What SEO actually is, without the mystique

A great deal of mystique has been built around SEO. What it actually does is fairly plain: give people what they searched for, in a form a search engine can understand.

There are two halves to that sentence and both are required. Great content on a site that can't be crawled stays invisible. A technically flawless site whose content doesn't answer the question stays invisible too.

Three components

Technical SEO. Whether a search engine can crawl and understand your site. Page speed, mobile behaviour, heading structure, sitemap, structured data, working redirects. Set up properly once, this largely stays in the background.

Content. Answers to what people are genuinely searching for. Not stuffing keywords — actually writing the page that answers someone's question.

Authority. Other sites mentioning and linking to you. The slowest-moving component, the one that looks most purchasable, and the one that does the most damage when purchased.

What to expect, and when

Technical fixes usually show within a few weeks: uncrawlable pages start being crawled, slow pages get faster.

Growth from content is slower. A newly written page typically takes three to six months to settle into rankings.

So be cautious about a proposal promising first place in month one. Nobody can guarantee Google's rankings.

Promises to be wary of

"Guaranteed first place." Not possible. Google decides rankings, and both the algorithm and your competitors keep moving.

"We're increasing keyword density." Repeating a phrase throughout the text stopped working years ago and drives readers away.

"We submitted you to 500 directories." Low-quality directory links don't help and sometimes hurt.

Forty articles a month. Producing near-identical content nobody reads doesn't bring traffic. Google's helpful-content updates target exactly this.

What to measure

Ranking alone is a misleading metric — it varies by query, device and location.

Track three things instead:

1. Visitors arriving from search (Search Console).
2. How many of them got in touch — this is the real question.
3. Which queries brought them. That list also tells you what to write next.

Where to start

In order:

1. Set up Search Console and check whether anything is blocking your site from being crawled.
2. Measure page speed and fix the worst offenders.
3. Give every page a unique title and description.
4. Write a page for each of the five questions customers ask you most.

Those four are the highest-return work available on most sites.

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We can assess your site's technical state and produce a prioritised list. See our SEO and growth service.