What is SEO, in plain English?

SEO stands for search engine optimisation. Stripped of the mystique, it means: making your business the one Google decides to show when somebody searches for what you sell.

Not the advert at the top — that is paid, and it stops the moment you stop paying. SEO is the results underneath it, and the little map with three businesses on it, which is where most local calls actually come from.

That is the whole definition. Everything else is detail about how.

The one idea underneath all of it

Google is trying to answer a question. Somebody typed “emergency plumber near me” and Google has to pick which businesses to show, in what order, in about a tenth of a second.

It makes that choice by reading. It reads your website. It reads your Google Business Profile. It reads your reviews. It reads what other websites say about you. Then it decides how confident it is that you are a real, nearby, well-run business that does the thing that was asked about.

Every legitimate part of SEO is one of two things: making true information about you easier for a machine to find and read, or making the thing itself genuinely better so there is more true information worth finding.

If somebody is proposing a third category, be suspicious.

What it actually consists of, for a local business

Your Google Business Profile. Free, and the single highest-return item on this list. Claimed, complete, categorised correctly, with real photographs and current hours. I have written separately about why a business does not show up on the map — start there before anything on your website.

Pages that answer real questions. Not “content”. Actual answers to the things people ask you before they commit. Do you take that insurance. How far do you travel. What does the first appointment involve. What does it cost, roughly, and what changes that. Each one is a page, because each one is a thing somebody types into a search box at eleven at night.

Consistent details. Your name, address and phone the same everywhere they appear. Search engines cross-check, and disagreement reads as uncertainty.

Reviews, gathered honestly. Steadily, from every customer, never bought, never filtered by who seems happy. The filtering thing is not just distasteful — it is against the Federal Trade Commission’s rule on consumer reviews and against Google’s policies.

Structured data. A small block of information on your site written for machines rather than people: this is a business, here is the address, here are the hours, here is the service. It removes guesswork. It is invisible to your visitors and it is one of the cheapest things on this list.

A site that works on a phone and does not make people wait. Slow, cramped pages lose people, and losing people is itself a signal.

Other sites mentioning you. The local paper, the chamber of commerce, a supplier’s dealer list, the association you belong to. Earned mentions from real places. Not bought links, which are against Google’s guidelines and get sites penalised.

That is the list. There is no eighth secret item.

What SEO cannot do

It cannot guarantee you a position. Nobody can promise you a rank — not me, not an agency, not whoever emailed you claiming they noticed a problem with your site. The results also differ depending on where the person searching is standing, so “number one” is not even a single fact.

It cannot work in a week. Verification takes days. Re-crawling takes longer. Reviews arrive at the speed of your customers. Real movement is measured in months, and the work compounds — which is the good news and the frustrating news at once.

It cannot fix a business problem. If people find you, call you, and then do not book, that is not a search problem and no amount of it will help.

It cannot beat a competitor who is simply better documented and better reviewed without you becoming better documented and better reviewed. There is no shortcut around that, which is precisely why it is worth doing.

How to tell if you are being sold nothing

Some signs, in rough order of how alarming they are:

• A guaranteed position. Not possible. Whoever says it either knows and is lying, or does not know.
• A monthly report and nothing else. Ask what changed on your site this month. If the answer is a chart, the answer is nothing.
• Vagueness about links. “We’ll build authority” often means buying links, which is a policy violation you carry, not them.
• Anything about “submitting your site to 500 search engines”. There are not 500 search engines.
• Locking you out of your own accounts. You should own the domain, the site and the Google Business Profile, in accounts you can log into.
• A cold call claiming they found a problem with your listing. This is an entire industry of nonsense.

A fair engagement should be able to tell you, in a sentence each, what was done this month and what it was for.

What I would honestly do first

If you have never done any of this, the order is:

1. Claim and finish your Google Business Profile. Free, one afternoon.
2. Get your name, address and phone consistent in the five most visible places.
3. Start asking every customer for a review.
4. Write the three pages that answer the questions you get on the phone most often.
5. Then, and only then, worry about anything more sophisticated.

Most small businesses never get past step three, and most of them would see more from finishing that list than from a year of paying somebody.

The short version

SEO is making true information about your business easy for a search engine to find, read, and believe. It is mostly unglamorous, mostly free to start, and it takes months rather than days. Anyone promising a position is selling something else.

If you want to know where you actually stand, the free site check measures what a search engine can read on your site right now. Or tell me what you have already tried and I will tell you what I would do next — including when the answer is nothing yet.