SEO explained
What SEO is, in plain English
Written for someone who has never heard the term and would rather not have to admit it. There is nothing embarrassing about not knowing this — it is not your job.
What the words actually mean
SEO stands for “search engine optimization.” Here’s what it actually means.
When somebody types “bookkeeper near me” or“wedding florist in Boise” into Google, Google has to decide which businesses to show first. It makes that decision by reading websites and working out what each one does, where it does it, and whether it seems trustworthy.
SEO is the work of making your website easy for Google to read and understand — so that when someone goes looking for exactly what you sell, your name is on the list.
Why it matters more than how the site looks
Almost nobody clicks to the second page of results. If you’re not in the first handful, you may as well not be there — however good you are at the actual work.
That’s the part most people get backwards. A beautiful website that Google can’t make sense of is a business card sitting in a drawer. It’s not doing anything. This is why we treat SEO as the point of the build rather than something bolted on at the end.
The work itself
What we actually do about it
Seven things, on every site we build. No acronyms that we haven’t already explained.
We give every page a clear title.
That’s the blue line you click in Google results. Most old sites say “Home” or “Untitled.” Yours will say what you do and where you do it.
Every service gets its own page.
If you do three things, that’s three pages. Google can only recommend you for something it knows you offer, and one page listing everything is far weaker than one page each.
Every area you serve gets a page.
If you cover five towns, you get five pages. This is the single biggest reason small businesses show up in one town and are invisible in the next one over.
We make it load fast.
Google pushes slow sites down, and visitors leave before a slow page finishes loading. Ours are built to load almost instantly, even on a phone with one bar.
We add a summary Google can read directly.
There’s a hidden, structured summary on every site telling Google your name, phone number, hours, service area, and reviews in a format it understands perfectly. Most small sites don’t have one.
We connect it to your Google Business Profile.
That’s the box with your map pin, hours, and reviews. Linking it properly to your site makes both stronger.
We write it in your customers’ words.
People search using the words they’d say out loud, not industry terms. We write the way your customers talk, because that’s what they’re typing.
What we won’t promise you
We can’t promise you the number one spot, and we won’t pretend otherwise. What we can promise is that everything above gets done properly, and that most small business websites have none of it.
Anyone who guarantees you the top of Google is guessing, or worse. Rankings depend on how much competition you have, how long you’ve been around, and how many people leave you reviews — and none of those are things a website builder controls.
What is in our control is whether your site is built so that Google can read it, understand it, and match it to the people looking for exactly what you do. That part we will do properly, and it is most of the battle for a small business. The rest is time and reviews.
This is included, not an extra
All seven are part of the $500 build. There is no SEO package to add on, because a site without it isn’t finished.