◎Getting found

SEO means: making sure Google understands your pages and shows them. The assistant checks your pages and lists what is still missing — with a score from 0 to 100.

First step: work through the list of hints from top to bottom, starting with the home page. Most points take a minute to fix.

The two lines that appear in the search results.

Write them the way a person would search for them — “Electrician emergency service Sampletown” instead of “Welcome”.

This is the single most effective measure of all and takes a minute per page. “Welcome” as a title is the most common mistake on German company websites.

If the same content can be reached under several addresses, the canonical setting determines which one is the official one. Otherwise your own pages compete with each other.

This happens more often than you might think — for example when a page can be reached both with and without “www”, or when a campaign page carries the same text as the home page.

Weeks to months — and for general terms (“tradesman”) possibly never.

What realistically works and takes effect quickly:

• Local search terms: service plus place. The competition there is manageable.
• An entry in a business directory and on the map services.
• Regular posts — the simplest thing you can do for your findability.

What does not work: stuffing search terms into the alt text, writing texts for machines instead of people, hoping for quick wins through tricks.

It shows variant A to one half of your visitors and variant B to the other, and measures which one leads to the goal more often. That way, gut feeling does not decide.

Three rules without which a test is worthless:

1. Set the goal beforehand — submitted forms, donations, clicks on a particular button. Without a goal, the test measures nothing you can use.
2. Change one thing at a time. If you change three things at once, you will not know afterwards which one made the difference.
3. Patience. A result only becomes reliable with a few hundred visitors.

Usually not. On small websites it can take weeks for a result to become reliable — do not stop after two days, but do not start testing either if you have twenty visitors a day.

On small sites, the simple things achieve more: a clear headline, a visible phone number, a short form. Testing is worthwhile when there is enough traffic to detect differences.

Useful as a work list, dangerous as a goal. The score says how many of the checked points are met — not whether you will be found.

A page with 100 points and the title “Welcome” is found less easily than one with 70 and a title people actually search for.

Work through the list, but measure success differently: by enquiries.

Through three things that work together:

1. Place in the title and in the text — not hidden, but where it fits naturally.
2. Complete contact details that are identical everywhere — name, address, phone number. “Identical” means letter for letter, in directories too.
3. An entry on the map services.

For small businesses, this is the most effective route — the competition for “electrician Sampletown” is far smaller than for “electrician”.

Work through it from top to bottom:

1. Is the page published? A draft is not visible to anyone.
2. How old is it? New pages take days to weeks to be indexed.
3. Are you searching for the right thing? Try searching for your company name — if you can be found under it, indexing works, and it is only a matter of competition for general terms.
4. Is the address unique? Two equivalent addresses for the same content split the effect.

Whatever comes immediately before the action you want:

• The button label (“Send enquiry” versus “Request a callback”).
• The headline in the header area.
• The length of the form.

Not worth it: colours, font sizes, the order of sections far down the page. There, the difference is smaller than the noise.

Change only one thing between A and B — otherwise you will not know afterwards what made the difference.

None that last. What counts in the long run is unspectacular:

• Pages that answer a question people actually ask.
• Regular posts — the simplest thing you can do.
• Complete, up-to-date details.
• A fast page that is readable on a phone.

What does harm: stuffing search terms into alt texts, writing texts for machines, bought links. Search engines now detect this reliably, and the damage lasts longer than the brief advantage.