Search engine optimisation for your website

For a local service in a town with little competition, search usually starts bringing in enquiries in earnest after about three months. In a large city or a busy trade, expect it to take longer.

Three things move the timescale most:

• how many businesses in your area already do SEO for the same services
• the state the site is in at the start (an old site with errors needs fixing first)
• how many pages for your services already exist

They decide how long you wait for results, while the price is set by the number of pages and changes we make.

In the first month we check whether Google has read every page and which searches the site appears for at all. We compare rankings for the main searches from the second and third month, when there is something to compare.

An ad disappears from search the day you stop paying, while a page that has reached the first page of results usually stays there as long as the content is accurate and nobody writes a better answer.

SEO starts from €250 a month. The final amount depends on which of these items you order and how many there are:

The same package can't cover both a painter and decorator working in one town and an online shop with thousands of products, so we set the scope only once we have looked at the site and the searches in your trade.

Before you pay anyone for SEO, ask for a list of pages and fixes for the first three months. Without it, after three months you have nothing to check what you got for your money against. With us, that list comes after the first review, together with the price.

People in your area look for you in Google search and on Google Maps, and in both places Google chooses between businesses it knows exactly what they do and where.

So for local businesses we first prepare three things:

• a Google Business Profile with the exact business category and photos of finished jobs
• the same business name, phone number and address, written in the same order and the same words on the site, the profile and in every directory
• a separate page for every service, with a description of the service and the price

A price written on the site brings in people who add the word “price” to the service when they search on Google.

If you work in several towns, don't make copies of the same page where only the town name changes. Google lists such pages as doorway pages in its spam policies, and a site that has them can drop in the results or disappear from them entirely.

A page for another town makes sense when it has something of its own, for example jobs done right there or different call-out times. The ten city pages we wrote for Pando Cleaning were each written around the homes and the jobs in that city.

AI assistants like ChatGPT put an answer together from the pages they find, so it helps them to have a site with clear answers and a business described in the same words everywhere it is mentioned.

That is why AEO (Answer Engine Optimisation) is mostly writing and editing copy. With us it comes down to four things:

• on a service page, right under the heading, a sentence that answers the customer's question, for example how much the service costs or how long it takes
• the same description of the business and its services on the site, the Google Business Profile, social media and in directories
• prices and opening hours written as text on the page, never only in an image
• site settings that don't block the bots AI tools use to read pages

Say your site says you work only in Manchester, while your Google Business Profile says the whole North West: the assistant then has no clear answer to the question of where you work. No tag in the code, structured data included, guarantees that ChatGPT will mention you, and we tell you that before you pay for anything.