Getting found

How people find you on Google.

Two different things get called SEO, and only one of them is the website. It is worth separating them before you spend money on either, so here is what we do, what stays yours, and what nobody can honestly promise you.

Your own name, from launch day

Somebody who already knows your name and types it in should find you, not a directory listing with your old phone number on it. That part is mechanical and it happens the day you go live: the site goes up on your own domain, every page gets a proper name, and we submit the site to Google through Search Console, in an account in your name. You keep that account. It is where next month's numbers come from.

What is on every page we build

Google can only rank a page if it can work out what the page is about. So on every page of every site, not just the home page:

• One main headline on the page, and the headings under it in order.
• A page name and a one-line summary written for that page, not copied from the last one.
• A caption on every photo, which is also what a blind visitor hears.
• Your name, phone, address, hours and the towns you cover, written in the format Google reads.
• All the words sitting in the page itself, not drawn in afterwards by a program.

That last one matters more than it sounds. On a lot of modern sites the page arrives empty and a program fills it in a moment later. Google usually copes with that. Not always, and never quickly. Ours are just there, which is the same reason they open in about a second on a bad signal.

One page can only be about one thing

This is the part that changes how much work comes in, and it is the reason the plans are sized the way they are. Google ranks pages, not businesses. A single page covering leaks, drains, water heaters and furnaces is one page competing for four different jobs, and it will lose to four pages that each do one properly.

Splitting them out is why Growth carries up to eight pages rather than three, and why a page after that is $19 a month instead of a fresh invoice. More pages is not a bigger bill for its own sake. It is more ways in.

The part that is not the website

Here is the bit most people selling you SEO will not say first. For a trade or a clinic, the businesses in the box at the top of a local search are not there because of their websites. They are there because of their Google Business Profile and their reviews. That profile is free, it is yours, and it is the single biggest thing you can do.

We do not run it for you. It is your business and the login should stay with you. What we do is build the asking into your site, put your real reviews on your pages in your customers’ own words, and tell you plainly what to do with the profile and why it matters. Nobody can leave a review on your behalf. Only your customers can, and only you can ask them.

What arrives every month

On Growth and Partner you get two short emails a month. One is the search report: what people typed to find you and where you came up. The other is the analytics report: who visited, which pages they read, and how many tapped the phone. Both in plain words, no dashboard to log into.

At the end of each is one specific thing worth doing next. That line is the point of the whole exercise. A page of numbers is not worth paying for. Knowing which one thing to change is.

What we will not tell you

We will not promise you page one, and we will not put a date on it. Anybody who does is guessing, and it is a fair question to ask them how they know. Competing for a search like plumber near me takes time, it depends on how many others are pushing for the same thing, and a good deal of it is not the website at all.

What we will do is the part that is genuinely ours, on every page, on every site, and then show you the numbers either way, including the months they go down.