Search visibility, in plain English

What SEO means

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. It means making your website easy for search engines to read, so that when somebody types what you sell into Google or Bing, your site is one of the answers.

A search engine is a robot that reads websites. It cannot see your shop, your smile, or your reputation. It can only read words, pictures and links. SEO is the work of making sure that robot reads yours correctly.

The three things a search engine decides with

Every search engine, whether Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo or anything else, answers three questions about your page:

1. Can I read it? If the robot is blocked, or the page loads empty, nothing else matters.
2. Is it about what the person typed? The words on the page have to match the question.
3. Is it good? Other websites linking to you, and real people staying on your page, tell the engine you are worth showing.

Notice the word “decides”. You do not control the answer. You improve your chances. Anyone who promises you a guaranteed position is not being straight with you.

What we fix for you

Here is the work, in the order it matters.

Letting the robots in. A file called robots.txt tells search engines where they may look. A file called sitemap.xml lists every page you want found. If either is wrong, whole sections of your site are invisible. This is checked first, because nothing else helps if the robots cannot get in.

A title and a description on every page. The title is the blue line in a search result. The description is the grey paragraph under it. Both are yours to write, and most sites waste them by repeating the same words on every page, or leaving them to be invented by the engine. We write one for each page, in your voice, using the words your customers actually type.

Enough words to be worth reading. A page with fifty words does not answer anyone’s question. The engine notices, and so does the visitor. We point out which pages are too thin and what to add.

Making sure each page has one address. Your shop might be reachable as yoursite.com, www.yoursite.com, yoursite.com/index and yoursite.com?ref=42. To a search engine those are four weak pages instead of one strong one. A “canonical” tag says which is the real one, so your effort counts once, fully.

Telling the engines you have changed. When you add a page, you can knock on the engine’s door and say so, rather than waiting weeks to be noticed. We do that for you.

Keeping it true. Search engines read the same page every day and notice when it changes. A site that is audited daily and fixed daily holds its position. A site audited once a year loses it. Our platform re-reads your site on a schedule and re-checks the fixes, so problems are caught the day they appear.

What we cannot promise

This matters more than the promises, so it is not in small print.

Nobody can guarantee the number one position. Not us, not any agency. The engine’s ranking is its own secret and it changes. What we can do is make your site technically perfect and well written, which is the part that is in anyone’s control.

Being number one for one word is not worth much. If you sell handmade gold rings in Edinburgh, being number one for “rings” is impossible and would not help you anyway; it is a word the whole world uses. Being number one for “handmade gold rings Edinburgh” is achievable and brings you customers. We aim at the second kind.

Authority takes time. Other websites linking to you is the strongest signal there is, and you cannot fake it. It builds over months. A brand new site will not outrank an established one for a popular phrase this week, however perfect its code. This is the honest reason results take months, not days.

Different engines are different. Google is the biggest. Bing powers Bing, DuckDuckGo and, in many countries, the search inside Windows and ChatGPT. Doing the technical work properly helps all of them at once, because they all read the same page. But we cannot submit to an engine that has not verified your site, and each engine has its own way of confirming you own it.

Where our position numbers come from

You should be able to check any number we show you, so we only show one when a real search engine gave it to us. We read positions from a live search data service (for example Brave, DataForSEO or ValueSERP). When you search the phrase yourself, you should see your site roughly where we say it is.

When no such service is connected, we show no position at all. We do not guess, and we do not show an estimate as though it were a real ranking. The page says the position has not been checked, and why. That is less satisfying to look at than a number, but a number we cannot stand behind is worth nothing to you, and you would find it out the first time you searched.

The same rule covers the other figures. A search volume or a keyword difficulty is shown only when a data source supplies it. Where we have none, the field is left blank rather than filled with a plausible-looking guess.

What you get to see

You should never have to take this on trust. The dashboard shows:

• every page we found on your site, and its state;
• every problem, in plain words, with the fix;
• which fixes we applied and when;
• which fixes need you, because they need a decision only you can make.

If a number on a dashboard cannot be explained in one sentence to a shop owner, it should not be on the dashboard.