Getting found for the things that actually bring in work
SEO gets sold as a mystery. It isn't. It's three things: a site Google can read and rank, content that answers what people actually search for, and enough credibility that Google believes you. Everything else is detail.
What I won't do is sell you a monthly report full of rankings for terms nobody searches. I'd rather get you found for the handful of phrases that put work in your diary, and be able to show you the enquiries that came from them.
Technical SEO
The foundations, and the part most sites get wrong. Site structure and internal linking, page speed and Core Web Vitals, mobile usability, indexing and crawl issues, canonical tags, XML sitemaps, and structured data (schema) so Google understands what your business is and where it operates. Where a site is too slow to fix in place, a rebuild as a fast HTML website is often cheaper than fighting it.
Local SEO
For most businesses around Southampton this is where the work comes from. Google Business Profile set up and optimised, consistent name/address/phone across the web, local landing pages that aren't just the same page with the town swapped, review strategy, and local business schema done properly.
Content
Pages written for the way people really search, covering the questions they ask before they buy. Written to be genuinely useful first — that's what holds up now that search results are increasingly answered by AI summaries.
Reporting you can understand
Search Console and Analytics set up and verified, with conversion tracking so you can see enquiries and sales rather than just traffic. Plain-English reporting on what changed and what it produced.
SEO takes months to compound, which is why most clients run Google Ads management alongside it to cover the gap. You can see the sites this work has been done on in the portfolio, and there's a plain-English rundown of the basics in my website design tips.
Where SEO work usually starts
Nearly every audit I do turns up the same handful of problems.
Nothing is being tracked
No conversion tracking, or tracking that fires on every page load, so nobody knows which enquiries came from where.
The site is slow on mobile
Unoptimised images and a stack of plugins. Speed is both a ranking factor and the reason people leave.
No structured data
No schema, so Google is guessing what the business does and where it works.
Thin local pages
Twenty near-identical town pages that Google treats as duplicates and ignores.
Wrong keywords
Optimised for industry jargon rather than the words customers actually type.
Nobody claimed the profile
Google Business Profile unclaimed, unverified or full of out-of-date opening hours.