SEO, Explained Like You've Never Done It Before

Search engine optimisation is not a trick or a secret setting. It is three plain things done consistently: making sure search engines can find and read your pages, making sure each page clearly answers a question somebody actually types, and making sure enough other sites reference yours that you look like a real business rather than an empty shell.

Almost everything sold as SEO is one of those three wearing a different name. Technical SEO is the first. Content and on-page work is the second. Link building and local citations are the third. When you read advice that does not clearly serve one of them, you can usually ignore it.

Day one: run the free site check on your homepage and your single most important service page, and save the results. Do not fix anything yet. Day two: set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap so you can see what Google already knows about you. Day three: fix indexability problems only — anything that stops a page being crawled or indexed outranks every other fix in importance.

Day four: rewrite your titles and meta descriptions so each page targets one clear phrase and reads like something a human would click. Day five: look at speed, and specifically at image sizes and third-party scripts, which are the cause in the large majority of slow small business sites. Day six: add internal links so no important page is more than three clicks from the homepage. Day seven: re-run the check and compare it to day one. Expect a meaningful jump, expect a few stubborn items, and expect ranking changes to take weeks rather than days — Google re-crawls on its own schedule and improvements show up gradually.