Get found by Google

Google (and increasingly AI search) are such commonly used tools that where you show up in their list of things related to a word can decide how much traffic you get — and how hard your other promotions work for you.

But don't panic. They've given us half a map of how to make sure we get found.

I'm gonna say something now, and it's gonna seem dumb. But it's true.

Your content should be about what you sell.

That's really my big golden rule. Write about the questions your customers are asking about the thing you sell. Talk about the reasons they want it, how they get it, and the worries and concerns that stop them from buying. Obsessively. Continually. In detail.

If you want Google to look at your content and go, “Hey, this guy sells lawn mower repair!” then write about lawn mower repair!

What can I do to help you with that?

Well, I know how to help Google bots and AI search tools understand what you're writing about. Headings, page titles, meta descriptions, internal links, structured data and sitemaps — all the little technical signals that help machines find, interpret and organise your content.

I can essentially take your perfectly coherent blog about whipper snipper line and translate it into robot.

It's not as hard as it sounds, but it's pedantic and consistent, so you have to do it every time.

And you probably haven't, because nobody told you it would make a difference.

So I have services to help you with your new content, and also to go back over the existing stuff and give it a bit of a polish-up.

And there's more to it than robot translation.

Things like your reviews, how complete and useful your Google Business Profile is (that's GBP in SEO nerd speak), and whether other reputable websites link to yours all contribute to how easily people can discover your business.

And it's not just about collecting links. Who's linking to you, whether they're trustworthy, and what they're talking about when they link you all help establish the context of your website.

Hopefully, lawn mower repair.

These are all pieces of the picture that search engines use to understand your business, decide which searches you're relevant to, and determine when to show your website.

The other things that can block the little Google bots

Site speed

This is my pet project.

So many perfectly good websites are making life harder for themselves because nobody's looking after their technical health. They're harder to use, they lose impatient customers, and poor performance can hurt their visibility in search results.

The easiest place to see this is speed.

Think about how many times you've clicked on a website, waited a beat for it to load, and then assumed it was broken.

It was probably just slow.

We're impatient little creatures, and Google knows it. Page experience is one of the things it considers when deciding which results to show people. And even when Google does send someone your way, a slow website can lose them before they've seen what you sell.

This SEEMS like a totally unrelated thing when we're talking about getting found in Google, but it's often one of the first things I address when we do an SEO assessment.

Crawling and indexing

The bots have a little process.

First, they crawl. They discover your pages by following links, exploring your navigation and internal links, and checking your sitemap — which is essentially a list of pages you'd like them to look at.

Then they read what they find.

Hopefully, if we've done our translation jobs right, they'll figure out from all that information what we're on about and decide to save it for later.

That's what we mean when we say a page has been indexed by Google.

Then comes the ranking — deciding which of those pages to show people when they search, and where they should appear.

But there are ways we can stop the little crawlers from getting that far in the first place.

We can leave an important page off our sitemap and never link to it from another page, making it much harder to discover. We can accidentally tell Google not to index it. We can have a robots.txt file that blocks crawlers from accessing it entirely.

Server errors and broken links are also the enemy.

Checking for these blocks, removing them where appropriate, and laying clear breadcrumbs for the crawlers is part of what we do when we're talking SEO and discoverability.

So, how do we get you found?

There's no magic button that puts you at the top of Google. Annoying, I know.

But there are a lot of little things we can do to make sure your website is giving itself the best possible chance.

We can make sure Google can find your pages, understand what you're selling and see why your content is relevant. We can fix the technical problems getting in the way, tidy up the robot translation, and make better use of the content you've already worked hard to create.

Some of that is a one-off fix. Some of it is the sort of boring, consistent maintenance that makes a difference over time.

And you don't have to do everything at once.

We can start with one page, tackle the technical problems, or work through a longer-term plan to improve your visibility.

The important thing is that we're making it easier for the right people to find you — not just trying to impress the robots.