SEO and visibility

What is realistic, and when #

SEO is the one part of your website where you do the work today and see the result months later. That is not down to your template, it is how search engines work. An unknown domain is not shown up front before there is evidence that something real stands behind it.

That is why the expectation comes before the instructions here. People who know what happens when do not give up disappointed after six weeks. That is where most small websites fail, not on missing knowledge.

These periods are experience with small websites in manageable niches, not a promise. In a crowded market everything takes longer, with a very specific service it goes faster. What you steer with this chapter is the direction, not the date.

This chapter assumes your text is broadly in place, see Text and content. You can go live in parallel, the route to your own domain is in the chapter Going live. None of this is a reason to wait.

What your template already brings #

A good part of what gets sold as an SEO template is already built into yours. Not because it is particularly hard, but because it costs almost nothing while building and is tedious to retrofit later.

• One page per topic. Home, services, about, contact and articles each have their own job. Two pages fighting over the same query never even come into being.
• A title and description on every page. Every page already carries both, filled with example text. So you never have to create anything, you only overwrite.
• An overview file. Building creates a list of all your pages at /sitemap.xml. You submit it once, after that it keeps itself current with every build.
• Structured data. The head of every page carries your company details in machine readable form. They come from one central file and move along automatically when you rebuild the site.
• Finished pages instead of a page builder. Building turns your website into plain files. There is no database being queried on every visit. That is why these pages load fast.
• The same content on every device. Google rates the mobile version of your page. Your pages show the same text, the same headings and the same data on a phone as on a computer, not a shortened version.
• Readable addresses. Every page sits at a short address made of real words, not at a number.
• Every page pointing at itself. This makes it unambiguous for search engines which address is the official one, even when the same page could be reached by several routes.

What your template cannot bring are the words your customers search for, your answers to their questions and the stamina to keep at it for months. That is what the rest of this chapter is about.

Finding search terms without buying tools #

Finding search terms is not a tooling problem. The expensive programs show numbers that are useful for websites with tens of thousands of visitors. At the start you need something else, namely the words your customers use to describe their problem before they know your solution.

1. Write down twenty real customer questions. On the phone, by mail, in the first conversation. Word for word, in their language, not in yours. This is the most valuable half hour in this whole chapter.
2. Read the Google suggestions. Type the first words of a question into the search box and look at what unfolds. Those are real searches by other people, free of charge and sorted by frequency.
3. Take the “People also ask” box with you. It sits in the middle of the results on almost every search. Every question in it is a possible section on a page or a possible article.
4. Look at the first five results. Are they guides, comparisons or offer pages? That tells you more reliably than any number what kind of page is expected here.
5. Sort things out. Keep what clearly matches what you sell. Drop everything where you first have to construct a connection to your offer.

Pay attention to the intent, not to the volume. A query with ten thousand searches a month that you never win and that turns nobody into a customer is worthless. A query with thirty searches a month, where two people need exactly what you offer, carries your year.

Ten to fifteen such queries are enough for your first year. Put them in a list and assign exactly one page to each query. Queries without a page become your next articles, pages without a query are one topic short.

Buy, compare, understand #

Behind every search there is an intent, and it decides which kind of page wins. Three intents are entirely enough for your planning.

The most common mistake is trying to fit everything onto one page. Someone searching for “what does a bathroom renovation cost” who lands on a pure offer page is gone in five seconds. Someone who wants to hire you and first has to wade through three thousand words of guidance is gone too. One page serves one intent.

That leads to something many people find surprising. Most of your visitors arrive through pages that sell nothing. The selling happens on the second or third visit. That is why the link from an article to the matching service is the most important connection on your entire website.

Page title and description #

The page title is the clickable line in the search result and the text in the browser tab. It is the one place where a single field decides both about the rating and about the click. The description below it only decides the click, and that is worth just as much.

What belongs in the title

• Fifty to sixty characters. Anything longer gets cut off in the results. Count instead of guessing, your AI does that for all pages in one pass.
• What is being searched for goes first. The thing someone searches for stands at the beginning, your company name at the end, separated by a vertical bar. On the home page the name may come first.
• Every page gets its own. Two pages with the same title compete with each other and you lose both times. “Home” or “Services” as a title wastes the most important line you have.
• No word stacking. “Bathrooms Kassel bathroom renovation renovate bathroom Kassel” is not a title, it is a list. It reads badly and no longer works.
• The location belongs in it if you work locally. For a trade business it is half the battle. For a consultancy working nationwide it is wasted space.

What belongs in the description

• One hundred and twenty to one hundred and fifty-five characters. Shorter looks thin, longer gets cut off.
• It is not a ranking factor. Google does not rate the description. It is your advert in the result list and decides whether someone clicks you or the result below. That is a job for good copy, not for search terms.
• Written actively, with the next step at the end. “Free initial consultation” or “appointment usually within the same week” at the close gives the click a reason.
• It has to keep its promise. Anyone who clicks and does not find the announced answer goes back to the results. That signals that your page does not fit, and it works against you.

Headings and addresses #

Headings are not a design device, they are the table of contents of your page. Search engines read from them which sub-topics a page covers. People scanning the page read exactly the same thing.

• One main heading per page. It says in human language what this is about and matches the promise from the page title. Two main headings on one page are like two titles on one book.
• Section headings below it, without jumps. From the main heading to the second level, from there to the third. Never skip a level just because the font size happens to fit.
• Size is a question of design. If a sentence should look bigger, that is a job for the design, not for an extra heading level. How that works is in the chapter Adjusting the design.
• Headings carry statements. “The process in four steps” beats “Our approach”, because the heading alone already tells you something. That helps when people skim and when machines quote.

The same principle applies to the addresses of your pages. Short, lower case, with hyphens, without a date and without a jumble of numbers. You can read /bathroom-renovation out on the phone, /services/category/page-2-final not so much. And once an address is published you change it as rarely as possible, because for search engines every changed address is a new page without a history.

Internal links, the underrated lever #

Of everything you hold in your own hands, internal linking is the most underrated. It costs nothing, it needs no stranger to link to you, and it works from the next crawl onwards.

Links between your own pages do two things at once. They show search engines which pages belong together and which ones matter to you. And they lead people onwards instead of leaving them stranded at the end of a text.

• The link text says what is coming. “How a bathroom renovation runs” instead of “here” or “learn more”. For search engines the link text is the description of the target page, and “here” describes nothing.
• Every article links to at least one service. Otherwise your blog collects readers who never reach your offer.
• Every article links to a related article. That creates a net instead of a row of dead ends, and visitors stay longer.
• The most important pages are reachable from everywhere. Whatever is linked from the menu and the footer of every page counts as important. Which is exactly why not everything belongs in the menu.
• New content gets connected. An article nothing points to is almost invisible. Link it from two existing pages as soon as it is up.

Local search #

If your customers come from one town or one region, local search is the part that works fastest. Here you are not up against the whole internet, only against the providers around you. Many of them have not touched their presence in years.

Content that carries #

Everything up to here is craft and done in one or two days. What works over years afterwards are pages that genuinely answer a question.

The reason is simple. Google already has ten answers for every query. Your page does not have to be the best in the world, it has to be better than the one currently sitting in tenth place. With niche questions that is often surprisingly easy, because nobody there has written anything serious.

What counts is experience you cannot look up. You know what really goes wrong in your trade, what things cost and why the usual advice often does not fit. No model can invent that and no competitor can copy it. It is the one lead nobody takes from you.

How an article is built

1. The question as the heading. Word for word the way someone would ask it, not as an advertising slogan.
2. The answer in the first sentences. Not after an introduction about how important the topic is, but immediately. Whoever is looking for a number finds the number in the first paragraph.
3. Then the reasoning. Why it is that way, what it depends on, when it is different. This is where it may get long.
4. An example from your practice. Anonymised if needed, but concrete. One real example beats three paragraphs of generalities.
5. What people ask next at this point. The items from the “People also ask” box, each as a short section of its own with its own heading.
6. The next step. A link to the service that fits the topic and a link to a related article.

Two solid articles a month are worth more than ten thin ones. And an existing article that you revise after six months, adding what readers actually asked about, often works better than a new one. How to set up that rhythm in practice is in the chapter Maintaining and extending.

Structured data #

The head of every page in your template contains a small section no visitor ever sees. It holds your company details in a form machines can read without guessing. A business card for search engines, hidden in the source.

Without that section Google has to guess from your text that a string of digits is your phone number and that you are a business and not a private person. Usually that works. With the data it works reliably, and your details are more likely to appear in the box next to the search results.

In your template it holds the type of business, name, address, phone, opening hours and the address of your website. For articles a second section is added per post, naming title, date and author. Both are fed from one central file, so you maintain them in one place and not on every page.

• Only enter what is on the page as well. Details that do not appear in the visible text breach Google's guidelines and can cost you the enhanced display.
• No review stars without real reviews. Invented stars are the fastest way to lose the enhanced display permanently. If your template ships a review element as a placeholder, you replace it with real figures or take it out.
• Questions and answers only when they are visible. An FAQ in the data that does not exist on the page counts as deception.
• Check once after every rebuild. Google offers a free test for this where you enter your address. It shows you what was read and where something is missing.

The technical duty #

The technical part is short with your template, because most of it is already right. You should still check these six points yourself once, because every single one of them can make a whole website invisible without it looking any different.

Visible in AI assistants #

More and more people no longer ask a search engine but an assistant. The answer then consists of two or three sources instead of ten results. Whoever gets named wins a lot, everyone else does not appear at all.

You do not need a second toolbox for this. Assistants read the same pages as search engines, they simply prefer different properties. Following the points below works for both at once.

• The answer comes first. A model usually takes the first forty to sixty words of a section. If an introduction sits there, the introduction gets quoted. If the answer sits there, you get quoted.
• Clear structure beats beautiful prose. Headings as questions, short paragraphs, lists, tables. What a person can skim, a model can take apart.
• Numbers, deadlines and names make you quotable. “A bathroom renovation takes us ten to fourteen working days” gets quoted. “We work fast” does not.
• Do not lock the AI crawlers out. The file robots.txt lets you deny models access. Anyone who does that does not appear in their answers. For the vast majority of small websites, visibility is worth more here than keeping distance.
• Your details have to line up. Assistants compare your website, your business profile and directories. Contradictions lead to them preferring not to name you at all.

What to leave alone #

Four things cost time and money without working. Two of them do active damage.

There is a fifth thing on top. You will get calls and mails offering you first place on Google. Anyone who does not know how the ranking works cannot promise a position. With a young website the same money is far better spent on two articles a month.

Measuring without getting lost #

Without numbers you do not know whether you are doing something right or just staying busy. For the start one single tool is enough, Google Search Console. It is free, it needs no consent from your visitors, and it is the only place that shows you which search queries bring people to you.

Look in once a month, not every day. Three numbers are entirely enough.

The most useful report is the list of search queries. It contains phrasings you would never have come up with yourself. Every one of them that you can answer and do not answer yet is your next article.

For visitor numbers on your website a separate measurement is added that needs consent from your visitors. That is a decision of its own and is covered in the chapter Going live. For everything in this chapter, Search Console is enough.

The first 90 days #

If you put only one section of this chapter into practice, make it this one. It brings everything above into an order you can keep up alongside your actual work.