How Google decides who to show
Google works in three steps. A crawler visits the site and fetches its content, then stores it in the index, and for every search it builds a list of results from what is in the index.
The order depends on how well a page answers the phrase, whether it is trustworthy and easy to use on a phone, and whether other websites recommend it. For phrases with a city name, the customer's distance and your Google Business Profile matter too.
A page the crawler cannot read or understand will not rank, even if the business is the best in town. That is why SEO starts with the technical side.
The four parts of SEO
- 01
Technical
Google must be able to read every important page, and the site has to be fast on a phone.
- 02
Content
One page for each customer need, with the answer right at the top.
- 03
Links
Recommendations from other websites: directories, guest articles, local news sites.
- 04
Tracking
Phrase rankings, impressions and clicks from Search Console, compared over time.
Technical SEO: what we check first
The technical audit is part of the setup fee on every plan. We check these items on every site:
Indexing
Important pages are in Google's index, with no accidental noindex or robots.txt blocks.
Mobile speed
Core Web Vitals: loading time, layout stability and response to taps.
Titles and descriptions
Every page has its own title and description with the service and city shown in results.
Headings
One H1 per page, with the topic the customer is looking for.
URLs and redirects
One version of the domain, 301 redirects without chains and canonical URLs.
Sitemap
An up-to-date sitemap.xml submitted in Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools.
Structured data
Organization, LocalBusiness, Service and FAQPage in JSON-LD, without errors.
Internal links
Service pages linked to each other and to the articles that cover them.
Content: one page for each customer need
Google shows the page that best answers a specific phrase. One "Services" page listing everything loses to a competitor with a separate page for each service and each city.
So we build a content plan from the phrases customers already type: service pages, location pages, pricing with answers to cost questions, and articles that explain decisions before a purchase.
| Phrase the customer types | Page that answers it |
|---|---|
| bookkeeper austin | Home page with the service and city in the title and heading |
| bookkeeping for online store | Service page: bookkeeping for online stores |
| monthly bookkeeping cost | Pricing page with price ranges and cost questions |
| cash or accrual accounting | Article comparing both methods |
Example for a bookkeeping firm. Your phrases come from your own site's data.
Links from other websites
A link to your site from another website works like a recommendation. Who recommends you matters: one link from a local news site or an industry directory is worth more than hundreds of links from random pages.
They help
- Business and industry directories
- Guest articles on sites and blogs in your industry
- Local media and organizations, such as the chamber of commerce
- Partners and suppliers you work with
They hurt
- Bought packages of hundreds of links
- Networks of sites built only for links
- Comment links on random forums
Local SEO and your Google Business Profile
When a customer types a service with a city name or "near me", Google shows a map with a few businesses above the results. Your place on it depends on your Google Business Profile: category, services, hours, photos and reviews.
Consistency matters too: the same name, address and phone number on your site, in your Google profile and in directories. Different versions of your details weaken the trust of Google and of AI assistants.
How to measure SEO: Search Console and phrases
Google Search Console is Google's free tool that shows how your site performs in results. These four numbers show SEO progress:
- Position
- Average place of the page in results for a phrase
- Impressions
- How many times the page appeared in search results
- Clicks
- How many people came to the site from Google results
- CTR
- The share of impressions that end in a click
How long SEO takes
Technical fixes take effect once Google crawls the site again, so the first changes in Search Console usually show within a few weeks. New pages need time to get indexed and collect their first impressions.
Rankings for competitive phrases take months, because they need better content and links than the competition. That is why we measure every week: you see the direction before you see the finish line.
SEO and AI answers
Google AI Overviews is built from Google's index, and ChatGPT, Perplexity, Claude and Copilot with web search fetch pages that do well in search engines. Good SEO is the foundation of AI visibility.
SEO alone is not enough: an AI assistant is more likely to recommend a business it finds consistent information about in many sources. That is why every plan covers both.
What you get and how we measure it
We work on everything Google rankings depend on: the technical side of your site, content that answers your customers' questions, and links from other websites. We choose the phrases with you, from the ones your customers actually type.
Every phrase on the list is checked every week, and the report shows what we shipped and how its ranking has changed since the first measurement. The report also includes Search Console and Bing data, so you can verify every change yourself.