04 / Service
Search
You searched for what you do and you were not on the first page. Somebody has been sending you a monthly report full of graphs for a year, and none of the numbers on it are customers.
Definition
Getting found by people looking for what you sell. This is the engineering half of search rather than the blogging half: making sure Google can read the site, understands what the business does, and is not put off by how slowly it loads.
Fit
You are probably in the right place if:
- A business invisible for the thing it actually sells.
- Anyone paying every month and unable to say what it bought.
- A site that used to come up and quietly stopped.
- A business whose phone number differs across three listings.
Scope
- A full check of what Google can and cannot read on the site
- Broken links, error pages and duplicate pages competing with each other, found and fixed
- Page structure and internal links, so the site explains what it is about
- The hidden description that tells search engines what your business is, with nothing invented
- Speed work, since Google measures it and customers feel it
- Business listings made consistent, and Google reporting set up with the useful parts pointed out
Sequence
-
01
Read it the way Google does
What is listed, what is blocked, what is duplicated, and what returns an error nobody noticed.
-
02
Fix structure before writing
A page can only come up for something the site makes clear it is about. That is usually a structure problem dressed as a content problem.
-
03
Make it fast
Speed is measurable, it counts towards ranking, and unlike most search work it improves the site whether or not it moves a position.
-
04
Make the details match
One name, one address, one phone number, one set of hours, everywhere. Inconsistency is among the most common causes of a weak showing and the cheapest to fix.
Effort
What actually moves the number.
The honest answer to what it costs is that it depends on these. Read them and you will know roughly where your job sits before anyone quotes you anything.
- Site size
- A nine page site is checked in a day. A store with four thousand products is not.
- How much history there is
- Years of old forwarding rules and abandoned pages take longer to untangle than a site built last year.
- Competition
- A specialised trade term is a different problem to one that ten funded companies are bidding on.
- Whether writing is needed
- The technical work makes a site findable. If nothing on it answers the question people are searching, that is writing, and writing takes time.
FAQ
Can you guarantee first place?
No, and anyone who does is either guessing or picking a search term nobody uses. What is promised is that the barriers come down and the results are measured in Google's own reporting, not a dashboard built to look busy.
How long before anything changes?
Technical fixes show up within weeks. Movement on anything competitive is months. Anyone quoting faster is describing a term with no competition.
Do I need to pay every month?
Usually not at first. Most small sites need one block of work, then a check every few months. Paying monthly makes sense once there is a real amount of writing to do.
Does site speed really affect rankings?
A little. It affects sales far more. Vodafone Italy ran two identical pages that differed only in speed, and the faster one sold eight percent more. That is the reason to care.
Next
Tell us what is wrong with it.
The quote form arrives with search already selected. It starts with the site rather than with you, so the first step costs you nothing.