What to fix on your website before you spend anything on search

Search is a slow business. Anybody promising first page results in a month is either guessing or hoping you will not check. The work takes months to show, which is exactly why it is worth getting the foundations right before you start paying for it.

Most of what follows you can do yourself, or at least check yourself, and doing it first means any money you spend later goes further.

Make sure your pages can actually be read

Search engines have to fetch and understand your pages before anything else matters. Usually they can. Occasionally something is quietly stopping them.

The common blockers are worth ruling out. A staging site that got indexed and is now competing with your real one. A robots file left over from development that is still telling crawlers to stay away. Pages that only assemble properly after a lot of scripts have run. Broken internal links pointing at pages that moved years ago.

Google Search Console is free and will tell you most of this. If you have never set it up, that is the single highest value hour available to you right now. It shows which of your pages are indexed, which are not, and why.

Speed and mobile, again

These matter for search partly because they matter for people. A page that takes six seconds on a phone loses visitors, and losing visitors quickly is itself a signal.

Test on a real phone on mobile data, not on your office connection. Test the pages that actually matter, meaning the ones people land on rather than the homepage everybody optimizes. If a service page takes five seconds and the homepage takes two, you have been measuring the wrong thing.

Find out what people actually search for

Businesses consistently describe themselves in industry language, and customers consistently search in plain language. The gap between those two is where a lot of traffic is lost.

Three cheap ways to close it. Read your own inquiry emails and note the words people use. Check the search terms report in Search Console, which shows what people typed before they found you. And type the start of a relevant question into a search box and read the suggestions, which are drawn from what real people search.

Then be realistic about competition. A broad two word term with national intent will be dominated by companies with large budgets and years of history. Longer, more specific phrases attract fewer people, and those people are much closer to buying. For most small businesses that trade is obviously worth making.

Local search is usually the fastest return

If you serve a geographic area, this is where to start, and it is frequently neglected.

Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. All of it. Categories, hours, service area, description, and photographs that are actually of your business. Then check that your name, address and phone number are written identically everywhere they appear, on your site, in directories, on social profiles. Inconsistent details across listings undermine confidence in all of them, and this is boring work that genuinely moves the needle.

Reviews matter here as well, and the practical advice is simply to ask. Most satisfied customers will leave one if asked directly and shown where to go. Very few will think of it unprompted.

Write pages that answer questions

The most durable content is the sort that answers something a customer genuinely asks, properly, in one place.

Your team already knows what those questions are because they answer them every week. Each one is a page. Written honestly, at reasonable length, without padding to hit a word count.

One page that thoroughly answers a real question will out perform six thin pages assembled around keywords. It also has the advantage of being useful, which means people send it to each other, and that is worth more than any amount of optimization.

Check that traffic can turn into inquiries

It is possible to succeed at the search part and still get nothing, because the pages people arrive on do not give them a way forward.

Look at your most visited pages. Does each one make the next step obvious? Is there a phone number that works as a link on a phone? Does the form work, and does anybody read where it lands? Ranking better simply sends more people to whatever you already have, so it is worth making sure what you already have functions.

Things that will actively set you back

A short list, because these still get sold and they still cause damage.

Buying links is the main one. Packages offering hundreds of backlinks for a modest monthly fee are placing your site on networks that exist for no other purpose, and search engines have been identifying those for years. The downside is not that it fails to work. It is that recovering afterwards takes longer than the original work would have.

Repeating your target phrase unnaturally throughout a page is the other survivor from an earlier era. It reads badly to humans, which is now the more important problem.

Then there is the habit of publishing a large volume of near identical pages, one per town or per slight variation of a service. It creates a lot of pages competing with each other and very little that anybody wants to read. One strong page usually beats fifteen thin ones.

If an approach would embarrass you to explain to a customer, that is a reasonable signal.

What honest reporting looks like

When you do bring somebody in, the reporting tells you a lot about whether the work is real.

Reports full of impressions, average positions and traffic totals can look impressive while telling you nothing about your business. The measures worth insisting on are inquiries, calls, and which pages produced them. Rankings are a means to that, not the point.

Ask for the timeline in advance as well. Three to six months before meaningful movement is normal for competitive terms, sometimes sooner for local ones. Anybody comfortable saying that out loud is more likely to be doing the work properly than anybody promising you page one by next month.