Search
There is no trick. There is a list of things that make a site legible to a search engine and useful to a person, and most small business sites are missing half of it.
What the work actually isa-competitor.ca › services
Services | A Competitor
We offer a wide range of services to both domestic and commercial customers across the region…
yourbusiness.ca › the-exact-service
The exact thing they searched for, in their words
What it costs, how long it takes, what is included, and one obvious way to get in touch. Written for the search, not for the brochure.
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Top 10 providers near you — Directory
A page of adverts sitting between you and the customer, which is what happens when you have no page of your own.
SEO has a bad name because a lot of it is sold dishonestly. It is worth saying plainly what I do and what I will not do, before you spend anything.
Making the site readable by a search engine, writing pages that answer a real search, and then measuring whether it worked. That is most of it. It is not secret and it is not clever — it is just rarely done properly.
Nobody outside Google controls the ranking. A guarantee usually means ranking you for a phrase so specific that nobody searches it — which looks like success in a monthly report and produces no work.
Ask anyone promising page one which phrase, and how many people search it.
Paid link networks work until the algorithm update that discounts them, and then you are worse off than when you started, with an invoice to show for it.
The links worth having come from being worth mentioning.
Pages stuffed with the same phrase read badly to people and, for well over a decade now, badly to Google as well. Forty near-identical town pages are the same mistake at scale.
If a page would embarrass you to read aloud, it is not going to rank.
Done roughly in this order, because there is no point writing pages for a site that cannot be crawled.
Pages blocked by a stray rule, a sitemap listing URLs that redirect, five versions of the same page competing with each other. This is the least interesting part of the job and the one most likely to be quietly costing you everything.
Speed is a ranking factor, but it matters far more as the reason people leave before the page appears. The fixes are usually images, fonts and scripts nobody chose.
Google indexes the mobile version. If your site is an afterthought on a phone, that afterthought is what gets ranked.
Marking up your services, questions and details so they can appear as more than a blue link. Useful, quick, and not a substitute for the page being good.
A page trying to rank for eight things ranks for none. The fix is boring and effective: work out the handful of searches that actually bring work, and give each one a page that answers it completely.
Someone typing a price question wants a price, not a contact form. Pages that answer the actual question outrank pages that dodge it, and they convert better when they do.
One main heading, sub-headings that say what each part covers. It reads better, it is navigable by keyboard and screen reader, and it happens to be what a crawler uses.
Pages linked from nowhere are found by nobody. Linking your related pages to each other, in the words people search, is free and most sites do not bother.
Suppliers, trade bodies, the local paper, the supplier whose product you fit, the charity whose hall you did for free. Unglamorous, slow, real, and impossible to penalise you for.
The listings you already own and have half filled in. Free, immediate, and often the first thing that moves.
A genuinely useful guide about the thing you do beats forty guest posts on sites nobody reads.
Everything that works quickly in this part of the job works by breaking a rule, and rules that are broken get enforced eventually. I would rather build something that survives the next update.
It is free, it comes from Google, and it tells you the real phrases people used to reach you. Most small businesses either have not connected it or have never opened it.
First place for a phrase nobody searches is worth nothing. Enquiries are the number, and everything else is a step towards it.
Plain figures from your own accounts, which you can open yourself. No dashboard only I can log into.
Some phrases are not winnable at your budget, and the honest answer is to say so and spend the money somewhere it works. I would rather tell you that than bill you monthly for standing still.
How the work goes
What you rank for now, what you could, and what is stopping you. It usually turns up two or three things that have been quietly costing you for years — a blocked page, a duplicate site, a homepage trying to be eight pages. You get the findings whether or not you go further with me.
The technical blockers first, because everything else is wasted until a crawler can read the site properly. Indexing, duplicates, speed, the mobile version, the things that break silently. This part has an end.
One page at a time, for the searches worth having. Each one gets a title and description written rather than generated, the question actually answered, and links from the pages it belongs with. Slower than publishing forty thin pages, and it is the reason it works.
Search changes, competitors publish, things break without telling you. If you would rather not keep an eye on it yourself, I do — and I will say when there is nothing worth doing this month rather than inventing something to bill for.
Almost always with the audit, because until you know what is wrong, everything else is a guess with an invoice attached.
A written list of what is holding the site back, in the order it is worth fixing, including the parts that are already fine.
The handful of technical things that make everything else possible. A project with a start and an end.
A page for each search worth having, written properly, starting with the one closest to money.
Monthly checks, new pages as the business changes, and an honest answer when nothing needs doing.
Quoted per scope after the audit, as a fixed price rather than a monthly retainer for unspecified work.
Ask these of anyone selling you search work, me included.
Technical fixes can show up in weeks. Ranking for a phrase people actually search usually takes months, and longer in a competitive city. Anyone quoting you a date is guessing.
No, and neither can anyone else. Nobody outside Google controls the ranking. A guarantee usually means ranking you for a phrase so specific that nobody searches it, which looks like success in a report and produces no work.
Almost certainly not. Most small businesses get further from a handful of pages that answer real buying questions properly than from weekly posts nobody reads. Publish when you have something to say.
The fixing is a project with an end. Keeping up with it — new pages, checking nothing has broken, watching what people actually search — is optional and month to month.
Then broad phrases are expensive and slow, and the winnable work is specific: the exact service, the exact area, the questions your competitors answer badly. That is where a small business can still win.
As a drafting tool, the way you would use a spellchecker. Nothing goes live that has not been rewritten to sound like you and checked for accuracy, because pages written entirely by a machine read like it and say nothing only you would know.
Start here
The audit tells you what is holding the site back and what it is worth fixing. You can act on it yourself, or with someone else, and it is still yours.