4.8s <img src="hero.jpg" width="4000"> (no srcset)Two requests to the same URL, minutes apart What it actually wasEveryone at the company had a warm cache and a desktop connection. A first-time visitor on a phone got an uncached origin and a four-thousand-pixel hero image with no responsive sizes. The people who kept testing it were the only ones who could never reproduce the problem.
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Critical
“Rankings fell off a cliff after the redesign.”
HTTP/2 200 x-robots-tag: noindex, nofollow <meta name="robots" content="noindex">Live production response, three weeks after launch What it actually wasThe staging noindex shipped with the new theme, and nobody checked the response headers after go-live. Search Console had been reporting it for three weeks in a section no one had opened. Traffic did not fall because the redesign was bad. It fell because the site had asked to be removed.
Run the first ten seconds of the audit
Three checks on any domain, right now. How fast it answers, whether your email is authenticated, and whether anything is telling Google to stay away.
This is three of about forty checks. See the full audit
A practical partner
from question to solution.
I help you understand the problem, decide what matters, and get the work moving - whether that's a new website, a site that should be ranking better, or a stack of tools that don't talk to each other.
About ChrisFrom the blog
All articlesYour Contact Form Stopped Sending and Nobody Told You
The visitor sees your thank you message. You see a quiet week. Why forms fail silently, and how to build one where a mail problem costs you the notification but never the lead.
What a Website Care Plan Should Actually Include
One provider charges $49 a month and another charges $400, and both say updates, backups, security, support. Five questions that reveal what you are actually buying.