Search Engine Optimization

What search engine optimization is

The visits it earns are free in the sense that you don’t pay per click. They aren’t free to earn: they come from technical care, useful content and a reputation other sites recognize.

It matters because search is still how most people start looking for a product, a service or an answer. A page that ranks keeps bringing visitors for months or years after the work is done, which no ad can do. And a site that is hard for Google to read usually has the same problems for people: slow pages, broken links, headings that don’t say what the page is about.

How Google gets from your site to a search result

Every search engine works in roughly the same three steps, and each one is a place where a site can fall down.

Most SEO advice skips straight to step three. In practice the biggest wins on a small or neglected site are usually in steps one and two:

A page Google can't crawl or index can't rank however good it is.

The three parts of SEO

What has changed with AI answers

Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity and Claude now answer many questions directly, often citing a handful of pages as sources. That changes what “ranking” means. You can be named in an answer without being linked, or linked as a source without being named. Assistants generate their answers fresh each time, so one check is one sample, not a settled position.

What earns a place in those answers is the same work that earns a ranking: pages that answer a real question plainly, that a crawler can fetch without running scripts, with accurate structured data and a reputation other sites confirm.

There is no published formula for AI citations, and anyone selling one is guessing.

How to check your own SEO

You can get a good picture of your site’s SEO in an afternoon with free tools.

1. 1
   Start with Google Search Console.

   Verify your site, then look at three reports. Performance shows the searches you appeared for, how often you were shown (impressions), how often people clicked, and your average position over the period. Pages (under Indexing) shows which pages Google has indexed and why the others aren't. Sitemaps shows whether Google could read yours. Remember that impressions are not search volume: an impression means your site appeared, not how many people searched.
2. 2
   Then crawl your site.

   A crawler reads every page the way a search engine does and lists what's wrong: missing titles, broken links, redirect chains, pages with no internal links in. Doing this by hand on more than a dozen pages is impractical.
3. 3
   Check speed on your most important page.

   Google's PageSpeed Insights runs Lighthouse in a lab and, when your site has enough visitors, shows real-visitor data from Chrome. Treat the two separately: the lab number is repeatable, the field data is what Google's ranking systems use.
4. 4
   Search for what you sell.

   Search the five or ten phrases a customer would use, in a private window, and note where you appear. Do the same for your competitors. One check is one sample, since results vary by place and device, but it tells you who you're up against.

Or let SMARTSEO do all of it. SMARTSEO crawls your site, reads Search Console and Analytics if you connect them, checks your rankings every week and compares you with the competitors you name. It turns all of that into one SMARTSEO Score and a list of Opportunities ordered by impact, each with the pages affected and how to fix it. A rescan confirms the fix.

Where to start when everything needs work

Fix in this order, because each step makes the next one count:

1. Anything that stops Google crawling or indexing pages you want found: a site-wide robots.txt block, a stray noindex, broken pages, redirect loops.
2. Pages that compete with each other: duplicate titles and near-identical content split your relevance between two addresses.
3. Titles and descriptions on the pages that already get impressions, especially those sitting just off page one, where a better title can move you up and win the click.
4. Content gaps: searches your competitors rank for and you don’t. These take longest, so start them early.

Before and after: a missing title

Example for illustration; not a client's data.

The sections of this site go deeper into each part: an SEO audit for the technical checks, enterprise SEO for large sites, and local SEO for businesses customers visit.