A user gave Webvidence a 3/10, and they were right about the problem
I got some direct feedback from a Webvidence user this week.
They said finding businesses faster was useful, but the app had marked several businesses as having no website when they actually did. The website just was not connected to the Google business listing.
That is a pretty serious trust problem.
Webvidence was treating “Google did not return a website” too much like “this business does not have a website.” Those are not the same thing, and once a user catches that a few times, the audit, recommendation, and outreach around that business all become questionable.
So I changed it.
The app now says “No website linked on Google” instead of claiming no website exists. Users can add or correct a business website directly from the lead page, and Webvidence will run a fresh analysis against the corrected address.
I also reduced the recommendation boost that came from a missing Google website. A missing field on a business listing should not automatically push somebody to the top of the prospect list.
If the same business appears again in another search, the user-corrected website is preserved instead of being replaced by the incomplete Google data.
This was not the most exciting feature to build, but it was probably more important than adding another outreach tool.
The search side only works if users can trust the business information underneath it.
The next step will probably be a secondary website lookup for businesses where Google does not provide one, but I wanted the manual correction and honest wording live first instead of pretending the automatic data was more complete than it really was.
