SEO gets sold as a mystery. It isn’t one.
It’s a handful of specific jobs, done in order, and most of them you could understand in a five minute conversation. Here’s what the work actually is.
First, Find Out What’s Broken
Every engagement starts the same way. I go through the site looking for what’s actively holding it back.
Pages that load slowly. Titles that are duplicated across twenty pages, or missing. Broken links. A structure that makes no sense. Pages Google can’t even reach.
This part is unglamorous and it’s usually where the fastest wins are. I’ve seen a site jump in the rankings from nothing more than fixing what was already wrong.
Then Find Out What People Actually Type
This is where owners are most often surprised.
You call it what the industry calls it. Your customers call it something else entirely. The gap between those two is where the traffic is.
Keyword research is just finding the words real people use, and how many of them use it, and whether you have any chance against who’s already ranking.
Fix the Pages
Titles, descriptions, headings, the actual words on the page.
Not stuffing keywords in. Writing pages that genuinely answer the thing somebody searched for, with the right words in the right places. Google has been good at telling those apart for a long time now.
Write the Things That Are Missing
Usually there’s a service you offer that has no page. Or a question you answer on the phone weekly that exists nowhere on the site.
Each one of those is a page, and each page is a door.
The Technical Layer
Speed, mobile, structured data, a sitemap Google can read, HTTPS. The plumbing.
Nobody sees it. It affects everything.
Local, If You’re Local
Google Business Profile claimed and filled out properly. Name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear. Real reviews from real customers.
For a local business this is often the highest-value work on the list, and it’s the most commonly skipped.
How Long
Three to six months before it’s clearly working. Anybody promising page one in thirty days is selling you something.
Want to know which of these your site needs? Call me. I’ll go through it and tell you straight.