Guide
What SEO can fix, and what it can’t
There is so much talked about with SEO, that it can be confusing to understand just what it can – and can’t – do, what to do first if you’ve limited time, and what isn’t SEO at all, and needs a different kind of help.
What SEO can genuinely fix
Can Google find and understand your website?
This is one of the basics of SEO and it is also the most reliably fixable. Broken pages, an unindexed site, missing page titles, images with no description, a confusing site structure. If search engines can’t be sure what your site is about, it’s likely your human visitors can’t either. If in any doubt both will look for someone’s else’s page instead.
Does your site match what people are searching for?
A lot of small business websites are written the way the business owner talks about their work, not the way a customer searches for it. You know the difference between “domestic and commercial pest control services” and what someone actually types when they’ve found mice in the kitchen. Matching your pages to real search language and intent is a core part of SEO, and it is one of the most important to get right.
Do you show up for people searching nearby?
If you are a local business, a properly set up Google Business Profile, consistent listings and a plan for collecting new reviews make a measurable difference to whether you appear when someone searches “near me” or names your town. If you have a lot of competitors in your area, you’ll want to get this optimised as much as possible.
Quick check
A Google Business profile is free but does require verification to set up, so do it sooner rather than later.
Is your site fast? Does it work properly on a phone?
Slow pages and clunky mobile experiences lose you both rankings and customers, often before anyone reads a word of your amazing content. Fixing this is technical, it is measurable, and the improvement is usually visible fairly quickly.
Is your content earning its place?
Most sites have pages that could rank far better with the right adjustments: a clearer heading, a more useful answer, better internal linking to related pages. This is often a quick win, because you are improving something that already exists rather than starting from scratch.
Conducting an audit will highlight issues with your website and surface improvements that you should consider making
What SEO can’t fix
A product or service that doesn’t appeal to your audience
SEO can put your business in front of the right person at the right moment. It can’t make someone want double glazing they don’t need or hire a service they don’t value. If enquiries come in and don’t convert, the problem could live in your pricing, your offer or your follow up, not in your search rankings.
A slow start
A new website can often be slow to rank, Google is cautious with new websites and new domains. – they have to prove their relevance and legitimacy. There are no ethical shortcuts to guarantee a brand new site will rank well in a few weeks. Anyone who tells you otherwise is either overpromising or doing something Google will eventually penalise.
Worth acting on quickly
Getting all the technical basics done when you first launch your site will be worth the time invested upfront. It’s tempting to just get the site live and worry about the other stuff later. This can further delay your site’s visibility and performance.
A poor reputation
If your reviews are poor, or you don’t have many recent ones, that should be a priority to address. People researching your business, and search engines increasingly weigh trust signals like reviews heavily, over what you say about your own service or products. This is worth fixing regardless of SEO, but it sits outside what an audit or a technical fix can achieve.
Ranking without any content at all
SEO helps to make your existing pages work harder, but it can’t conjure relevance out of nothing. A site with a few thin pages and no real explanation of what you do gives Google very little to work with, however well optimised. More substance such as, answering possible objections, giving a case study or adding images helps to give context on your subject.
Guaranteed results
Nobody can promise a specific ranking position or a specific number of leads by a specific date. Search engines change how they rank things, competitors are doing their own SEO too, and some of what determines rank sits outside anyone’s control. What I can promise is that the recommendations I give you are based on what is known to work, explained clearly enough that you understand why you should be doing them.
WHAT NEXT
Where to go from here
If your enquiries are down and your site hasn’t been touched in a while, there’s probably real opportunity in the list above. If it’s already in decent shape, the issue may not be search visibility at all, and it’s worth taking a look at outside factors before spending more on SEO.