Not Who's Best. Who's Visible. The whole of SEO in one video.

Cold open

Not who is best. Who is visible.

Imagine somebody is standing in your town right now. They need the thing you sell.

Maybe they need a plumber. Maybe an electrician. A solicitor. A dentist. A photographer.

A restaurant. A roofer. A mechanic. A phone repair shop. A software company.

Maybe they don’t know your business exists. And that’s the important part. They don’t start by thinking about your company. They start with a problem. They take out their phone.

They type something. Or they speak into it. And they search. And within seconds, something decides what they see.

An answer. A map. A list of websites. Reviews. Images.

Videos. Products. Maybe advertisements. Maybe an AI-generated response. Maybe several of those things at once.

And somewhere inside all of that is your business. Or it isn’t.

And this is the part that matters. The customer doesn’t see every business that could help them. They only see the ones that are visible. Not who is best. Who is visible.

That’s what this video is about. Not just Google rankings. Not just keywords. Not just blog posts. Not just backlinks.

Not just your Google Business Profile. Not just technical SEO. I’m going to explain the whole thing. How search works. What SEO actually is. And the five places your business can be found when somebody searches for what you sell. By the end of this video, you’ll be able to name all five, and you’ll know exactly what sits behind each one.

Starting with the question that is surprisingly often skipped: What actually is SEO? And before we can answer that, we need to answer an even more basic question. What is a search engine?

Part One: Foundations

What is a search engine?

When most people hear the phrase “search engine”, they immediately think of Google. And Google is obviously one of the biggest examples. But the underlying behaviour is much broader than Google.

People search on YouTube. They search on Amazon. They search on Instagram. They search on Facebook. They search in maps.

They search marketplaces. They search within websites. They search for products. They search for businesses. They search for people.

They search for answers. They search for images. They search for videos. They search for places. They search for instructions.

They search for things they don’t even know the name of yet.

So I want you to separate two ideas. The first is search as a behaviour. The second is a particular search engine or search platform. Search is simply the act of trying to find something. And the platform is the system helping you find it.

That distinction matters because SEO has become much broader than the old idea of: “Put some keywords on your website and get to number one on Google.” That’s not the whole thing. SEO is about discoverability. It’s about helping search systems understand what you have. Who it’s for. Where it applies. And why it might be useful.

And that can apply to different kinds of content. A website page. A product page. A business profile. A video.

An image. An article. A location. A piece of documentation. An author.

An organisation. And increasingly, information can be surfaced through different search interfaces, including AI-powered features within search.

Google’s own current documentation puts AI features alongside its other search features. Images, videos, snippets, title links and business details. And it says there are no additional requirements to appear in them. So when I say “search” in this video, I don’t want you thinking only about ten blue links. Search is an interface between: a person who wants something and

information that might satisfy that need. SEO sits in the middle.

So what is SEO?

SEO stands for: Search Engine Optimisation. And the basic definition is simple. SEO is the process of optimising something so that it can be discovered and understood in search. But I want to make that definition more useful.

Because “optimise your website for search engines” can sound like you’re writing for a robot. You’re not. You’re building something for a person. Then you’re making it easier for search systems to understand and surface it. So here’s the definition I want you to remember:

SEO is the work of making the things you want people to find discoverable in the places where they search. That’s the big idea. And everything else in this video is really an unpacking of that sentence.

What are we actually optimising?

This is where SEO gets interesting. Because we’re not necessarily optimising a website. We’re optimising whatever contains the information that we want discovered.

That might be: A website. A page. A service page. A product.

A business profile. A video. A YouTube channel. An image. An article.

A location. A person’s author profile. An organisation. A collection of products. A piece of documentation.

Or a combination of all of them. And that’s why you’ll hear people talk about different types of SEO.

Technical SEO. On-page SEO. Off-page SEO. Content SEO. Local SEO.

Article SEO. AI Search SEO. E-commerce SEO. International SEO. Image SEO.

Video SEO. News SEO. And so on. These aren’t necessarily completely separate disciplines. They’re different applications of the same underlying problem:

Can the thing be found, understood, trusted and presented to the right person when they search? That’s the foundation. So that’s what SEO is. Now let’s look at where it actually happens.

Part Two: The five places

In this video, we’re going to cover a lot.

Search. SEO. Intent. Keywords. Technical SEO.

Content. E-E-A-T. Authors. Local SEO. Reviews.

Images. Video. Accessibility. Performance. Search Console.

Organic growth. Paid search.

So before we go into any of it, I want to simplify the whole thing. Not by pretending SEO is simple. But by giving you a useful mental model. When someone searches for something you sell, there are several places where your business can become visible. For this framework, I’m going to keep it to five.

Five. Not six. Not twelve. Five.

One. The answer. The response search gives before anyone clicks anything. Two. The map. Where geography matters, and where local businesses are chosen. Three. The links. The traditional organic results, the doorways into websites. Four. The reviews. Where your reputation becomes visible. Five. The door. Your website, where a searcher becomes a customer.

The answer. The map. The links. The reviews. The door. Almost everything else in this video, every technical term, every tool, every tactic, belongs to one of those five places. The two things that sit alongside them, measuring it and paying for it, get their own parts near the end. And if you’re watching this because you run a business, subscribe. One press. Everything on this channel is about making your business easier to find and easier to choose.

But before we walk through the five places, there’s something that comes before all of them. The person doing the searching.

Part Three: The searcher

Before SEO: what does the person actually want?

Now let’s talk about one of the most important concepts in all of SEO. Search intent. Because a keyword is not a customer. A search query is a clue about what the person wants. Through a lot of this video, I’m going to use one real business as the example.

My own. JorTech. We repair phones, tablets, laptops and consoles, and we recover data.

Imagine someone searches: “phone screen” What do they want? We don’t know. They might want to buy a replacement screen.

They might want to fix it themselves. They might want to know what a repair costs. They might want a screen protector. They might be looking for a repair shop. They might be looking for one near them.

Now compare that with: “cracked iPhone screen repair near me” That’s much more specific. Or: “how to fix a phone that won’t charge”

Different intent. Or: “iPhone 15 screen replacement cost” Different again. Or:

“JorTech phone number” That’s navigational. The person already knows what they’re looking for. They already know the business by name. They just need the way in. So you can have the same broad subject and completely different intent.

And if you misunderstand the intent, you can create a technically excellent page that is still the wrong answer. That’s one of the biggest mistakes in SEO. People ask: “What keyword should I rank for?” A better question is:

“What is the person actually trying to accomplish?”

A name you can own

That search only works if your name is yours. JorTech used to be called Leeds Tech Repair. We renamed it in August 2026. It was a clear name. It was also the category. Someone searching it is not looking for us. They are looking for anyone. So our brand search and the category search were the same search, and we were competing for our own name against every rival in the city. Once people know you, that is the wrong way round.

A search for your name should return you. Your website, your Business Profile, your reviews, your social profiles. And nothing you compete with. A brandable name makes that possible. Nobody types “JorTech” for any other reason. A descriptive name carries the category while nobody knows you. The trade-off is that it never stops carrying it. And if you rename, do it properly. The old address redirects permanently to the new one. We kept the old domain, because email still arrives on it. A name people know is something you redirect, not something you drop.

What your name should return

So here is a habit worth keeping. Search your own business name, in a private window, and look at what comes back. Google builds several things around a name it recognises, and none of them are switches.

Sitelinks are the extra links from your own site under your result. Google describes them as automated: its systems analyse your site’s link structure to find shortcuts, and it only shows them when it thinks they will be useful. There is no request form. What Google asks for is informative, compact titles and headings, a logical site structure, and concise, relevant internal link text.

The knowledge panel is the box that appears for an entity in Google’s Knowledge Graph. Google says it is automatically generated from various sources across the web, and that an official representative can claim it and suggest changes. For a business serving customers at a location, the similar box is usually your Business Profile. Part Five.

And you can tell Google what you are called in a language it reads directly. Organization structured data on your home page has no required properties, but Google says some can influence what is shown in Search and in your knowledge panel, including which logo. Name, alternate name, legal name, your URL, a logo of at least 112 by 112 pixels that Google can crawl, and same-as links to your profiles. Then fix what the search shows you. A wrong number on a forgotten profile. An old trading name still outranking the new one.

Trade marks, briefly

One more thing about your name, and this is not legal advice.

Companies House puts it plainly: registering a company name does not automatically protect it by trade mark law. Companies House registers companies and the Intellectual Property Office registers trade marks. Two different forms of protection, two different organisations. A domain name is not a trade mark either. As far as I understand it, a domain is an address you rent, not a right to the name.

GOV.UK says a registered trade mark lets you take legal action against anyone who uses your brand without permission. It cannot just describe the goods or services, and it cannot be too common and non-distinctive. At the time of recording, GOV.UK lists £205 for one trade mark in one class and £60 for each additional class. A class is the category of goods or services you protect it for. It lasts ten years and must be renewed. Check the live page. A trade mark does not change how Google ranks anything. It gives you a legal basis to stop others using the name.

And in Google Ads, a route. Google says it does not allow ads that infringe trademark rights, and an owner can complain about specific advertisers where they hold the rights. But Google also lists using trade marks as keywords among the things it will not restrict. So a rival can still bid on “JorTech”. What they generally cannot do is put it in their advert.

Short-tail and long-tail search terms

You’ll often hear SEO people talk about short-tail and long-tail keywords. A short-tail term might be: “phone repair” “dentist” “running shoes”

“SEO” A long-tail search might be: “iPhone screen repair open now in Leeds” “best running shoes for flat feet under £100” “how to fix a WordPress canonical error”

Long-tail doesn’t necessarily mean “better.” And short-tail doesn’t necessarily mean “worse.” They represent different levels of specificity. The more specific the search, often the clearer the person’s intent becomes. But there is another important lesson here.

Search volume is not the same thing as business value. A keyword with 100,000 searches isn’t automatically more valuable to your business than a keyword with 500. If those 500 people are looking for exactly what you sell, the smaller audience may matter enormously. SEO isn’t about chasing the biggest number. It’s about matching demand with relevance.

Keyword research

Keywords still matter. Anyone telling you that words people type into search don’t matter is making this more complicated than it needs to be. Search engines need to understand what a page is about. And users need to recognise that your result is relevant to what they’re looking for. But modern SEO shouldn’t mean repeating the same phrase 47 times.

You start with the subject. Then you understand the different ways people describe it. Then you understand the questions around it. Then you understand the different intents. Then you build useful resources around those needs.

For example, take a tech repair business like JorTech.

You might have: Phone screen repair. Battery replacement. Laptop repair. Console repair.

Water damage repair. Data recovery. And questions: How much does a phone screen repair cost? How long does a laptop repair take?

How do I know whether my laptop is worth repairing? What should I do if my phone gets wet? Those aren’t simply a list of keywords. They’re a map of customer problems. That’s how I want you thinking about keyword research.

Don’t build a keyword list. Build a map of demand.

Where the map comes from

Where does the map come from? Five places, and only one of them costs money.

The counter. Every question a customer asks in the shop or on the phone is a search somebody else is typing. Write them down for a month. Google itself. Type the service into the search box and read what it suggests before you press enter. Then read the questions it shows between the results, and the related searches at the bottom. That is Google telling you what people ask. Search Console, once you have it. Part Nine. The queries your pages already appear for are the demand you’ve already touched.

Google Trends, for direction rather than size. Google’s own FAQ says it’s a sample of searches, scaled from 0 to 100 against the highest point in the range, and that terms with low volume show as zero. So it tells you whether laptop repair rises in September. It doesn’t tell you how many people.

And Keyword Planner, which is the one behind a card. It’s a Google Ads tool. Google says you complete the account, billing details included, to reach it, and an account that isn’t running campaigns sees ranges rather than numbers. The third-party tools you’ll be sold estimate the same thing from their own data. Useful for ideas. Not a measurement, and never a promise. Now you know what the person wants. So let’s follow them into the five places, starting with the first thing search shows them.

Part Four: Place one, the answer

The first place is: The answer.

Search engines increasingly provide answers directly. Sometimes that’s a traditional featured snippet. Sometimes a knowledge result. Sometimes a local summary. Sometimes an AI-powered search feature.

Google’s current Search documentation covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and says there are no additional requirements to appear in them. No new machine-readable files. No AI text files. No special markup. The important thing isn’t to treat it as a separate discipline with its own rules, a mystical new thing called: “AI SEO.” There isn’t a button you press that says: “Make ChatGPT recommend my business.”

And while we’re on AI: these videos are planned, scripted and edited with Claude. I use it every day. So when I tell you it isn’t a button, I’d know. The underlying principles still matter. Can your information be discovered? Can it be understood? Is it useful?

Is it trustworthy? Is the underlying entity clear? Does the content genuinely answer questions? Can search systems access it? Those fundamentals don’t disappear because the interface changes.

The interface can change. The underlying need remains.

Be useful enough to be found and understood.

Featured snippets, precisely

The featured snippet is the older answer, the box at the top with a passage lifted from a page. Google’s page says its systems determine whether a page would make a good featured snippet for a search, and if so, elevate it. And it says you can’t mark your page as one. It’s lifted from an ordinary result, so the work is the ordinary work: a page that answers the question directly, near the top, in plain words, on a page that already ranks for it. The controls are the ones you’re about to hear again. nosnippet and data-nosnippet remove you from all snippets, featured or not. And Google says the shorter your max-snippet setting, the less likely the page is to be featured.

AI Overviews and AI Mode, precisely

AI Overviews and AI Mode may use what Google calls query fan-out: multiple related searches across subtopics and data sources, to develop a response. While the response is being generated, its models identify more supporting web pages, so it can display a wider and more diverse set of helpful links than a classic web search. The eligibility test is one sentence: indexed, and eligible to be shown in Google Search with a snippet, meeting the technical requirements.

Google says to limit the information shown from your pages in Search, use nosnippet, data-nosnippet, max-snippet or noindex. Noindex you’ll meet again in Part Eight; the three snippet controls are its siblings, and they all apply here because an AI response is Google showing something from a page. If a control seems ignored, Google’s advice is to check the HTML Googlebot received with URL Inspection, then wait, because crawling can take anywhere from several days to several months.

Google-Extended

Then Google-Extended, which is widely misread. It is a standalone product token for robots.txt. Google says publishers can use it to manage whether content it crawls may be used for training future generations of Gemini models, and for grounding in Gemini Apps and Grounding with Google Search on Vertex AI. The same page says Google-Extended does not impact a site’s inclusion in Google Search, nor is it used as a ranking signal in Google Search.

The AI features page describes it as limiting AI training and grounding in some of Google’s other systems. Other systems. Not Search. Search, with all its features, belongs to Googlebot. So blocking Google-Extended is a decision about training and grounding in Gemini. It is not a way out of AI Overviews, and not a way in.

The other answer engines

OpenAI and Perplexity publish their own crawler pages, and the pattern repeats: a search crawler that respects robots.txt, and a user-triggered fetcher that may not.

Three of OpenAI’s matter here. OAI-SearchBot surfaces websites in ChatGPT’s search features, and a site that opts it out in robots.txt will not be shown in ChatGPT search answers, though it can still appear as a navigational link. GPTBot crawls content that may be used in training its foundation models, and disallowing it says the content should not be used for that. ChatGPT-User visits a page when a person asks ChatGPT a question, and OpenAI says robots.txt rules may not apply, because that is a user action, not crawling.

PerplexityBot surfaces and links websites in its results, is not used to crawl for foundation models, and Perplexity recommends allowing it. Perplexity-User acts on a person’s request and generally ignores robots.txt.

Microsoft’s controls date from September 2023, written for Bing Chat, and they are meta tags. NOCACHE: content may be included in answers as URL, title and snippet only, and only those three may be used in training. NOARCHIVE: not included, not linked, not used in training. Neither: may be included, and may be used to train its generative models. And Microsoft says content with either tag still appears in its search results. Across all four, the front door to the AI answer is the same crawlable, indexable page. Whether your content trains a model is a separate question, and it is a business decision, not a search one.

llms.txt

You will be offered an llms.txt file.

Its own home page calls it a proposal to standardise on an llms.txt file to help agents use a website. Proposed by Jeremy Howard in September 2024, now at version two of the proposal. The page says the AI labs publish one for their own developer documentation. It does not say that Google, Bing, ChatGPT search, Perplexity or Copilot read one when answering a question about your business. That is the file behind the no-AI-text-files line from earlier. Nothing on that page says it will bring a repair shop in Leeds a customer.

What every engine reads

What all of them read is the entity. Consistent facts: one name, one address, one phone number, everywhere. That is NAP, Part Five, and it is why JorTech’s rename from Leeds Tech Repair had to land everywhere at once. Organization structured data on the home page, so a machine can tie the old name to the new one. Part Three has the fields. Person structured data for the people the expertise rests on, pointing at a real page about them. An About page that says who you are, where you are and what you have actually done, with credentials that are true. Part Eight’s trust layer.

Bylines on expert content that lead to that page. And the one thing not to do: the fifty-town AI page farm. Part Eleven has the policy. An answer engine that quotes you is borrowing your reputation, and it can only borrow what is there. And one of the ways you make the underlying entity clear, in a language machines read directly, is structured data.

Structured data

This is where you provide machine-readable information about what a page represents. This lives in your website’s code, but it exists to serve the answer, so it belongs here.

For example: An article. A product. An organisation. A local business.

An event. A breadcrumb. And other supported entities and features.

Google says structured data gives it explicit clues about the meaning of a page, and can enable richer search results. But structured data is not a magic ranking switch.

That’s another distinction worth remembering. Eligibility is not guaranteed appearance. You can implement valid structured data and still not receive the visual feature you were hoping for. And you should never mark up information the visitor can’t actually see on the page. The answer is where search speaks for you. The next place is where geography decides.

Part Five: Place two, the map

The second place is: The map. This is particularly important for local businesses. You want the business to be understood as: the right business,

in the right place, offering the right thing.

Local SEO

This is local SEO, one of the biggest areas for local businesses. And local search is different because location matters.

If I search: “coffee shop” the results I want in Amsterdam aren’t the same results I want in Manchester. If I search: “phone screen repair”

the physical location of the business can be extremely important.

Google currently says local results are mainly based on: relevance, distance and popularity. Let’s take those one at a time. One note on words: Google’s headline sentence says popularity, and the section explaining that third factor is headed prominence. Same factor.

Relevance

Does the business match what the person is looking for? If someone searches for a dentist, a dentist is relevant. A bicycle shop isn’t. If someone searches for console repair, a shop that actually repairs consoles is more relevant than one that only sells phone cases. Or picture framing. Someone in north Leeds searches for a framer. AS Frames on Potternewton Lane in Chapel Allerton, a framing workshop that also cuts glass to size and prints, is relevant. A gift shop with a shelf of ready-made frames is a weaker match.

So your business information needs to make the business understandable.

Distance

How far is the business from the relevant location? This can be the searcher’s location or a location included in the query. And this is important because local SEO isn’t simply: “Put the town name on your website.” Physical geography matters.

Take AK Barbers in LS5. Someone in that part of Leeds who types “barbers near me” is close by, and distance works in their favour. Someone typing the same words on the other side of Leeds is not, and that’s the system doing its job.

“Near me” is not a place. It’s the searcher.

Google’s wording is that distance refers to how far each business is from the customer who’s searching, and if a customer doesn’t share where they are, Google uses what it knows about their location. So “near me” on your website moves you closer to nobody. Your address, or your service area, on the profile does. The same page says local results appear on Google Maps and Search. Two surfaces, and in my experience the map pack in Search and the list in Maps for the same words don’t always show the same businesses. So check both, from the streets you actually serve, and treat a difference as information, not a fault.

Prominence

Then there’s prominence. How well known is the business? Google says prominence can be informed by things such as links from other websites and reviews, among other information. This is where local SEO starts overlapping with wider SEO. Your website matters.

Your reputation matters. Other websites matter. Your Business Profile matters. Your reviews matter. And here is the shift to make about that profile: it is a page you maintain, not a form you filled in once.

Google’s own wording is that businesses with complete and accurate info are more likely to show up in local search results, and its list of what to keep current includes hours, photos, replies to reviews and what is in stock. And the information Google receives from across the web can matter.

Links: in, out and within

Three kinds of link, and people only ever talk about one.

Links in, from other websites to yours. Links out, from you to other sites. And links within, from one page of yours to another.

Google’s own description of ranking says one of the factors used to determine quality is understanding if other prominent websites link or refer to the content. Link or refer. A mention counts for something, even without the link. So links in are earned the way reviews are earned: by being worth referring to. Where does a local business actually earn them? Suppliers who list their stockists. The trade association. The sponsorship page for the junior football team. The local paper, when there’s a story. An event you ran. A partner you work with. And a resource on your site so useful that other people point at it. That last one is the only one that scales, and it’s Part Eight’s content layer doing its job.

Now the other side. Google defines link spam as the practice of creating links to or from a site primarily for the purpose of manipulating search rankings. Its list is specific. Buying or selling links for ranking purposes, including exchanging money, goods or services for links. Excessive link exchanges. Automated programs that create links. Advertorials that pass ranking credit. Low-quality directory links. Links stuffed into widgets and footers across many sites. Forum comments with optimised links. Low-value content made primarily to manipulate links. “A hundred backlinks for fifty pounds” is that list, item by item.

And if someone has already bought you a pile of them? Google’s disavow tool exists, but its own page calls it an advanced feature, says most sites will not need it, and says to use it only if you have a considerable number of spammy, artificial or low-quality links, and they have caused a manual action or likely will. So for most businesses: don’t buy them, and don’t panic about them. One more honest note. The “authority score” you’ll see in SEO tools is the tool’s own number. Google doesn’t publish one, and its documentation doesn’t use one.

Links out. Google says linking to other sites isn’t something to be scared of, and that using external links can help establish trustworthiness, for example citing your sources. So cite your sources. This video does. If you were paid for a link, Google asks you to mark it sponsored. If users can add links on your site, mark those ugc. Nofollow is for links you don’t trust. Links within. Google’s rule is the simplest of the three: every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. A page nobody links to is a room with no door. The trade calls it an orphan.

And a link is only a link to Google if it’s an ordinary HTML link, an a element with an href. A button that navigates with a script doesn’t count. The words on the link matter, and Google’s examples of bad anchor text are “click here”, “read more”, “website” and “article”. Descriptive, reasonably concise, relevant to both pages. So the laptop repair page links to the laptop battery guide with the words “laptop battery guide”, not “read more”.

Breadcrumbs are links within, too. Google says a breadcrumb trail indicates the page’s position in the site hierarchy and may help users understand and explore a site, and it uses breadcrumb markup to categorise the information from the page in search results. Links in: earn them. Links out: cite them. Links within: build them.

Mentions, the press and the entity

Now the mention without the link, and two ways to earn one.

The first is digital PR, which for a local business means giving a journalist a story. A story is not “we exist”. It’s a thing that happened, with a person, a place and a number in it. Let me invent one: a framer who put a flood-damaged wedding photo back together. Send it to the reporter who covers your patch or your trade, with the photo and a line they can quote. Ask for the name spelt right and a link to the page about that work. If they won’t link, take the mention.

The second is reclaiming. Search your name in quotes, minus your own site.

Google’s help page: quotes for an exact match, a minus to leave a word out, site: for a domain, no space after the operator. What comes back is other people talking about you. Named without a link: ask for the link. Wrong facts: ask for the correction. Because those facts are the entity. Website, profile, social profiles and directories, one business described the same way everywhere, and we’ll come to keeping that consistent shortly, under NAP.

And you can hand Google the list: the same-as links from Part Three. Google defines sameAs as the URL of a page on another website with additional information about your organisation, for example your profile page on a social media or review site. It recommends the home page, or a single page that describes your organisation, such as the about page.

So the about page says: this is us, and these are the other places that are also us.

Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is one of the obvious foundations for a local business.

Make sure the business is represented accurately. Business name. Category. Your address, where applicable. Opening hours.

Phone number. Website. Services. Photos. Other relevant business information.

Google itself recommends keeping business information complete and accurate, responding to reviews, and adding photos and videos.

Categories decide what you are relevant for. You set one primary and can add others, and Google’s rule is to choose the fewest categories it takes to describe your overall core business, as specific as possible but representative of the main business.

The description is up to 750 characters and shows in the “From the business” section. Google says no URLs or HTML, and to focus on details about your business instead of promotions, prices or sales.

Services sit under each category with descriptions and prices; custom services that break policy are rejected automatically, so keep prices and phone numbers out of the name. Attributes are the small facts; some you set, some come from customers who visit. But don’t confuse “complete profile” with: “Google now owes me position one.” It doesn’t. A complete profile makes your business easier to understand.

It doesn’t give you a guaranteed ranking. And Google explicitly says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

Hours go stale first. On the public holidays Google lists, a warning may appear on your profile telling people your hours might differ, unless you set special hours for those dates in advance.

Google says it is a good idea to confirm your hours for official holidays even if they are the same as your regular hours. So every bank holiday, confirm them.

Photos: JPG or PNG, recommended at 720 by 720 pixels, videos up to 30 seconds. Google says an exterior photo helps customers recognise your business when they visit.

Then posts: an update, an offer or an event. They show under “Updates” on mobile and “From the owner” on desktop, and posts older than six months are archived unless a date range is set. A post is a notice on the door, not permanent content. Events are the post type with a clock on it.

An event post takes a title, start and end dates and times, and Google says that if you don’t give it times, the event displays as lasting 24 hours.

Hours that differ by service aren’t posts either. Google’s “More hours” is for specific services with different times, and its own examples are senior hours, and delivery and takeout hours.

And if you shut for the winter, don’t leave the hours standing. Google’s rule is: closed for 7 days or less, set special hours; closed for more than 7 days, for the off-season or indefinitely, mark the profile temporarily closed. Google says that helps customers who search for you by name understand the closure is only temporary.

A profile in two languages

Let me invent a business for a minute, because this comes up more than you’d think. A Thai café in an English-speaking town. Most of the regulars are local, but a good share of them are South-East Asian, and they’d rather read the menu, the hours and the booking page in Thai.

Start with the profile, because it’s where the temptation to double everything begins.

Google’s guidelines for the business name rule out repeating the same name in more than one script or language, even when the sign above the door does exactly that. So the name is the name, once. The same page says the description is for useful information about what you offer, and about the mission and history of the business. It doesn’t say anything about which language that goes in, so I keep the description in one language and let the website do the Thai properly. And reviews written in Thai are reviews.

Google’s local ranking page says relevance is how well a profile matches what someone is searching for, and that reviews are among the things that inform prominence. Whether a Thai review helps a Thai search find you is a reasonable thought, but Google doesn’t say it, so I won’t either. What I will say is: don’t ask for reviews in any particular language. Earned is earned.

NAP

You’ll also hear the term NAP. Name. Address. Phone number. The principle is simple:

Your business information should be accurate and coherent.

If your website says one phone number. A directory says another. Your business profile says something else. An old page has an old address. A social profile has another version.

You’ve created unnecessary confusion. But don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is some magical SEO superstition around whether every comma, abbreviation and punctuation mark is identical everywhere. The important thing is accuracy and consistency of the underlying business information. Directories are where that consistency gets tested, because every listing is another copy of your name, address and phone number that can drift. The trade calls each copy a citation.

Google’s prominence paragraph says the factor is also based on info like how many websites link to your business. It doesn’t say directories, and the spam list you heard earlier, in the links section, includes low-quality directory links. So: consistency over volume. A handful of accurate listings on sites a customer might actually use, and an afternoon a year checking they still say what your profile says.

Three fields people leave empty. Q&A: Google says business owners and profile managers can answer customer questions there, where the feature exists for your category and region. Answer the day it lands, or a stranger will.

Messaging: Google’s own chat closed on 31 July 2024. What remains, where eligible, is a WhatsApp or text option on a claimed and verified profile, plus the booking button, which is a URL you enter. And the website link. Put utm_source, utm_medium and utm_campaign on it, so whatever analytics you run can tell a profile visit from a search-results visit.

The profile’s own report is Performance: calls, directions, website clicks and the search terms it appeared for. Google’s caveat: it counts organic results and Google Ads together.

Local SEO matrix pages

Now let’s talk about something that can be extremely powerful and extremely badly abused. Local SEO matrix pages. These pages sit on your website, but they exist to serve the map, so they belong here. Imagine you provide: Phone repair.

And you serve: Leeds. Bradford. Wakefield. Huddersfield.

You might naturally have pages around real service areas. But here’s the trap.

You create: /phone-repair-leeds /phone-repair-bradford /phone-repair-wakefield /phone-repair-huddersfield

and then copy the same page four times. You change the town name. Everything else stays the same. That’s not a strategy. That’s a page factory.

And if the pages exist purely to capture searches while offering little unique value, you’ve created exactly the kind of doorway page, thin content problem you should be avoiding. The question isn’t: “Can I make a page for this town?” The question is: “Does this town genuinely deserve a useful page?”

Maybe it does. If you genuinely operate there. If customers actually use the service there. If you can provide meaningful local information. If you have real examples.

If you can explain availability. If you can show relevant projects. If you can answer local questions. If the page genuinely helps somebody. Then the page can have a reason to exist.

A legitimate local content architecture might look like: Service × Location

But every intersection has to earn its existence. Back to the framer. AS Frames posts prints and restored photos anywhere in the UK, so a page about printing by post has earned its place. A page about framing in a town where nobody has ever brought a picture in has not.

More than one location

If you have more than one door, each one is a place on the map in its own right.

Google’s guidelines say all locations must have the same name unless the business’s real-world representation consistently varies from location to location.

So it’s one profile per location, under one name, and once you have 10 or more locations Google lets you add, verify and manage them in bulk from a spreadsheet. On the website, each location gets one page, and it has to pass the matrix test.

What earns it: photos of work done at that branch, not the stock library. A customer’s words about that branch. The route from the station, where to park, the map embed, and the phone number that rings in that building. Name the landmark next door only if it is actually next door. One workshop on Potternewton Lane needs none of this. A chain of them needs all of it, once per door.

Local structured data

One more thing for any page that stands for a place, one door or ten: it gets its own markup.

Google recommends the most specific subtype of LocalBusiness for a physical business, and its documented properties include the address, geo coordinates to at least five decimal places, a telephone number with the country code, and a url that must be a working link to that specific location. Opening hours go in openingHoursSpecification, in hh:mm:ss, and a day you’re closed is opens and closes both set to 00:00. sameAs isn’t on the LocalBusiness page. It’s the same-as property you heard about in Part Three, documented on Google’s Organization page as the URL of a page on another website with additional information about your organisation. Your profile belongs there. And the rule from Part Four still stands: nothing in the code that isn’t on the page. Same hours in the code as on the page. Same phone. Same address.

The map, summed up

So, the map. Google currently describes local ranking as mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, or prominence, as it goes on to call it. That means you should think about: Your Business Profile. Your categories.

Your services. Your opening hours. Your address where appropriate. Your website. Your photos.

Your reviews. Your reputation. Your local relevance. And your wider presence across the web.

Two parity listings. Apple’s free tool lets you claim the place card shown across Apple Maps, Messages, Wallet and Siri, and since March 2026 it sits inside Apple Business. Bing Places for Business is free and can import your listing from Google. And a cadence. Weekly: answer questions and reviews, and post only if there is something real to say. Monthly: read Performance and add a photo. Seasonally: special hours before every holiday on Google’s list. But remember: Nobody can legitimately sell you a guaranteed Google Maps position. You’ve just seen Google’s own words on that.

Housekeeping before we leave the map.

If you go to the customer, Google’s rule is: if you don’t serve customers at your business address, remove the address from your profile, and set up to 20 service areas by town or postcode, not a radius, within about two hours’ driving time of your base.

Verification. Google’s methods include phone or text, email, postcard, a live video call, a video recording and Search Console. For video, be ready to show your location, your equipment, and proof you manage the business. Reviews take up to five business days.

Suspensions. Google may suspend profiles that don’t follow its guidelines. The route back is the appeals tool, with evidence such as business registration or utility bills matching the profile’s name and address, and never a new profile while the appeal is under review.

Fake competitors. The Business Redressal Complaint Form is for misleading information or fraudulent activity in a business’s name, phone number or URL. Reviews are out of scope there: report a review from the review itself, and only for a policy breach.

Map spam

One more kind of competitor, with a rule you can point at.

Google’s naming rule is that your name should reflect your business’s real-world name, as used consistently on your storefront, website, stationery, and as known to customers. And the same page lists what a name must not include, among them: marketing taglines, store codes, business hours, phone numbers or website URLs, service or product information, location information, and containment information. So a service or a town bolted onto a name that isn’t the one over the door is against the guidelines, and “near me” is nobody’s real-world name. That’s map spam. JorTech is the opposite: the real name on the site and the real name on the profile. If a competitor’s name reads like a search query, the Redressal form you just saw is the route. And don’t do it yourself: the appeals process you heard about a minute ago is where stuffed names can end up.

Part Six: Place three, the links

Third: The links. The traditional organic search results. This is where your website pages can appear. And this is where almost everything in this video comes together.

Technical accessibility. Search intent. Keywords. Page titles. Content.

Internal linking. Authors. Experience. Trust. Performance.

Images. Structured data. External references. Useful information. A search result is not the website.

It’s the doorway to the website. And that means you need both: visibility and a reason to click.

Let’s take visibility first.

Published is not ranked: the six stages

Now we’re going to get technical. Because before Google can rank your page, it has to be able to discover and process it. And this gives us one of the most important distinctions in SEO: Crawling is not indexing. And indexing is not ranking.

And ranking is not clicking. And clicking is not becoming a customer. Let’s slow that down.

You publish a page. That doesn’t necessarily mean Google has crawled it. Google discovers URLs through links, sitemaps and other mechanisms. It then crawls the page. It processes what it finds.

If the page is eligible and useful enough to be indexed, it may enter Google’s index. Then, when somebody searches, Google’s systems decide whether that page is relevant enough to appear. Then where it appears. Then whether the searcher actually clicks it. Then whether the visitor actually becomes a customer.

So: Published. Crawled. Indexed. Ranked.

Clicked. Converted. Those are six different things. And confusing them causes an enormous amount of bad SEO advice.

Google itself says Search works in three stages. Crawling, indexing, and serving search results. Not all pages make it through each stage. And knowing this can help you fix crawling issues and get pages indexed. The machinery that gets a page crawled and indexed lives inside your website, so it belongs to the door. We’ll open it up properly in Part Eight.

Google publishes the entry conditions, and it calls them Search Essentials. Three parts: technical requirements, spam policies, and key best practices.

The technical requirements are three sentences. Googlebot isn’t blocked. The page works, meaning it’s served with a 200 status code, because Google says client and server error pages aren’t indexed. And the page has indexable content: text in a file type Google supports, that doesn’t violate its spam policies. Meet those and the page is eligible. Google’s word, and it adds the caveat itself: eligible, not guaranteed. For now, the reason to click. And that starts with two things you write yourself.

Page titles

Let’s start with the title.

The title tells users and search systems what the page is about. A good title is descriptive. It should represent the actual page.

And bear in mind Google generates the title it shows automatically. It usually uses yours, but it can swap in a heading or other text from the page if it thinks that describes the page better. It shouldn’t be a collection of keywords. If the page is: “iPhone Screen Repair in Leeds” then say what the page is.

Don’t turn it into:

“Phone Phone Repair Leeds iPhone Repair Screen Repair Leeds Cheap Phone Repair Best Phone Repair Shop Leeds.” That isn’t optimisation. That’s noise.

Google’s own list for the title element: every page has one, descriptive and concise, different on every page, the site name once, separated by a hyphen, a colon or a pipe, and in the same language and writing system as the page. And its list of what makes it swap yours out: a half-empty title, boilerplate repeated across the site, a title that’s out of date, one that doesn’t match the page, and a page with several equally prominent headings. It builds the replacement from what it can see: the title element, the main heading, the text other people use when they link to you, the og:title tag, and your WebSite structured data. So the heading on the page and the title in the tab should agree. If they don’t, Google picks.

Meta descriptions

Then we have meta descriptions.

This is another area where SEO mythology gets ahead of reality. A meta description is not simply: “Write this perfectly and Google will rank you higher.” Google says snippets are primarily created from the page content itself. It sometimes uses your meta description instead, if that gives a more accurate description of the page, and it might show different snippets for different searches. So think about it as search-result presentation.

Its job is to help communicate what the page offers. It’s not a secret ranking lever.

That’s an important distinction. Google’s practical rules for it: a unique description per page, with the relevant facts in it. For a large catalogue, generating them from the data is fine; Google says it’s encouraged. And there is no length limit. The snippet is truncated to fit the device, so the useful part goes first.

The rest of the result

A result is more than a title and a snippet. Look at one properly.

The site name above the title. Google says it reads WebSite structured data on your home page, the name property, with alternateName for a short form, and otherwise works it out from og:site_name, the title element and the headings. It has to be on the home page, at the domain or subdomain root. A site in a folder doesn’t get one.

The favicon beside it. Google’s rules: square, at least 8 by 8 pixels, though it recommends larger than 48 by 48, linked from the home page, and crawlable by Googlebot-Image. It says a favicon isn’t guaranteed to appear even when every guideline is met, and one it deems inappropriate is replaced with a default icon.

And the address. Google asks for readable words rather than long ID numbers, hyphens rather than underscores between words, one case throughout, because it treats upper and lower case as different URLs, and percent-encoding for anything outside ASCII.

So the laptop page lives at laptop-repair-leeds, not at index dot php, page equals 42. The address is part of the result. Make it readable.

Rich results

Some results carry more than text: a breadcrumb trail, a star rating, a price, an event date, a video thumbnail. Google calls those rich results.

Google publishes the catalogue. Its search gallery lists every feature it supports, and the ones a local business can actually use are these: Article, Breadcrumb, Event, Local business, Organization, Product, Profile page, Review snippet and Video. Each has a page of required and recommended properties, and its own guidelines. Miss one and the markup is valid but ineligible.

Test it before you trust it. Google’s Rich Results Test validates the markup and, for most features, previews what it could look like. Once it’s live, Search Console’s rich result status reports tell you when a page breaks, and Google says pages do break after deployment, through templating or serving changes. And the rule from Part Four, in Google’s words: don’t add structured data about information that is not visible to the user, even if the information is accurate.

Images and video in the results

Two of the twelve types from Part One live here: image SEO and video SEO. Same discipline, pointed at a different file.

Images. Google finds them in the src of an ordinary img element, and it says it doesn’t index CSS images. So the photo of the repair is an image element on the page, not a background. It reads the alt text, the filename, which it calls a very light clue, and the words around the image. Put the photo next to the text it belongs to. The formats it supports: BMP, GIF, JPEG, PNG, WebP, SVG and AVIF. Serve responsive sizes with srcset, keep a plain src as the fallback, and for images that crawling won’t reach, an image sitemap. If you want to choose the image that represents the page, Google reads og:image, or primaryImageOfPage in the structured data.

Video. Google says videos can appear in the main results, in video mode, in Google Images and in Discover. Its conditions: the video is on a public page, embedded with a standard element, video, iframe, embed or object, and it is the point of the page. Google calls that a dedicated watch page, with the video prominent, not buried under the fold. Then it needs a stable thumbnail, and it needs to be told about the video: VideoObject structured data, a video sitemap, or Open Graph tags. Key moments, the chapters you see under a video result, come from Clip structured data, where you give the timestamps, or SeekToAction, where Google works them out. And Google says a YouTube video embedded on your page can be indexed on both, your page and YouTube’s, if both pages qualify. That’s how this video is published: on YouTube, and on its own page on veryseoly.com with the transcript, the chapters and every source.

Products in the results

If you sell things online, one more of the twelve: e-commerce SEO. The short version, because it deserves a video of its own.

Google has a set of guides for it. The ones to read first: how to share product data, structured data for e-commerce, URL structure for shops, and helping Google understand your site structure.

Product structured data comes in two kinds. Product snippets, for pages where people can’t buy the product, and merchant listings, for pages where they can, carrying the price, the stock, the sizes, the shipping and the returns.

Then Merchant Center. Google’s free listings put your products on the Shopping tab, in Search, in Images and Lens, on Maps and on YouTube, with no advertising fee. What it needs is a Merchant Center account, a product feed with the required attributes, ID, title, link, image, price, description and availability, shipping details, and a returns policy on your website.

Keep the two in step. Google’s own advice is to let Merchant Center update its copy from your website when it notices a difference, because price and stock are where the two drift apart.

And the addresses. Google’s rules for shops: as few alternative URLs for the same product as possible, no session IDs or tracking codes in your own internal links, descriptive words in the path, and for variants, the green t-shirt at t-shirt slash green, or t-shirt with a colour parameter, with the plain t-shirt page as the canonical when the parameter is optional.

Every product you want indexed should be reachable by links: menu to category, category to sub-category, sub-category to every product. Google says that if the category pages don’t link to every product, crawling alone might not find them all. A sitemap or a Merchant Center feed covers the gap. That’s the links: visibility, a reason to click, and everything the result itself can carry. But before anyone clicks, many of them look at one more thing.

Part Seven: Place four, the reviews

Fourth: The reviews. This is where your reputation becomes visible. People don’t just want to know: “Can this company provide the service?”

They want to know: “Do other people trust them?” “Have they done this before?” “What happened to previous customers?” Reviews are not a replacement for good SEO.

They’re not a replacement for a good website. They’re not a replacement for a good business. They’re part of the broader reputation system around the business.

Reviews are earned, not bought

Now reviews. Reviews are not something you buy. At least they shouldn’t be. Don’t manufacture them. Don’t create fake customers.

Don’t pay random people to pretend they used your service. Don’t build a system designed to fabricate reputation.

Google’s own policies prohibit fake reviews, and reviews that are paid for or incentivised. And in the UK, since 6 April 2025, this is written into the law as a banned practice in its own right.

Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, three things are now banned practices. Submitting a fake review. Commissioning someone else to write one. Submitting a review that hides the fact it was incentivised, and a discount or a freebie counts as much as cash. And the business that orders it is on that list, not just the person who types it.

So when someone offers to sell you reviews, they’re not offering you a shortcut. Offering that service is banned under the same paragraph. They’re offering you a liability. Instead: Do good work. Ask genuine customers for honest feedback. Make the process easy.

Ask at an appropriate point.

Google gives you the mechanism. Your profile has a review link, and a QR code, that you can hand to a customer, print on the receipt or send in the follow-up message. Google’s own page says the customer must be signed into a Google Account, and that an account can be set up with a non-Gmail address, which answers the objection you’ll hear most. And its own advice on the mix, word for word: a mix of positive and negative feedback often feels more trustworthy. So the link goes to every customer, not the ones you think will be kind.

And respond professionally. If someone leaves a great review, thank them.

If someone leaves a negative review, don’t turn your business profile into a public argument. Address the issue. Invite the conversation offline where appropriate. And remember: A review isn’t just an SEO object.

It’s a piece of information another potential customer is reading.

Don’t obsess over the number

There’s another mistake here. People ask: “How many reviews do I need?” There isn’t a universal magic number where Google says: “Congratulations. You now have 147 reviews. You may enter the top three.”

Local visibility is more complicated than that.

Google explicitly describes local ranking using multiple factors, including relevance, distance and prominence. Reviews are one part of the picture. And for the customer, quality and relevance matter too. A person isn’t necessarily asking: “Does this company have exactly 4.7 stars?”

They’re asking: “Can I trust these people?” “Have other people had this exact problem fixed here?” “What do customers say?” “Are they nearby?”

“Do they actually provide the service I need?”

Reviews beyond Google

Google isn’t the only place a review lives, and it isn’t the only place a searcher looks.

Trustpilot. Your Facebook page. And whatever your sector reads: the trade platform, the booking site, the marketplace where the customer first found you. The rules travel.

Trustpilot’s guidelines for businesses forbid three things that matter here. Being selective with invitations, by picking and choosing which customers you invite. Offering incentives in connection with reviews: discounts, promo codes, prize draw entries, refunds, freebies. And suggesting that reviewers only leave positive reviews, with “if you like us, please leave us a five-star review” as their own example of what not to say. That’s the same shape as Google’s policy and the same shape as the Act. Invite everyone, offer nothing, ask for honesty.

Now the stars under your own result. People put review markup on their own site and expect them.

Google’s guideline, word for word: if the entity that’s being reviewed controls the reviews about itself, their pages that use LocalBusiness or any other type of Organization structured data are ineligible for star review feature. It adds: ratings must be sourced directly from users, the review content must be readily available to users from the marked-up page, and don’t aggregate reviews or ratings from other websites.

So your testimonials page can show your reviews. What it can’t do is earn stars in Google’s results for the business itself. The stars belong to the profile, and to the platforms.

The reviews, summed up

So, the reviews. Ask real customers. Make it easy. Don’t fabricate. Don’t manipulate.

And if you show reviews on your own website, show them honestly. Hiding the genuine bad ones, or hand-picking only the good ones, is on the same banned list as writing fake ones. Respond professionally. And remember that the customer is reading the review, not an algorithm.

Watching your name, and theirs

Reputation is also something you watch.

Google Alerts emails you when new results for a topic show up in Google Search. Enter the topic, choose how often, which sites, language and region, and create it. One for your business name in quotes, one for the old name if you’ve renamed, one for your own name if you’re the face. Then the Part Three search, your name in a private window, weekly. Not for ranking: for what’s being said. Now theirs. A competitor review you can do in an afternoon.

Search the terms that matter most. Note who appears in the map and who appears below it. Open their pages: a page per service, a guide, prices, photos of real work, whatever they have that you don’t. Then read their reviews, the low ones first. What customers complain about is a list of things to be better at, out loud, on your pages.

And a warning about the screenshot. Somebody will show you “position one” as proof. It proves what one person saw, once.

Google says it uses information such as your location, past Search history and Search settings to determine what is most relevant for you in that moment. Its own example is “football”: Chicago will likely see American football, London might get the Premier League. And when it personalises, it says it lets you know, through About this result.

So a result on their phone, on their street, signed in, is not the result on your customer’s phone. Averages across many impressions, Part Nine, are the honest version.

Part Eight: Place five, the door

And finally: The door. Your website. This is where the person arrives after you’ve earned the click. And this is why I call it the door.

Because your website is where someone can move from: searcher to visitor to

prospect to customer. Remember the line from the start. Not who is best.

Who is visible. The first four places make you visible. The door is where visible becomes chosen. And everything technical in SEO belongs inside this place. Technical SEO isn’t a sixth place. It’s part of the door.

Because if the door is locked, beautifully decorating the hallway doesn’t help.

If the page is noindex, Google will drop it from Search once it crawls it. If the page is broken, the customer can’t use it. If the page is painfully slow, people may leave. If the service isn’t explained, people may leave. If the contact form doesn’t work, the conversion is lost.

If nobody knows who you are, trust is weakened. If the page doesn’t match the search intent, the visitor is in the wrong room. So the door has layers.

Technical. Content. Performance. Accessibility. Trust.

Conversion. But it’s still one place: the website. Let’s open it, one layer at a time.

Layer one: technical

This is technical SEO. And I want to make something very clear. Technical SEO is not just: “Make your website fast.” That’s one tiny part of it.

Technical SEO is about making the website accessible to search systems and users, and making the site’s structure understandable and functional. Let’s go through the major pieces.

Crawling

A search engine needs to be able to access your content. If a page cannot be reached, that’s a problem. If important content is hidden behind systems a crawler can’t use properly, that’s a problem. If internal links don’t lead to important pages, that’s a problem. If your website architecture is chaotic, that’s a problem.

Rendering

Then there’s rendering. Many modern websites build parts of the page with JavaScript, in the browser. To see that content, Google has to render the page, much like a browser does. If your important content, or your links, only appear after scripts run, and something in that process fails, Google may not see what your customers see. So one simple question matters: can the important content and links be seen in the page Google actually renders? Search Console’s URL Inspection tool will show you the rendered HTML, and a screenshot if you run its live test. We’ll get to it in Part Nine.

Google says it processes JavaScript sites in three phases: crawling, rendering, then indexing. It renders with an evergreen version of Chromium, meaning a current one. But rendering is queued after the crawl, and Google says that queue can take a few seconds, or longer. Its plain rule: if the content isn’t visible in the rendered HTML, Google can’t index it. And it still recommends server-side or pre-rendering, because not every bot can run JavaScript.

Robots.txt

Then there’s robots.txt.

This file can provide instructions about which areas crawlers should or shouldn’t request. But here’s an important distinction: robots.txt is not the same thing as noindex. And blocking crawling isn’t the same thing as removing a URL from search. You have to understand what each control actually does before using it.

Google’s own words: robots.txt is used mainly to avoid overloading your site with requests, and it is not a mechanism for keeping a web page out of Google. A page blocked in robots.txt can still appear in results, just without a description.

The rules Google honours are user-agent, disallow, allow and sitemap. A noindex line in robots.txt is not on that list, so it does nothing.

Noindex

Then there’s the noindex directive.

This tells compliant search engines that the page should not be included in their index.

There are two ways to say it: a meta tag in the page, or an X-Robots-Tag header the server sends with the response. The header version never shows in the page source, which is one reason a noindex can hide for months. And Google is explicit that for noindex to work, the page must not be blocked by robots.txt, because the crawler has to fetch the page to see the instruction. And this is one of those tiny technical details that can have enormous consequences. Because if you accidentally put noindex on the page you desperately want people to find…

your beautifully written page isn’t going to solve that problem.

I know that because I’ve done it. I once had a booking page on JorTech, my own repair business, carrying a noindex directive for far too long.

The page existed. The booking system worked. Customers could use it if they reached it. The page wasn’t the problem. The booking system wasn’t the problem.

Being found was. Nobody complained. Nobody emailed me saying: “Jordan, your SEO is broken.” They simply didn’t find the page.

That’s an important lesson. SEO failures aren’t always dramatic. Sometimes they’re invisible.

XML sitemaps

There are four more controls in this layer. The last one is the one that quietly destroys websites when they get redesigned. Stay with me. Then we have XML sitemaps. A sitemap can help search engines discover URLs that you want crawled. But submitting a sitemap does not mean: “Google, please rank all of these.”

It doesn’t guarantee indexing. It doesn’t guarantee ranking. It is a discovery mechanism and a useful diagnostic resource. Think of it as handing the search engine a map of URLs that matter. Not a command to rank them.

Google ignores the priority and changefreq values. Leave them out. It uses lastmod only if it’s consistently and verifiably accurate, so never stamp today’s date on every URL. A single sitemap is capped at fifty thousand URLs or fifty megabytes uncompressed; past that, you split it and list the parts in a sitemap index file.

And crawl budget is a large-site problem. Google’s guide is for sites with a million or more pages, or ten thousand pages changing daily. If your pages are crawled the day they’re published, Google says you don’t need it.

Google’s rule: to request a crawl of individual URLs, use the URL Inspection tool; for large numbers of URLs, submit a sitemap. When you’ve fixed one page, that’s how you ask Google back. But there’s a quota for submitting individual URLs, requesting a recrawl multiple times won’t get it crawled any faster, and it does not guarantee inclusion in search results, instantly or even at all. Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks, and Google’s AI features page says months. A request, not a command.

Canonicals

Then we get to canonical URLs. Suppose the same or substantially similar content is accessible through multiple URLs.

You might have: /service /service/ /service?source=facebook or multiple URL variations created by filters, parameters or technical architecture.

Canonicalisation gives search engines a signal about which URL you consider the preferred version. Again: signal, not magic command.

SEO is full of these distinctions. People often look for switches. Search is much messier than that.

Here’s the part most people miss: Google chooses the canonical, not you. Its documentation calls a rel canonical annotation a strong signal, a redirect a strong signal, and a sitemap entry a weak signal. If you specify nothing, Google says it will identify which version is objectively the best to show.

One trap on paginated listings: Google says don’t make page one the canonical for the whole sequence. Give each page its own canonical URL, and link page to page with ordinary a href links.

Your address on the web

Your website should answer to one address.

Your homepage is probably reachable at four: with and without the “www”, with and without the “s” in “https”. To a search engine, four candidates for the same page. Pick one yourself.

Google says it prefers HTTPS pages over the equivalent HTTP pages as the canonical, unless there are issues or conflicting signals, and it calls a redirect a strong signal that the target should become the canonical. So choose the secure version, choose “www” or not, and redirect the other three to it, permanently. The same goes for your name. Register both the “.co.uk” and the “.com”, use one, and redirect the other. Nobody else can trade on your name with the spare, and every link to either version lands on the right site.

And own the domain yourself. Register it in the business’s own account, with the business’s own email as the renewal contact, and set it to auto-renew. If the person who registered it moves on, or the renewal email goes to an inbox nobody reads, the site goes dark, and the address can be lost to whoever registers it next. The website can be rebuilt. The address is harder.

The ending matters less than people think: Google’s starter guide says it doesn’t care whether you use a “.com” or a “.org”, and that it only matters if you’re targeting a specific country’s users, and even then it’s usually a low-impact signal. And on whether a blog or shop sits on a subdomain or in a folder, the same guide says to do whatever makes sense for your business.

One town, two languages: the website

Back to the Thai café from the map, because the website is where the real work is, and it starts with the address.

Google recommends a different URL for each language version of a page, rather than swapping the language with a cookie or the browser’s settings. So the Thai menu lives at its own address, and so does the English one. Google says it uses the visible content of a page to work out its language, not the lang attribute in the code and not the URL. So keep one language per page, navigation included, and avoid side-by-side translations on the same page. Google also says not to redirect people automatically based on what you think their language is, and not to use IP location to adapt content, because it calls that difficult and generally not reliable.

Instead, put a visible link on every page so the person can switch language themselves.

Then tell Google the two pages are versions of each other. That’s hreflang, and Google accepts it three ways: link elements in the page header, an HTTP header, or a sitemap. Each version has to list itself and every other version, with full URLs, and if two pages don’t both point to each other the tags are ignored. The code is a language code, optionally with a region, so th for Thai and en-GB for British English. And x-default is the version Google uses when no language matches the person’s browser setting, which is why it’s designed for a language selector page.

For this café, I’d point x-default at the English page and move on.

Redirects and status codes

You also need to understand HTTP status codes.

A 200 generally means: “The request succeeded.” A 301 is a permanent redirect. A 302 is a temporary redirect. A 404 means the resource wasn’t found.

The 500-series codes are server-side failures.

Google describes a redirect as resolving an existing URL to a different one: telling visitors, and Google, that a page has a new location. A permanent redirect, a 301 or 308, tells Google to show the new target in search results. A temporary one, a 302 or 307, tells it to keep showing the original.

Its status code documentation calls a 301 a strong signal that the target should be processed, and a 302 a weak one. Google recommends a server-side redirect whenever possible. A meta refresh is the fallback: instant counts as permanent, delayed as temporary. A JavaScript redirect is the last resort, because Google only sees it after rendering the page, and if rendering fails it might never see it. And redirects chain.

Google’s crawlers follow up to ten hops by default, and Search Console reports an error when a chain is too long or loops. Point old addresses straight at their final destination. Now the errors. Google treats every 4xx code except 429 the same way: the content doesn’t exist, and an indexed URL is removed. That includes 404 and 410 alike.

What Google does flag is the soft 404: a page that says “not found” to a person while telling the crawler “success”. Return a real 404 for a page that is truly gone, and if the page has moved, use a 301. And 500-series errors, the server failing, make Google’s crawlers slow down, and URLs that persistently return a server error are eventually dropped from the index. You don’t need to become a server engineer. But if you’re responsible for SEO, you should understand what these things mean.

Because moving a website without understanding redirects can destroy useful pathways into the site. Changing URLs can break links. Deleting pages can remove search visibility. Launching a redesign can introduce technical problems that weren’t there before.

Moving house: the JorTech rename

I have lived this. In August 2026 I renamed my repair business from Leeds Tech Repair to JorTech, on a new domain.

A rename is permanent, so every old address redirects, permanently, to its equivalent on the new domain. Not to the homepage: an old link to laptop repair lands on the new laptop repair page.

Google’s site-move guidance is a checklist: change one thing at a time, time it for lower traffic, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, expect temporary fluctuation, be patient. For a small or medium site it recommends moving every URL at once. And keep the redirects as long as possible, generally at least a year, so it can transfer the signals to the new URLs, including the links on other sites that point to the old ones. That is why the old domain is kept, not dropped. It still carries live email, and every link and bookmark from years of trading.

Google’s Change of Address tool is only for moving domain to domain; it isn’t needed for HTTPS, “www” on or off, or moving pages within a domain. Temporary is for a page that will come back. A seasonal offer, or a page taken down for a week to rework, gets a temporary redirect, because you want Google to keep the original address in its results. And for pages that are simply gone, give your 404 page a job. A search box, links to your main sections, and a way to contact you.

This is why technical SEO matters. It’s infrastructure.

Internal linking

Now something much less glamorous. Internal links. The links between pages on your own website. These matter for users. They help people navigate.

And they help search engines discover and understand relationships between pages.

Imagine your website as a building. Your homepage is one room. Your service pages are other rooms. Your guides are other rooms. Your contact page is another room.

If there are no doors between important rooms, people and crawlers can struggle to move through the building. Good internal linking creates pathways. And it also communicates relationships. A page about phone screen repair might link to: battery replacement,

water damage repair, charging port repair, pricing, and relevant guides. And the words on the link matter, as we said on the map in Part Five: descriptive, reasonably concise, relevant to both pages. “Laptop battery guide”, not “read more”.

That’s not keyword stuffing. That’s information architecture.

Information architecture

This is another phrase worth understanding. Information architecture. It simply means organising information so that it makes sense. Your website should have a logical structure. People should be able to understand:

Who you are. What you do. Where you operate. What you sell. What problems you solve.

How your services relate to one another. How to contact you. And search engines should be able to discover those relationships too. This is why SEO isn’t just a marketing activity. It can expose weaknesses in the underlying structure of a business website.

Mobile

Now let’s talk about mobile.

Your customer is often not sitting at a desk. They’re standing in a shop. Sitting in a car. Walking down a street. Holding a phone.

Searching quickly. Your page needs to work properly on that device. Text needs to be readable. Buttons need to be usable. Forms need to work.

Navigation needs to make sense. Content shouldn’t jump around unnecessarily. And the main information shouldn’t be buried under a mountain of pop-ups. Mobile isn’t a special SEO trick. It’s simply part of building a website for the way people actually use the web.

Google says it uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with the smartphone agent, for indexing and ranking. So if the mobile version hides text or drops structured data, that’s the version Google judges. Google’s advice is to keep content, structured data, title and description equivalent on both.

HTTPS

HTTPS belongs here too. Google’s page experience checklist asks whether your pages are served in a secure fashion, and it says that beyond Core Web Vitals, other page experience aspects don’t directly help you rank higher. Do it for the customer, not the ranking.

Layer two: content

Now we’re at the part most people think SEO is. Content. And content matters enormously. But content does not mean: “Write 2,000 words because Google likes long articles.”

There is no universal ideal word count. Sometimes the best answer is 200 words. Sometimes it is 2,000. Sometimes it is a calculator. Sometimes it’s a table.

Sometimes it’s a product page. Sometimes it’s a video. Sometimes it’s a map. The right amount of content is: the amount needed to satisfy the user’s need properly.

If someone wants your opening hours, don’t make them read 2,000 words. If someone wants to understand a complicated legal process, 200 words might be nowhere near enough. Content length should follow the problem. Not a superstition.

Headings

Then there are headings. H1. H2. H3. These help structure the content.

But don’t turn heading levels into some kind of SEO ritual. The purpose is clarity. A page about laptop repair might have:

H1 — Laptop Repair in Leeds H2 — Common Laptop Problems H2 — Screen and Keyboard Replacement H2 — How Much Does Laptop Repair Cost? H2 — When Is a Laptop Worth Replacing?

That creates structure. It makes the page easier to scan. And it helps communicate the organisation of the information. The goal isn’t: “How many keywords can I put in H2 tags?”

The goal is: Can a human understand this page quickly?

Keyword stuffing

Let’s kill another old idea. You do not need to repeat your target phrase endlessly. If you’re writing: “Laptop repair Leeds” and every paragraph contains:

“laptop repair Leeds” “laptop repair Leeds” “laptop repair Leeds” the page starts sounding like it was written for an algorithm rather than a human. Search engines have much more sophisticated ways of understanding language and content than simple exact-match repetition.

Write naturally. Use the terminology your customers actually use. Cover the subject properly. Answer related questions. Explain the service.

And make the page genuinely useful.

What about blogging?

Let’s talk about blogging because this is where businesses get sold some nonsense. You don’t need a blog because: “Google likes websites that blog.” You need useful content because your customers have questions. Those questions can become content.

Suppose you offer data recovery. People might ask: Can you recover files from a laptop that won’t turn on? How much does data recovery cost? How long does it take?

Can photos be recovered from a phone that’s been in water? Is my data kept private while you work on it? How do I stop it happening again? Those are legitimate information needs. Create genuinely useful answers.

Now run those pages as a system. The data recovery service page is the hub. Each of the six questions becomes a guide, each guide links back to the hub, and the hub links out to each guide. That’s a topic cluster. The doors between those rooms are the internal links from the technical layer. This is the content that gives them somewhere to go. But don’t publish:

“10 reasons why our repair shop is amazing.” every Tuesday. Content should exist for a reason.

And content isn’t a build you finish. It’s something you run. For JorTech, one page a month, from a question asked in the workshop that month: the fault, what we checked, what it cost. For AS Frames, one finished piece a month: a print or a restored photo, framed and photographed on the bench. For AK Barbers, one month the bank holiday hours, the next a photo of a cut the shop keeps being asked for. And photograph the work yourself.

Google’s guidance on showing how content was made talks about evidence of the work involved, such as photographs. A stock image is evidence of nothing.

Images

Now images. Images are content. And they can also create problems. A huge uncompressed image can slow a page. A poorly named image can provide little useful context.

An image without appropriate alternative text can create accessibility problems. And an image that’s important to understanding the page shouldn’t be treated as if it doesn’t matter. Think about: File size. Dimensions.

Format. Compression. Responsive images. Descriptive filenames where useful. Alt text.

Captions where useful. Surrounding text. And, above all, relevance. If the image is a photograph of a cracked iPhone screen being repaired, the filename shouldn’t necessarily be:

IMG_839201.jpg If you can meaningfully describe it, something like: iphone-screen-repair-leeds.jpg is more informative. But don’t turn alt text into:

“best iPhone screen repair Leeds phone repair shop Leeds.” Alt text is not a keyword dumping ground. Its primary job is to communicate the image’s purpose or content when the image can’t be perceived.

Video

And the same thinking applies to video. A video is content too. Give it a clear title and a description that says what it covers. Put it on a page where it’s genuinely relevant. And give it captions or a transcript, which we’ll come to shortly, so the substance isn’t locked inside the audio.

Translated content

One more thing content can be, and it belongs here rather than in the code: content in a second language. Remember the Thai café from the map. Don’t translate the whole site. Translate the pages a Thai-speaking customer actually needs, in this order: the menu, the opening hours, the booking page, how to find you, and the allergen information. Then stop, and see whether anyone uses them.

Every one of those pages should be read by a fluent Thai speaker before it goes live, because a menu with a mistranslated allergen is worse than no Thai menu at all.

Google’s spam policies describe scaled content abuse as many pages generated mainly to manipulate rankings rather than help people. And among the examples they give is scraping content to generate many pages, including through automated transformations, with translating named among them, where little value is provided to users. A handful of human-checked pages is nowhere near that. A whole site pushed through a translation tool and never read is a lot closer to it than people think. Mark the language in the structured data too.

schema.org has a property called inLanguage, defined as the language of the content, using a code from the IETF BCP 47 standard, and a Menu on schema.org is a creative work, so it carries it. And when not to bother. If you can’t get the translation checked, one page of machine Thai is worse than a clear English page, because Google reads the visible words, and so does the customer.

Layer three: performance

Now we’re going to talk about performance. Because a website can have excellent information and still be painful to use.

Google’s current documentation says its core ranking systems use a variety of signals related to page experience. It says specifically that Core Web Vitals are used by ranking systems. But Google also says good Core Web Vitals scores don’t guarantee that your pages will rank at the top. And it says chasing a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time. That’s exactly how I want you to think about this.

Don’t optimise the score. Optimise the experience.

Core Web Vitals

The current Core Web Vitals are:

LCP — Largest Contentful Paint This is about how quickly the main content becomes visible. INP — Interaction to Next Paint This is about responsiveness to interactions. CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift

This is about unexpected movement of the page. These are useful because they translate technical behaviour into things users actually experience.

The thresholds are public. Good is LCP within 2.5 seconds, INP of 200 milliseconds or less, and CLS of 0.1 or less. Poor starts at 4 seconds, 500 milliseconds and 0.25. And the measure is the 75th percentile of page loads, split by mobile and desktop, so most of your visitors have to get the good experience.

Lab data loads the page in a controlled environment with fixed network and device conditions; that’s Lighthouse. Field data comes from real users on their own devices and connections; that’s the Chrome User Experience Report, which PageSpeed Insights displays.

A page loads. The customer sees the main content. They tap a button. The site responds. They start reading.

The page doesn’t suddenly jump because an advert or image loaded above what they were reading. That’s real user experience.

PageSpeed Insights

So use PageSpeed Insights.

Use Lighthouse. Use your browser’s developer tools when necessary. And use real-user data where available. But don’t become obsessed with getting a perfect laboratory score. A perfect laboratory score is not the purpose of your website.

A customer doesn’t care whether your Lighthouse report says 97. They care whether the page loads. Whether they can read it. Whether the button works. Whether the form works.

Whether they can find your phone number. Whether the website doesn’t feel broken. Whether they can actually buy or book. That is the objective. What actually moves the needle? From my own work on small business sites, it is nearly always the same five things.

Images uploaded straight from the camera. Four megabytes where two hundred kilobytes would do. Third-party scripts: the chat widget, the embedded map, the tracking pixels, each one a download before your page can finish. Web fonts, when the text waits for them. The main image at the top being lazy-loaded, so the thing Google measures for LCP is the last thing to arrive. And the server. Cheap shared hosting answers slowly, and everything else waits behind that first byte.

Lighthouse names which of the five is yours. Fix that one first, then measure again.

Layer four: accessibility

Accessibility deserves its own layer. Unlike most of SEO, accessibility has a written standard.

It’s called WCAG, the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines, and it’s developed by the World Wide Web Consortium, the W3C, through its Web Accessibility Initiative. The current version is WCAG 2.2, published in October 2023 and updated in December 2024.

It defines three levels of conformance: A, AA and AAA. AA is the level to aim for, and it’s the level UK public bodies are held to. It rests on four principles.

Perceivable: people can take in the content with the senses they have. Operable: they can work the controls and move around the site. Understandable: the content and the interface make sense. Robust: it keeps working with the browsers and assistive technology people actually use.

Can somebody navigate your website using a keyboard? Can they understand the headings? Are forms labelled properly? Is there sufficient contrast? Can a screen reader make sense of the page?

Are images described appropriately when necessary? Are interactive elements usable? Are videos captioned? Can people tell where focus is? Can someone complete your contact form without needing perfect vision, perfect hearing, perfect dexterity and perfect motor control?

WCAG turns those questions into rules, and a few are worth knowing by heart.

Contrast: at Level AA, ordinary text needs a contrast ratio of at least 4.5 to 1, and large text at least 3 to 1. Keyboard: all functionality has to work through a keyboard, not just a mouse, and there has to be a mode where the keyboard focus indicator is visible. Forms: labels or instructions are provided when content requires user input, so every field gets a visible label, not a placeholder that vanishes when you type. Images: all non-text content has a text alternative that serves the equivalent purpose, so alt text says what the image is for. Video: captions for all pre-recorded audio in synchronised media.

Touch targets: WCAG 2.2 says the size of the target for pointer inputs is at least 24 by 24 CSS pixels, with a short list of exceptions. Audio: if anything plays automatically for more than three seconds, there has to be a way to pause or stop it, or to control its volume separately. And one from me: respect the reduced-motion setting on people’s phones. WCAG asks for that only at its top level, but it’s a few lines of CSS. These are not merely SEO tricks.

They’re quality-of-website questions. Don’t sell accessibility as: “Google gives you extra ranking points if you add alt text.” That’s not the right model. Build an accessible website because people use your website.

And because a website that communicates clearly to a broader range of people is simply a better website. There’s also a legal frame in this country.

Section 29 of the Equality Act 2010 says a service-provider must not discriminate against a person requiring the service, and that a duty to make reasonable adjustments applies to a service-provider.

Section 20 explains that duty: where a provision, criterion or practice of yours puts a disabled person at a substantial disadvantage compared with people who are not disabled, you take such steps as it is reasonable to have to take to avoid it. A website nobody can use with a screen reader is a practice. I’m not a lawyer, and what’s reasonable for a two-person repair shop is a question for one, but the duty is there.

Public bodies have a stricter rule: the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018 require them to meet WCAG 2.2 AA and publish an accessibility statement.

And if you sell to consumers in the EU, the European Accessibility Act applies to e-commerce services provided to consumers after 28 June 2025, though the directive exempts microenterprises providing services.

Captions

Captions are another useful example. A caption can give an image context. It can tell someone what they’re looking at. For video, captions are even more important. They make spoken content accessible to people who can’t or don’t want to hear the audio.

They can also improve comprehension. And a transcript can make the substance of a video available as text. But again: Don’t turn accessibility features into fake SEO tricks. Do them because they make the content better.

Good SEO and good accessibility often overlap because both are pushing you towards clearer, more understandable content. But they’re not identical systems.

Testing it

Here’s how to test it, and how far the tools go.

Lighthouse has an accessibility category, each audit is pass or fail, and its weighting is based on the axe rules from Deque.

axe puts a number on the limit: it says you can find, on average, 57 per cent of WCAG issues automatically, and it’s built to return zero false positives.

Lighthouse’s own report says automatic detection can only detect a subset of issues and does not guarantee the accessibility of your web app, so manual testing is also encouraged. A tool can see a missing alt attribute or low contrast. It can’t tell whether the alt text is right, whether the headings make sense in order, or whether you can finish the booking form by keyboard alone. So run Lighthouse, fix everything red, then put the mouse away and tab through your own contact form.

Those fixes are search fixes too: Google says it uses alt text along with computer vision algorithms and the contents of the page to understand the subject matter of an image, and that standard HTML image elements help crawlers find and process images.

Readability and Flesch

Now let’s talk about readability. You may have heard of the Flesch Reading Ease score or Flesch-Kincaid. These formulas attempt to estimate how easy text is to read using characteristics such as words per sentence and syllables per word. They can be useful editorial tools. But don’t turn them into another SEO superstition.

There is no magic rule saying: “Get your Flesch score to 72 and Google will rank you.” Instead, ask: Can people understand this? Are the sentences unnecessarily complicated?

Are paragraphs too long? Are headings useful? Can somebody scan the page? Are technical terms explained? Can a normal customer understand what we’re saying?

Sometimes expert content needs technical language. That’s fine. The answer isn’t to dumb everything down. The answer is to explain it properly.

Layer five: trust

Links belong here too. We covered links in, out and within back on the map, in Part Five. The trust layer is where they land.

E-E-A-T

This brings us to E-E-A-T.

Experience. Expertise. Authoritativeness. Trustworthiness. You’ll hear E-E-A-T everywhere in modern SEO.

Google itself says E-E-A-T isn’t a specific ranking factor. But here’s what I don’t want you to do. Don’t turn it into: “Google gives me an E-E-A-T score of 73.” That’s not how you should think about it.

Think about what those ideas represent. Experience: Have you actually done the thing? Expertise: Do you understand it?

Authoritativeness: Do other credible signals support your authority in the subject? Trustworthiness: Can people reasonably trust the information and the organisation behind it? And trust is particularly important.

Who wrote this? Why should I believe it? Can I verify it? Does the business actually exist? Are there real contact details?

Are there genuine examples? Are claims supported? Does the site make it clear who is responsible for the information? That’s much more useful than trying to game a fictional score.

First-hand experience

Experience is particularly interesting. Suppose I’m writing about a phone that won’t charge. I can produce an article from generic information. Or I can explain: “We see this fault regularly.”

“Very often, it’s pocket lint packed into the charging port.” “Here’s what happened on a recent job.” “Here are the three things we check first.” “Here’s the point where you should stop troubleshooting and bring it in.” That’s first-hand experience.

It can make content more useful because you’re bringing something to the page that isn’t simply a rewrite of everything already online. And this is one reason businesses have a huge advantage if they actually document what they do.

Your real work contains information. Your jobs contain questions. Your customers contain questions. Your staff contain expertise. Your mistakes contain lessons.

Your projects contain evidence. Your case studies contain experience. That is content.

Author SEO

This brings us to authors. If you’re publishing expert material, especially in areas where expertise matters, don’t automatically hide the person who wrote it. Give the reader context. Who is the author? What do they do?

What experience do they have? Why are they qualified to discuss this? If appropriate, create an author page. Link the author to their profile. Use accurate author information and appropriate structured data where supported.

Google’s own page on people-first content gives you the test. It asks you to look at your content in terms of who, how and why. Who: is it self-evident to your visitors who authored the content, and do bylines lead to further information about the author? How: if automation or AI was used, is that self-evident to visitors? Why: the page says making content primarily to attract search engine visits is not aligned with what its systems seek to reward. The same page says trust is the most important of the four.

So make the author page answer those three questions. But don’t manufacture credentials. If someone has ten years of experience, say that if it is true. If they have a qualification, say what it is if relevant. If they don’t have specialist credentials, don’t invent them.

SEO works much better when you stop thinking about how to look authoritative and start thinking about how to be useful and trustworthy.

Layer six: conversion

And the last layer of the door is the last of the six stages from earlier. Clicked is not converted. Here’s another simple principle. Don’t make the visitor work to discover whether they’re in the right place. If someone searched: “cracked iPhone screen repair Leeds”

and your page starts with:

“Welcome to our website. We are a family-run company founded in…” you’ve made them wait. Tell them what the page is about. Then give them the information they need. Then establish credibility.

Then explain the service. Then answer questions. Then make the next step obvious. SEO and conversion optimisation overlap here. Because getting someone to the page is only half the job.

What counts as converted

So decide what “converted” means for your business, because you can’t measure a word. For most local businesses it’s one of six things: an email enquiry, a call, a booking, a form sent, a direction request, or a quote asked for. Each is counted somewhere different; no single tool sees all of them.

The profile’s Performance report, from Part Five, counts calls as the number of times a customer clicked the call button on the profile. Directions is how many people asked for directions, adjusted for multiple taps, cancellations and spam. Bookings only show if your bookings are managed through a booking provider. A phone that rings because someone read your number off the website is counted nowhere, unless you ask the caller. On the site, the measure is the event: the form sent, the number tapped, the booking confirmed. A developer wires those in once.

And the tool that holds them doesn’t have to be Google’s.

There’s a category of analytics now that sets no cookies. Plausible is one: its page says it doesn’t use cookies or any other persistent identifiers, that the data is hosted in Germany, and that it never leaves the EU. The point is the category: a page view and a form event, with no consent banner in front of the customer. That’s why the UTM tags went on the profile link in Part Five: so any of these tools can tell the two visits apart.

Speed is money, and who controls it

Google’s own developer site collects the receipts on speed, and I’ll quote them exactly, because they’re the ones I can point at. The BBC found it lost an additional 10 per cent of users for every additional second its site took to load. Vodafone: a 31 per cent improvement in Largest Contentful Paint increased sales by 8 per cent. redBus increased sales by 7 per cent after improving Interaction to Next Paint. Rakuten 24 reported revenue per visitor up 53 per cent, and conversion rate up 33 per cent, after investing in Core Web Vitals.

Those are their numbers, on Google’s page. Your site is not the BBC. But the direction is the same at every size: seconds cost customers.

Here’s my own site through the same test, today: veryseoly.com, performance, accessibility, best practices and SEO. When I checked before filming, it was 100 in all four. So who controls your speed? If your site lives on a website builder, some of it is yours: the images you upload, the apps you bolt on, how much you put on the page. And some of it isn’t. The server, the code that renders the page, the headers, the way scripts load. That’s the platform’s, and you can’t touch it. That’s not a criticism of the builders. It’s the trade. Templates are quick to launch precisely because you don’t control the layer underneath.

The further you want to go on speed, on structured data, and on the redirects and headers we covered in the technical layer, the more you need code you own. Which is what VerySEOly builds, and manages, for businesses that have outgrown the template. That’s the whole pitch, and I’ll leave it there.

And whether you’re on a builder or on code, run the free Site Score on your own site. It’s the same Google Lighthouse check, on screen, in about twenty seconds. It tells you where you stand today. That’s the door. Six layers, one place. And now that every place is open, the next question is how you know any of it is working.

Part Nine: Measuring it

Search Console

Now let’s talk about one of the most important free tools available to a website owner. Google Search Console.

If you own a website and you don’t have Search Console configured, you’re missing one of the most useful windows into how Google sees your site.

Google describes Search Console as a free service that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results. Whether Google can find and crawl your site. Indexing problems. And your search traffic. Before any report means anything, you prove the site is yours.

A Domain property includes all subdomains and multiple protocols, http and https, and it’s DNS record verification only. A URL-prefix property includes only URLs with the specified prefix, including the protocol. Choose Domain, so every variant lands in one place.

Google’s methods are an HTML file upload, an HTML tag, a Google Analytics tracking code, Google Tag Manager, a Google Sites or Blogger account, and your domain name provider. Verification lasts as long as Search Console can confirm the presence and validity of your verification token. And if all verified owners lose access to a property, all users lose access with them.

So don’t hand your login to a developer. Add them as a full user. The business stays a verified owner.

And leave the emails on. Search Console sends messages to website owners when an important event occurs on their site. Inside it, you can investigate things such as:

Queries. Impressions. Clicks. Click-through rate. Average position.

Pages. Indexing. URL inspection. Sitemaps. Core Web Vitals.

Search appearance. And other reports depending on the site. One of those deserves a slower look, because it’s where a stray noindex gets found.

The Page indexing report gives every URL one of two statuses, Indexed or Not indexed, and a reason. Learn three. Discovered, currently not indexed: the page was found by Google, but not crawled yet. Crawled, currently not indexed: the page was crawled by Google but not indexed. Google looked and, for now, declined. Excluded by noindex tag: when Google tried to index the page it encountered a noindex directive and did not index it. That third row is where a page like my booking page shows up. Quietly. Fix every instance, select Validate fix, and Google can confirm it.

Two reports you want to stay empty. Manual actions is where a penalty lives, and Google’s definition is exact: a manual action is issued when a human reviewer at Google has determined that pages on the site are not compliant with its spam policies. Some or all of the site will not be shown in results. Google says most sites don’t have one. If yours does, the route is to fix every affected page, not some of them, then send a reconsideration request describing exactly what you fixed, and Google says the review can take days or weeks, longer for link-related ones. Its list of what earns one reads like the spam section coming up in Part Eleven: unnatural links to or from the site, thin content, cloaking and sneaky redirects, hidden text and keyword stuffing, structured data that breaks the rules, user-generated spam, site reputation abuse. The other is Security issues. Same rule: it should be empty, and both send an email if you left the notifications on.

Your name, and everything else

One split is worth making every time. Searches that contain your name, and searches that don’t.

The Performance report lets you filter queries to those containing a string, those not containing it, or a regular expression. Run it twice: once with “jortech” in, once with it out. They are two different signals of health. Brand searches tell you people already know you. If that line drifts, it is rarely a website problem. Non-brand searches tell you Google is showing you to strangers. That is the part SEO work moves, and the part to judge it by. Add them together and one hides the other. Keep them apart.

Impressions

An impression is counted when a link to your site appears on the page of results the person is looking at, whether or not they scroll down far enough to see it in a search result. You can have impressions without clicks. That’s useful. Because it tells you: Google is showing this page for something.

Now ask: What query? What position? What page? Is the result attractive?

Is the title clear? Is the page actually answering the intent?

Clicks

Clicks tell you that somebody selected your result. Now you’ve moved one step further. But clicks still aren’t customers. You can have 10,000 clicks and terrible business results. Or 100 highly relevant clicks and excellent business results.

That’s why SEO metrics should eventually connect to business outcomes. Calls. Bookings. Leads. Sales.

Applications. Downloads. Whatever the business actually needs.

CTR

CTR is click-through rate. Broadly: How often did people click compared with how often the result was shown? It’s useful. But don’t reduce SEO to:

“Get the CTR as high as possible.” Context matters. A high CTR on the wrong audience isn’t necessarily useful. And a lower CTR for a highly specific query may still produce excellent customers.

Metrics are evidence. They’re not the objective.

Average position

Then there’s average position. This one gets misunderstood constantly. People want: “What is my position?” But search results vary.

Queries differ. Locations differ. Devices differ. Search features change. Personalisation and context can matter.

So average position is a measurement across a set of impressions, not a permanent physical position engraved into Google.

Google’s own definitions for the other two. A click is one that sends the user to a page outside of Google Search, Discover or News. And position, by Google’s own example: one query returns your site at positions 2, 4 and 6, counted as 2, the topmost. Another returns you at 3, 5 and 9, counted as 3. The average across the two is 2.5. Don’t treat it as: “My website is number 4.”

Treat it as: “Across this data set, this is the reported average position.” That’s much more accurate.

URL Inspection

Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can be incredibly useful.

You can investigate a specific URL.

The verdict comes first: URL is on Google, URL is on Google but has issues, URL is not on Google, or URL is an alternate version. Then the two lines that catch the most: the user-declared canonical and the Google-selected canonical, the page Google selected as the authoritative URL when it found similar pages on your site. If you find an unexpected page here, Google says, consider explicitly declaring a canonical version. And a live test fetches the page now, so it’s how you check a fix, but it does not test for all possible indexing issues, including whether this is a duplicate or alternate page. Is it indexed? What does Google report?

Are there issues? Can you request indexing where appropriate? But again: Requesting indexing isn’t requesting a ranking. You’re not pressing a button saying:

“Please make this number one.” You’re asking Google to consider the URL for crawling and indexing.

Google’s page is plain: there is a daily limit to how many index requests you can submit, and submitting a request does not guarantee that the page will appear in the Google index. So when is pressing it pointless? When the page still carries noindex, or robots.txt still blocks it. When it returns a 404. When its canonical points somewhere else. And when you’ve already asked. Fix the reason first. Then request once. The ranking question comes later.

Bing, and IndexNow

Then Bing. Bing Webmaster Tools can import your verified sites and sitemaps from Search Console, and the imported sites are automatically verified.

Bing also takes IndexNow: a ping that a URL was added, updated or deleted, shared across all IndexNow-enabled search engines. The FAQ lists Amazon, Bing, Naver, Seznam.cz, Yandex and Yep. Google is not on that list. And submitting a URL does not guarantee immediate indexing, there either.

Beyond Search Console

Search Console stops at the click. The business starts after it. Start with the phone, because it’s where measurement and the map collide. Call tracking means a different number per channel, so each call can be attributed. It works. And it costs you something on the map.

Google’s guidelines say to use a local phone number instead of a central call centre helpline number whenever possible, that the phone number must be under the direct control of the business, and that additional phone numbers can be used on Google Business Profile websites and other local surfaces. Premium numbers are not acceptable regardless of the rate charged to the caller. And Google says not to provide phone numbers that redirect or refer users to numbers other than those of the actual business. My read: the primary number is the NAP number from Part Five, the one on every directory and profile. A tracking number goes in the additional slot, never in its place. As the primary, it’s a mismatch you paid for. Then sort your numbers into two kinds. Leading indicators move first: non-brand impressions, pages indexed, profile views, direction requests.

Lagging indicators are the ones you want: enquiries, bookings, revenue. Judge a month by the first and a year by the second.

And never compare this month with last month if your trade has seasons. Open the date filter and choose Compare. Google’s advice: when comparing two date ranges, consider using the Weekly or Monthly granularity option, because aggregating by week or month neutralises the day-of-the-week effect. And you can have only one comparison at a time. A framer’s December against November tells you about Christmas. December against last December tells you about the work.

The monthly review

So once a month, five lines. Non-brand impressions and clicks, against the same month last year. Pages indexed, and anything new in the reasons table. Profile calls, directions and website clicks. Enquiries, bookings and quotes, from your own count.

And one sentence: what changed, and what we change next. That last line separates a report from a list. A report that lists what was done is activity. A report that says what changed is progress, and Part Eleven is about the difference. If you pay for SEO and the report has no number you’d recognise as money, ask for one.

Part Ten: The system

SEO is not a button

This is a theme I want you to notice.

Again and again, SEO doesn’t work like a button. You don’t:

add sitemap → rank. Add schema → rank. Get 100 reviews → rank. Get a PageSpeed score of 100 → rank. Publish 50 blogs → rank.

Buy backlinks → rank. Add keywords → rank. That’s not how this works. You are building a system. And that system is evaluated through many different signals and processes.

The website as a system

Think about your website as an ecosystem.

The technical layer lets systems access it. The information architecture organises it. The content explains what you do. The pages target real needs. Internal links connect the information.

Structured data can clarify certain entities and relationships. Authors can provide context. Experience can make content genuinely useful. Performance affects how the page behaves. Accessibility affects who can use it.

Local information connects your business to places. Reviews provide reputation. External links and mentions can contribute to prominence. And Search Console gives you evidence about what is happening in Google Search. None of these exists in isolation.

The three levels of SEO

Here’s a second way to look at the same system. The five places tell you where you can be seen. These three levels tell you what has to be true in every one of them. If you want an even simpler model, think of SEO in three levels.

Level one: Can you be found? Technical accessibility. Crawling. Indexing.

Discoverability. Level two: Can you be understood and considered relevant? Content. Intent.

Keywords. Structure. Local information. Entities. Experience.

Expertise. Level three: Will people trust and choose you? Reputation. Reviews.

Evidence. Website experience. Brand. Conversion. That’s a much more useful model than:

“SEO equals keywords.”

Organic SEO and compounding

Now we get to one of the most misunderstood ideas in SEO. Compounding. Imagine a business that gets: 10 organic visits a day. Then, over time:

1,000. It is possible to build organic search traffic without buying Google Ads. But I want to be extremely careful here.

I’m not promising you will go from 10 to 1,000. SEO doesn’t work like an investment calculator. There is no guaranteed growth curve. But the reason people talk about compounding is that useful search visibility can accumulate. You create useful pages.

Those pages begin appearing for relevant searches. You learn from the data. You improve them. You create additional resources. You earn mentions.

You earn links. You build reputation. You answer more questions. You cover more relevant demand. You improve your internal architecture.

Your brand becomes more recognisable. And the whole system can become larger and more useful over time. That’s the compounding idea. Not: “Google rewards old websites.”

But: The information asset you’ve built can become larger and more valuable.

SEO is an asset, if you actually build one

This is where SEO differs fundamentally from simply buying traffic. If you spend £500 on Google Ads today, you can potentially buy traffic today. But stop paying and the paid traffic stops.

SEO isn’t free. It costs time. It costs expertise. It can cost writers. Developers.

Photographers. Designers. SEO specialists. Research. Technology.

Content production. But you’re attempting to build something that continues to exist after the individual piece of work is finished. A useful service page can keep attracting relevant searches. A genuinely useful guide can keep answering questions. A strong reputation can keep helping people choose you.

A well-structured website can continue to work. That’s why I think of good SEO as building an information asset.

Google Ads

And that brings us to Google Ads. SEO and Google Ads are not enemies. They’re different tools. Paid search can be extremely useful when you need immediate visibility. A new service launch.

A seasonal promotion. A temporary offer. A new market. Testing demand. A time-sensitive campaign.

Building awareness around something new.

Now look at a results page again. Some of what you see is there because it earned its place. Some of it is there because someone paid for the slot.

Google labels the paid ones. One header over the block: Sponsored results. And the two are decided by different systems.

Google says plainly that advertising with Google won’t have any effect on your site’s presence in its search results. You cannot buy your way up the organic list. And you cannot earn your way into the sponsored slots. So what is paid search, in one breath? An auction.

Every time someone searches, the advertisers who want that search bid for the slots.

You pay when someone clicks. Not when the ad is shown. And the price isn’t just your bid.

Google scores the ad as well: how likely people are to click it, how relevant it is to the search, and what the page behind it is like. That last one matters for this video. The page behind the ad is the door. The same door. A slow, confusing page costs you in the auction as surely as it costs you in organic search.

So the work in Part Eight isn’t “SEO work”. It’s website work. Both channels stand on it. Here’s the honest comparison.

Paid is fast. You can be visible this afternoon. Organic is slow. Months, sometimes longer. Paid stops when the budget stops. Organic keeps working after the work is finished, if you built something useful. Paid gives you data in days: which words people actually search, which pages turn visitors into enquiries.

Organic gives you compounding, if you use that data. Paid is a cost you can turn up and down. Organic is an asset you build. Neither is free. Both need the door. And used together, paid tells you where the demand is, and organic goes and earns it.

And paid campaigns can be useful alongside other marketing systems, including efforts to turn visitors into owned audiences such as email subscribers who’ve agreed to hear from you. But paid visibility is paid visibility. You rent that exposure. Organic search is an attempt to build durable discoverability. Neither statement makes one universally better.

They solve different problems. What’s in the paid toolbox, briefly. Search ads. The text results at the top, for the words people type.

Local Services Ads. The panel some trades see at the very top of the page, with the Google Verified badge, where you pay per enquiry rather than per click. Shopping ads. The product row with prices.

Performance Max. One campaign that runs across Google’s channels at once. And that’s the next video. Google Ads for a local business: what it really costs, how to read the numbers you get back, and how to know whether you should be spending anything on it at all.

For now, the one thing to take from this: Paid buys attention. Organic earns a place. This video is about the place.

And this is why SEO takes time

Good SEO can take months. Sometimes longer. Not because SEO is magic. Because building useful infrastructure takes time. Google has to discover and process changes.

Content has to establish itself. Competitors don’t disappear. Reputation doesn’t appear overnight. Links and mentions take time. Customers take time to generate reviews.

Search demand changes. And you need enough data to know what is actually happening. So if somebody tells you: “Give me seven days and I’ll dominate Google.”

Be very careful. A short-term technical fix can happen quickly. A broken page can be fixed today. A noindex directive can be removed today. A title can be changed today.

A bad redirect can be fixed today. But building sustainable visibility is different.

The long game

SEO is the long game because you’re building an information system around a business. The website becomes clearer. The content becomes better. The technical foundation becomes stronger. The business becomes more visible.

The reputation becomes more established. The data becomes more useful. And you learn what customers actually ask. That is the asset. So that’s the system. Now, how do you actually work on all of this without wasting your time?

Part Eleven: Doing the work

SEO order of operations

Here’s the order I would generally think about it.

First: Make the business understandable. Who are you? What do you sell? Where do you operate?

Who do you serve? What makes you relevant? Then: Make the website technically accessible. Can important pages be crawled?

Can they be indexed? Are important URLs working? Is the architecture sensible? Are there accidental noindex directives? Are redirects correct?

Are there major technical failures? Then: Build useful pages. Create the pages that customers actually need. Service pages.

Product pages. Location pages where justified. Guides. FAQs where genuinely useful.

One caution on FAQs, because a lot of advice online is out of date. Since August 2023, Google has said FAQ rich results, the expandable questions under a result, will only be shown for well-known, authoritative government and health websites, and that for all other sites the rich result will no longer be shown regularly. So write the FAQ for the reader, not for a drop-down in the results, because you’re unlikely to get one. And Google says there’s no need to proactively remove markup you already have. Unused structured data doesn’t cause problems. Case studies.

Supporting resources. Then: Match those pages to real search intent. What does the customer actually want? What questions are they asking?

What information do they need? Then: Build trust and reputation. Real work. Real evidence.

Real reviews. Real authors. Real expertise. Real relationships. Real mentions.

Then: Measure. Search Console. Analytics. Conversions.

Calls. Bookings. Sales. Then: Improve.

And repeat. That’s SEO. Not: “Publish 500 articles and pray.”

And “improve” includes the pages you already have. Once a quarter, open the Performance report, go to the Pages tab, pick a page, then switch to Queries. Now you’re looking at the searches that one page is shown for. Is it still true, and does it still answer those queries? Rewrite it if the subject still matters and the page is out of date. Prune it if nobody needs it and nothing links to it.

Or consolidate: if two pages answer the same question, merge them into the better one and permanently redirect the other.

Google says its indexing pipeline uses a permanent redirect as a signal that the redirect target should be canonical.

And when you update a page, the date should mean something. Google’s guidance is a visible date labelled “Published” or “Last updated”, with datePublished and dateModified in structured data. Its people-first content page asks: are you changing the date of pages to make them seem fresh when the content has not substantially changed? Change the date when you change the page. Not before.

The biggest SEO mistake: activity isn’t progress

One of the worst SEO habits is measuring output rather than usefulness. “We published 50 articles.” Okay. Did they attract the right searches? Did anyone read them?

Did they help customers? Did they create enquiries? Did they answer genuine questions? Did they strengthen the site’s topical coverage? Did they earn references?

Did they become useful resources? Or did you simply produce 50 pages? And I think the biggest mistake businesses make is confusing activity with progress.

They say: “We’ve done SEO.” What did you do? “We wrote six blogs.” Okay.

Why? “We changed our metadata.” Why? “We added keywords.” Why?

“We got an SEO report.” Okay. What actually changed? That’s the question. Did your business become easier to understand?

Did an important page become indexable? Did a broken customer journey get fixed? Did you create a genuinely useful resource? Did you answer a high-intent search? Did your local presence become more accurate?

Did customers leave genuine reviews? Did your site become easier to use? Did search visibility improve? Did enquiries improve? That’s progress.

What SEO is not

Let’s make a list. SEO is not:

Buying number one. Keyword stuffing. Publishing endless rubbish. Changing a keyword five times. Buying fake reviews.

Creating hundreds of town pages with identical text. Getting a perfect PageSpeed score. Adding every possible schema type. Buying a mysterious “SEO package.” Receiving a monthly PDF and assuming work happened.

Being promised guaranteed number one rankings. And it definitely isn’t: “Give me £500 and I’ll tell Google to put you first.” Nobody legitimately controls Google’s organic ranking system.

And Google’s own documentation says it plainly: no one can guarantee a number one ranking on Google. It says the same about the map: there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

Spam

And there is a more serious reason to avoid shortcuts. Search engines have spam policies.

Google defines spam as techniques used to deceive users or manipulate its Search systems into featuring content prominently, and that now includes manipulating its AI responses. Sites that violate its policies may rank lower in results, or not appear at all.

Google’s position on AI-written content is about purpose, not the tool. Its guidance says appropriate use of AI or automation is not against its guidelines, and that using automation, including AI, to generate content with the primary purpose of manipulating ranking in search results is a violation of its spam policies.

The spam policies name it. Scaled content abuse is when many pages are generated for the primary purpose of manipulating search rankings and not helping users, and the first example Google lists is using generative AI tools to generate many pages without adding value for users. Fifty AI-written town pages is that. One page from a real job, tidied by a tool, is not. Two of those policies concern addresses.

Google names expired domain abuse: buying a lapsed domain and repurposing it, primarily to manipulate rankings, with content that provides little or no value to users. That is the other half of why you keep your old domain when you rename. And it names sneaky redirects: showing search engines one kind of content while sending people somewhere significantly different. It says ordinary redirects are legitimate, including moving a site to a new address. The line is intent: helping the person arrive, or deceiving the system.

So the question shouldn’t simply be: “Can I get away with this?” It should be: “Am I actually making this better for the person searching?” That is a much healthier SEO question.

SEO is a loop

Good SEO is a loop.

Research. Build. Publish. Measure. Learn.

Improve. Repeat. You don’t finish SEO. Just like you don’t finish having a website. You don’t finish understanding your customers.

Markets change. Products change. Search behaviour changes. Competitors change. Search interfaces change.

Technology changes. Your own business changes. So the SEO process changes too.

How I audit a business

And this is how I would approach an SEO audit. Not: “Let’s check your keyword density.” I’d start with the business.

What does this business actually sell? Where? To whom? What searches matter? Then search.

What appears? Where does the business appear? What doesn’t appear? Then the map. Is the business represented correctly?

Then the website. Can it be crawled? Can important pages be indexed? Are there technical problems? Then the pages.

Do they match search intent? Are titles useful? Are descriptions useful? Is the content genuinely helpful? Are internal links sensible?

Are images usable? Is the site accessible? Then trust. Who wrote this? What evidence exists?

What do customers say? What external references exist? Then performance. How does the website behave? Then Search Console.

What is Google actually showing? What queries? What pages? What impressions? What clicks?

What indexing problems? Then conversion. What happens after the person arrives? Can they call? Can they book?

Can they buy? Can they understand what happens next? That’s an audit. Not a PDF full of red, amber and green boxes. An audit should tell you:

What is stopping people from finding you? What is stopping them from choosing you? What is stopping them from becoming customers?

The business owner’s SEO checklist

If you run a business, here are the questions I want you to be able to answer.

Can Google find my important pages? Are my important pages indexed? Do I know which searches matter to my business? Does each important service have an appropriate page? Does each important page satisfy the search intent?

Is my website technically sound? Is my business information accurate? Is my local profile complete? Are my opening hours correct? Are my services represented accurately?

Do I have genuine customer reviews? Do I respond to them? Is my NAP information accurate? Do I have useful local pages where they are genuinely justified? Can people understand who wrote my expert content?

Can they see evidence of experience? Are my images usable? Is my website accessible? Does it work properly on mobile? Does it load reasonably quickly?

Have I looked at Search Console? Do I know what queries generate impressions? Do I know which pages generate clicks? Can visitors actually contact me? And most importantly:

Am I measuring business outcomes, not just SEO activity?

What should you do tomorrow?

If you’ve watched all of this and you’re thinking: “Okay. Where do I start?” Don’t start by writing 100 blog posts. Don’t start by buying backlinks. Don’t start by changing 500 keywords.

Start with the fundamentals. Search for the things your customers actually search for. Look at what appears. Look at the map. Look at the organic results.

Look at the questions. Look at the competitors. Look at your own site. Then open Search Console. Look at your pages.

Look at the queries. Look at impressions. Look at clicks. Look at indexing. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights.

Check the mobile experience. Check the important pages. Check your Business Profile. Check your reviews. And then fix the biggest problems first.

Not the easiest problems. The biggest ones.

The close

The audit

And if you want a starting point for that, I’ve put an audit tool at: veryseoly.com/audit You don’t need to give me your email. You don’t need to book a sales call. You run the audit.

It takes roughly twenty seconds. It runs Google’s PageSpeed Insights against your site and shows you the results in plain English. That’s the door: speed, mobile, accessibility and the basic technical checks. Not the map, not the reviews, not the whole system. And importantly: It won’t tell you everything. No automated audit can.

It gives you a starting point. Then you investigate. Because SEO isn’t a score. It’s a system. If this was useful, subscribe. The Google Ads video is next on this channel.

The real goal

And ultimately, ranking isn’t actually the goal. Visibility is a step towards the goal. Traffic is a step towards the goal. The goal is whatever the business needs. A booking.

A phone call. A sale. A consultation. A shop visit. A download.

A subscription. An application. A customer. And sometimes the best SEO decision is not: “How do I get more traffic?”

It is: “How do I get more of the right people?”

The five places, one last time

So let’s bring it all together. When somebody searches for something you sell: One — the answer. Can your information be understood and surfaced in the answer layer? Two — the map.

Can your local business be discovered where geography matters? Three — the links. Can your pages appear in the organic results? Four — the reviews. Can potential customers see evidence from other customers?

Five — the door. When they arrive at your website, does it actually work? And inside that door are all the technical foundations:

Crawling. Indexing. Rendering. Internal links. Canonicals.

Redirects. Mobile. Performance. Accessibility. Structured data.

Content. Authors. Images. Conversion. Trust.

That’s the whole system. So from now on, when somebody searches for something you sell, ask: Can I appear in the answer? Can I appear on the map? Can I appear in the links?

Can I appear through reviews? And when someone reaches the door, does the website actually do its job? That’s the framework.

Final thought

The biggest change I want you to make after watching this video is how you think about SEO. Stop thinking: “How do I trick Google?” Start thinking: “What is my customer searching for?”

“Where are they searching?” “What are they trying to accomplish?” “What information do they need?” “Can search systems understand that I provide it?” “Can people trust me?”

“Can they actually use my website?” “And when they find me, can they become a customer?” That’s SEO. Not one trick. Not one keyword.

Not one plugin. Not one report. Not one backlink. Not one AI tool. Not one Google Business Profile setting.

The whole thing. And if you remember nothing else, remember the five places. The answer. The map. The links.

The reviews. The door. Because the customer doesn’t necessarily begin by asking: “Who is the best business?” They ask:

“What can solve my problem?” And search decides what they see. So the game isn’t simply being the best business. It’s making sure the things you’ve built, the expertise you’ve earned, the reputation you’ve developed, and the services you provide are actually discoverable. Because:

Not who is best. Who is visible. I’m Jordan Gilbert. This is VerySEOly. And that’s the whole of SEO.