SEO for Business Websites | The Web Alchemist

You know the website should be bringing in more work from Google. What nobody’s done is explain search engine optimisation to you without the jargon. So this page does. It covers how Google finds and ranks pages, picking the words to go after, what matters on the page and behind it, local results, AI Overviews and how to tell if any of it is working. Every factual point here comes straight from Google’s own documentation, apart from one from the WordPress project, and the sources are listed at the bottom.

In brief

If Google hasn’t indexed a page, nothing else you do to it matters.
Start with the words your customers actually type. They’re often not the ones you use internally.
Clear titles, sensible internal links and properly useful pages still do the heavy lifting, and Google says AI Overviews and AI Mode need nothing extra.
Check Search Console and GA4 before and after any big change, and plan your redirects properly if URLs ever move.

How Google finds, stores and ranks your pages

Google breaks search into three stages. First it crawls, sending automated programs out to download the text, images and video from pages they’ve found. Then it indexes, working out what it downloaded and filing it in a very large database. Finally it serves, which is the bit you see, when someone types a query and gets back the results Google thinks are most relevant. A page has to clear the first two before it gets anywhere near the third. If nothing links to it, it may never be found. If it’s still carrying a leftover ‘noindex’ setting from the build, it’ll be kept out of the index.

Nothing’s guaranteed, by the way. Google doesn’t promise to crawl, index or show any page, even one that follows every guideline, and it won’t take money to crawl a site more often or rank it higher. Anyone claiming a special arrangement with Google is selling something else.

For a quick check, Google’s SEO Starter Guide suggests searching for site:yourdomain.co.uk. For the proper picture, open the Page indexing report in Google Search Console. It lists the URLs Google knows about and gives a reason for each one it’s left out, a redirect, a server error, a duplicate and so on. Google says not every URL needs to be indexed. What matters is that every page that’s important to your business is.

An XML sitemap helps Google find your URLs, though it won’t guarantee they get indexed. Google says most sites benefit from having one, and WordPress has made a basic sitemap automatically since version 5.5.

Where AI Overviews and AI Mode fit

AI Overviews and AI Mode both link out to pages that back up their answers. Google’s guidance says there are no extra requirements to appear in either and no special optimisation needed. The page has to be indexed and eligible to show in Search with a snippet, and after that the ordinary advice on this page applies. Google also reports that people who click through from results with AI Overviews tend to spend more time on the site. So be wary of anyone selling an ‘AI SEO’ package that skips the basics.

Keyword research in your customers’ own words

Google’s starter guide asks you to think about the words someone might search for to find your content, and points out that different people describe the same need differently. Loads of business websites are written in the business’s own language instead. An accountancy practice talks about ‘compliance services’ while its prospects are searching for help with a tax return. A kitchen fitter writes ‘bespoke cabinetry’ and homeowners type ‘new kitchen cost’. A manufacturer lists part numbers when buyers are searching for the problem the part fixes.

Decent keyword research often costs nothing. Listen to how customers describe the problem on the phone. Read the wording in enquiry forms and reviews. Ask whoever answers the phone which questions come up every week. Then open the Performance report in Search Console, which shows the searches people made before your site appeared, with clicks and impressions for each. Lots of impressions but hardly any clicks is worth a proper look. Google already thinks you’re relevant, and the page might just need a clearer title or a better answer.

Once you’ve got the words, give each separate service or product its own page, aimed at its own cluster of searches. That’s much easier to decide while you’re planning a site, which is why our guide to planning a business website from scratch treats page structure as a search question as much as a design one. And you can forget the old ‘meta keywords’ tag entirely. Google says its search doesn’t use it.

Title links, snippets and the words on the page

The blue clickable headline in a Google result is what Google calls a ‘title link’. Your HTML title element is one source for it. So are the main heading on the page, other prominent text and the wording of links pointing at the page. Google says the process is completely automated, and if it spots a problem it may build a different title link from other text. The problems it lists include titles that are half-empty or out of date, titles that don’t match the content, and the same wording repeated across lots of similar pages.

Google’s advice is to keep each title descriptive and concise. Don’t call it ‘Home’. Don’t repeat the same words over and over. Make it unique to the page, and make it obvious which heading on the page is the main one. For a dental clinic that might mean ‘Emergency Dentist Appointments in Stroud’ on the emergency page, rather than the practice name repeated on every page of the site.

The grey text underneath is the snippet. Google says it’s mostly built from the page content itself, and that it sometimes uses your meta description when that gives a more accurate summary. There’s no length limit on a meta description, but Google cuts the snippet to fit the screen. Write a unique one for each important page that tells a searcher plainly what they’ll find, and accept that Google might pick a passage from your copy instead.

None of that helps if the page doesn’t answer the question. Clear headings, plain explanations and an obvious next step all have to be there.

Site structure and internal linking

Google uses links to judge how relevant pages are and to find new pages to crawl. Its link guidance says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site. Those links should be ordinary HTML anchor elements with an ‘href’ attribute, because links built other ways often can’t be followed by its crawlers.

Group related pages together. A hotel might have sections for rooms, dining and weddings, each linking back to a clear parent page. An online shop links categories to products and products to related items. The wording of the link matters as well. Google recommends link text that’s descriptive and relevant, so ‘boiler servicing prices’ tells Google and the reader far more than ‘find out more’.

We’ve gone into this properly in our explainer on internal linking for business websites, including how to check the links you’ve already got.

Helpful content and what E-E-A-T really means

Google’s guidance on helpful content asks for what it calls people-first content, made mainly for people rather than to manipulate search rankings. Its self-assessment questions come down to who made it, how and why.

You’ll see E-E-A-T mentioned a lot. It stands for Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness and Trustworthiness, and Google says trust matters most of the four. It’s also clear that E-E-A-T itself isn’t a specific ranking factor, though a mix of other factors can help identify content that shows it. Google uses human search quality raters to evaluate its results too, but says they have no control over how pages rank and their data isn’t used directly in the ranking algorithms.

In practice? Show the actual people behind the work, explain how you do things and make it easy to see who you are. A physio clinic that names its clinicians and explains its assessment process gives a reader far more reason to trust it than a page of generic health tips. A B2B manufacturer that publishes clear specifications and tolerances earns more confidence than one with a vague capabilities list.

Links from other websites

Links from other sites still help Google find and assess your pages, and its local ranking help even mentions how many websites link to a business as part of how well known it is. But Google’s spam policies define link spam as creating links mainly to manipulate rankings, which covers buying or selling links, excessive link swaps and automated link building. Paid links for advertising or sponsorship are fine as long as they carry a ‘nofollow’ or ‘sponsored’ attribute. Sites that break the rules can rank lower or drop out of results altogether. Earn your links through trade bodies, suppliers, local press and content people actually want to reference.

Technical foundations and page experience

Google uses the mobile version of a site’s content, crawled with a smartphone crawler, for indexing and ranking. Hide content on mobile that shows on desktop and Google warns you can expect some traffic loss. Tabs and accordions are fine, as long as the content’s actually there.

Google confirms Core Web Vitals are used by its ranking systems, and asks site owners to think about whether pages are served securely over HTTPS, display well on mobile and avoid intrusive interstitials. There are three Core Web Vitals right now. Largest Contentful Paint covers loading, with a target of 2.5 seconds or less. Interaction to Next Paint covers responsiveness, with a target under 200 milliseconds. Cumulative Layout Shift covers visual stability, with a target under 0.1. Interaction to Next Paint took over from the old First Input Delay metric on 12 March 2024, so any report still quoting FID is out of date. Our guide to website speed and Core Web Vitals goes through the measuring and the fixes.

Keep it in proportion, mind. Google says good Core Web Vitals scores don’t guarantee top rankings, and that it always tries to show the most relevant content even if the page experience is sub-par. HTTPS, updates and uptime are part of running a site safely as well, which we cover in the guide to keeping a website secure and maintained.

Structured data

Structured data is code, usually in the JSON-LD format Google recommends, that describes a page in a way machines can read. Google says it gives explicit clues about what a page means and can make the page eligible for rich results, the fancier listings that may encourage people to click. It doesn’t guarantee they’ll show up, and Google expects the markup to match what’s visible on the page.

Local SEO and your Google Business Profile

Google’s help page on local ranking says local results mainly come down to three things. Relevance is how well a Business Profile matches what someone searched for. Distance is how far the business is from the person searching, and if they haven’t shared a location, Google goes on what it knows about where they are. Prominence is how well known the business is, which draws on things like links from other websites and the number of reviews. Google notes that more reviews and positive ratings can help.

You can’t pay for a better local ranking, and Google says so. Its own tips are to keep your details complete and current, verify the business, keep opening hours right, add photos and reply to reviews. It makes sense for the name, address and phone number on your website to match the profile too, so nobody’s left wondering which one’s right.

Your website backs the profile up, with a clear page for each service and a contact page showing your address and the area you cover. If you’re in or around Gloucestershire and want local help with this, our Gloucester SEO page explains what we do in the area.

Measuring progress and protecting it through a redesign

Search Console should be the first thing you connect to any business website. The Performance report shows clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position, split by query, page, country, device and date. Google says sites appearing in AI features such as AI Overviews and AI Mode are included in the overall search traffic shown there. The Page indexing report tells you which pages are in Google and why the rest aren’t.

Search Console covers what happens up to the click. For everything after it you want Google Analytics 4. In GA4, the actions that matter to your business, like an enquiry form, a tap on your phone number or a completed order, are now called ‘key events’. The word ‘conversion’ is kept for actions used to measure and optimise advertising. Set them up and you can see which search traffic actually turns into enquiries. If visits look healthy and enquiries don’t, have a look at the pages themselves, which is where our conversion rate optimisation service and our guide on turning more visitors into enquiries come in.

Give it time. Google says some changes take effect in a few hours and others can take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before deciding whether a change helped.

Moving or rebuilding a site without losing rankings

A rebuild that changes your URLs puts existing rankings at risk, and Google’s site move documentation sets out how to handle it. List every old URL and decide where each one should go. Set up server-side permanent (301) redirects from old to new. Point your internal links straight at the new addresses, submit the new sitemap in Search Console, and use the Change of Address tool if you’re moving domain. Google advises keeping redirects for as long as possible, generally at least a year. It also warns that visibility in Search may fluctuate temporarily during the move, and that on a medium-sized site it can take a few weeks or more before Google starts showing the new URLs instead of the old ones. If a rebuild’s on the cards, make the redirect plan part of the website design project from week one rather than launch week.

Getting help with SEO

You can do a lot of this in-house with time and care, and Search Console will tell you plenty once it’s got a few weeks of data. The hard part is knowing what to fix first and finding the time to keep going. If you’d rather have someone working on that alongside you, we offer ongoing SEO support for business websites built on the same principles as this page.

Not sure where your site stands? Have a look at the search engine optimisation services we provide, then get in touch for a conversation about your website. We’ll tell you straight what we’d look at first.

How SEO Works for a Business Website