Not Who's Best. Who's Visible. The whole of SEO in one video.

Cold open

Imagine somebody is standing in your town right now. They need the thing you sell. Maybe they need a plumber. Maybe an electrician. A solicitor. A dentist.

A photographer. A restaurant. A roofer. A mechanic. A phone repair shop. A software company.

Maybe they don’t know your business exists. And that’s the important part. They don’t start by thinking about your company. They start with a problem. They take out their phone. They type something.

Or they speak into it. And they search. And within seconds, something decides what they see.

An answer. A map. A list of websites. Reviews. Images. Videos.

Products. Maybe advertisements. Maybe an AI-generated response. Maybe several of those things at once. And somewhere inside all of that is your business. Or it isn’t.

And here’s the uncomfortable truth. The customer never sees every business that could help them. They only see the ones that are visible. Not who is best. Who is visible. That’s what this video is about.

Not just Google rankings. Not just keywords. Not just blog posts. Not just backlinks. Not just your Google Business Profile. Not just technical SEO.

I’m going to explain the whole thing. How search works. What SEO actually is. And the five places your business can be found when somebody searches for what you sell. By the end of this video, you’ll be able to name all five, and you’ll know exactly what sits behind each one. Starting with the question that is surprisingly often skipped: What actually is SEO? And before we can answer that, we need to answer an even more basic question.

What is a search engine?

Part One: Foundations

What is a search engine?

When most people hear the phrase “search engine”, they immediately think of Google. And Google is obviously one of the biggest examples. But the underlying behaviour is much broader than Google.

People search on YouTube. They search on Amazon. They search on Instagram. They search on Facebook. They search in maps. They search marketplaces.

They search within websites. They search for products. They search for businesses. They search for people. They search for answers. They search for images.

They search for videos. They search for places. They search for instructions. They search for things they don’t even know the name of yet.

So I want you to separate two ideas. The first is search as a behaviour. The second is a particular search engine or search platform. Search is simply the act of trying to find something. And the platform is the system helping you find it. That distinction matters because SEO has become much broader than the old idea of:

“Put some keywords on your website and get to number one on Google.” That’s not the whole thing. SEO is about discoverability. It’s about helping the systems people use to find information understand what you have, who it’s for, where it applies, and why it might be useful. And that can apply to different kinds of content. A website page.

A product page. A business profile. A video. An image. An article. A location.

A piece of documentation. An author. An organisation. And increasingly, information can be surfaced through different search interfaces, including AI-powered features within search.

Google’s own current documentation files AI features alongside its other search features, such as images, videos, snippets, title links and business details, and says there are no additional requirements to appear in them. So when I say “search” in this video, I don’t want you thinking only about ten blue links. Search is an interface between: a person who wants something and information that might satisfy that need.

SEO sits in the middle.

So what is SEO?

SEO stands for: Search Engine Optimisation. And the basic definition is simple. SEO is the process of optimising something so that it can be discovered and understood in search. But I want to make that definition more useful. Because “optimise your website for search engines” can sound like you’re writing for a robot.

You’re not. You’re building something for a person. Then you’re making it easier for search systems to understand and surface it. So here’s the definition I want you to remember:

SEO is the work of making the things you want people to find discoverable in the places where they search. That’s the big idea. And everything else in this video is really an unpacking of that sentence.

What are we actually optimising?

This is where SEO gets interesting. Because we’re not necessarily optimising a website. We’re optimising whatever contains the information that we want discovered. That might be: A website. A page.

A service page. A product. A business profile. A video. A YouTube channel. An image.

An article. A location. A person’s author profile. An organisation. A collection of products. A piece of documentation.

Or a combination of all of them. And that’s why you’ll hear people talk about different types of SEO.

Technical SEO. On-page SEO. Off-page SEO. Content SEO. Local SEO. Article SEO.

AI Search SEO. E-commerce SEO. International SEO. Image SEO. Video SEO. News SEO.

And so on. These aren’t necessarily completely separate disciplines. They’re different applications of the same underlying problem:

Can the thing be found, understood, trusted and presented to the right person when they search? That’s the foundation. So that’s what SEO is. Now let’s look at where it actually happens.

Part Two: The five places

In this video, we’re going to cover a lot.

Search. SEO. Intent. Keywords. Technical SEO. Content.

E-E-A-T. Authors. Local SEO. Reviews. Images. Video.

Accessibility. Performance. Search Console. Organic growth. Paid search.

So before we go into any of it, I want to simplify the whole thing. Not by pretending SEO is simple. But by giving you a useful mental model. When someone searches for something you sell, there are several places where your business can become visible. For this framework, I’m going to keep it to five. Five.

Not six. Not twelve. Five.

One. The answer. The response search gives before anyone clicks anything. Two. The map. Where geography matters, and where local businesses are chosen. Three. The links. The traditional organic results, the doorways into websites. Four. The reviews. Where your reputation becomes visible. Five. The door. Your website, where a searcher becomes a customer. The answer. The map. The links. The reviews. The door.

Everything else in this video, every technical term, every tool, every tactic, belongs to one of those five places. And if you’re watching this because you run a business, subscribe. One press. Everything on this channel is about making your business easier to find and easier to choose.

But before we walk through the five places, there’s something that comes before all of them. The person doing the searching.

Part Three: The searcher

Before SEO: what does the person actually want?

Now let’s talk about one of the most important concepts in all of SEO. Search intent. Because a keyword is not a customer. A search query is a clue about what the person wants. Through a lot of this video, I’m going to use one real business as the example. My own.

JorTech. We repair phones, tablets, laptops and consoles, and we recover data.

Imagine someone searches: “phone screen” What do they want? We don’t know. They might want to buy a replacement screen. They might want to fix it themselves.

They might want to know what a repair costs. They might want a screen protector. They might be looking for a repair shop. They might be looking for one near them. Now compare that with: “cracked iPhone screen repair near me”

That’s much more specific. Or: “how to fix a phone that won’t charge” Different intent. Or: “iPhone 15 screen replacement cost”

Different again. Or: “JorTech phone number” That’s navigational. The person already knows what they’re looking for. They already know the business by name. They just need the way in.

So you can have the same broad subject and completely different intent. And if you misunderstand the intent, you can create a technically excellent page that is still the wrong answer. That’s one of the biggest mistakes in SEO. People ask: “What keyword should I rank for?” A better question is:

“What is the person actually trying to accomplish?”

Short-tail and long-tail search terms

You’ll often hear SEO people talk about short-tail and long-tail keywords. A short-tail term might be: “phone repair” “dentist” “running shoes” “SEO”

A long-tail search might be: “iPhone screen repair open now in Leeds” “best running shoes for flat feet under £100” “how to fix a WordPress canonical error” Long-tail doesn’t necessarily mean “better.” And short-tail doesn’t necessarily mean “worse.”

They represent different levels of specificity. The more specific the search, often the clearer the person’s intent becomes. But there is another important lesson here. Search volume is not the same thing as business value. A keyword with 100,000 searches isn’t automatically more valuable to your business than a keyword with 500. If those 500 people are looking for exactly what you sell, the smaller audience may matter enormously.

SEO isn’t a popularity contest. It’s about matching demand with relevance.

Keyword research

Keywords still matter. Anyone telling you that words people type into search don’t matter is making this more complicated than it needs to be. Search engines need to understand what a page is about. And users need to recognise that your result is relevant to what they’re looking for. But modern SEO shouldn’t mean repeating the same phrase 47 times. You start with the subject.

Then you understand the different ways people describe it. Then you understand the questions around it. Then you understand the different intents. Then you build useful resources around those needs. For example, take a tech repair business like JorTech.

You might have: Phone screen repair. Battery replacement. Laptop repair. Console repair. Water damage repair.

Data recovery. And questions: How much does a phone screen repair cost? How long does a laptop repair take? How do I know whether my laptop is worth repairing? What should I do if my phone gets wet?

Those aren’t simply a list of keywords. They’re a map of customer problems. That’s how I want you thinking about keyword research.

Don’t build a keyword list. Build a map of demand. Now you know what the person wants. So let’s follow them into the five places, starting with the first thing search shows them.

Part Four: Place one, the answer

The first place is: The answer.

Search engines increasingly provide answers directly. Sometimes that’s a traditional featured result. Sometimes a knowledge result. Sometimes a local summary. Sometimes an AI-powered search feature.

Google’s current Search documentation covers AI Overviews and AI Mode, and says there are no additional requirements to appear in them. No new machine-readable files. No AI text files. No special markup. The important thing isn’t to invent some mystical new thing called: “AI SEO.” There isn’t a button you press that says: “Make ChatGPT recommend my business.” And while we’re on AI: these videos are planned, scripted and edited with Claude. So when I tell you AI isn’t a button, that’s someone who uses it every day telling you.

The underlying principles still matter. Can your information be discovered? Can it be understood? Is it useful? Is it trustworthy? Is the underlying entity clear?

Does the content genuinely answer questions? Can search systems access it? Those fundamentals don’t disappear because the interface changes. The interface can change. The underlying need remains.

Be useful enough to be found and understood. And one of the ways you make the underlying entity clear, in a language machines read directly, is structured data.

Structured data

This is where you provide machine-readable information about what a page represents.

For example: An article. A product. An organisation. A local business. An event.

A breadcrumb. And other supported entities and features.

Google says structured data gives it explicit clues about the meaning of a page, and can enable richer search results. But structured data is not a magic ranking switch.

That’s another distinction worth remembering. Eligibility is not guaranteed appearance. You can implement valid structured data and still not receive the visual feature you were hoping for. And you should never mark up information the visitor can’t actually see on the page. The answer is where search speaks for you. The next place is where geography decides.

Part Five: Place two, the map

The second place is: The map. This is particularly important for local businesses. You want the business to be understood as: the right business, in the right place,

offering the right thing.

Local SEO

This is local SEO, one of the biggest areas for local businesses. And local search is different because location matters.

If I search: “coffee shop” the results I want in Amsterdam aren’t the same results I want in Manchester. If I search: “phone screen repair” the physical location of the business can be extremely important.

Google currently says local results are mainly based on: relevance, distance and popularity. Let’s unpack those. One note on words: Google’s headline sentence says popularity, and the section explaining that third factor is headed prominence. Same factor. Relevance

Does the business match what the person is looking for? If someone searches for a dentist, a dentist is relevant. A bicycle shop isn’t. If someone searches for console repair, a shop that actually repairs consoles is more relevant than one that only sells phone cases. Or picture framing. Someone in north Leeds searches for a framer. AS Frames on Potternewton Lane in Chapel Allerton, a framing workshop that also cuts glass to size and prints, is relevant. A gift shop with a shelf of ready-made frames is a weaker match. So your business information needs to make the business understandable.

Distance How far is the business from the relevant location? This can be the searcher’s location or a location included in the query. And this is important because local SEO isn’t simply: “Put the town name on your website.” Physical geography matters.

Take AK Barbers in LS5. Someone in Kirkstall who types “barbers near me” is a few streets away, and distance works in their favour. Someone typing the same words on the other side of Leeds is not, and that’s the system doing its job. Prominence Then there’s prominence. How well known is the business? Google says prominence can be informed by things such as links from other websites and reviews, among other information. This is where local SEO starts overlapping with wider SEO.

Your website matters. Your reputation matters. Other websites matter. Your business profile matters. Your reviews matter. And the information Google receives from across the web can matter.

Google Business Profile

Your Google Business Profile is one of the obvious foundations for a local business.

Make sure the business is represented accurately. Business name. Category. Address where applicable. Opening hours. Phone number.

Website. Services. Photos. Other relevant business information. Google itself recommends keeping business information complete and accurate, responding to reviews, and adding photos and videos. But don’t confuse “complete profile” with:

“Google now owes me position one.” It doesn’t. A complete profile makes your business easier to understand. It doesn’t give you a guaranteed ranking. And Google explicitly says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

NAP

You’ll also hear the term NAP. Name. Address. Phone number. The principle is simple: Your business information should be accurate and coherent.

If your website says one phone number. A directory says another. Your business profile says something else. An old page has an old address. A social profile has another version. You’ve created unnecessary confusion.

But don’t fall into the trap of thinking there is some magical SEO superstition around whether every comma, abbreviation and punctuation mark is identical everywhere. The important thing is accuracy and consistency of the underlying business information.

Local SEO matrix pages

Now let’s talk about something that can be extremely powerful and extremely badly abused. Local SEO matrix pages. These pages live on your website, but they exist to serve the map, so they belong here. Imagine you provide: Phone repair. And you serve:

Leeds. Bradford. Wakefield. Huddersfield. You might naturally have pages around real service areas. But here’s the trap.

You create: /phone-repair-leeds /phone-repair-bradford /phone-repair-wakefield /phone-repair-huddersfield and then copy the same page four times.

You change the town name. Everything else stays the same. That’s not a strategy. That’s a page factory. And if the pages exist purely to capture searches while offering little unique value, you’ve created exactly the kind of doorway/thin-content problem you should be avoiding. The question isn’t:

“Can I make a page for this town?” The question is: “Does this town genuinely deserve a useful page?” Maybe it does. If you genuinely operate there. If customers actually use the service there.

If you can provide meaningful local information. If you have real examples. If you can explain availability. If you can show relevant projects. If you can answer local questions. If the page genuinely helps somebody.

Then the page can have a reason to exist. A legitimate local content architecture might look like: Service × Location

But every intersection has to earn its existence. Back to the framer. AS Frames posts prints and restored photos anywhere in the UK, so a page about printing by post has earned its place. A page about framing in a town where nobody has ever brought a picture in has not.

The map, summed up

So, the map. Google currently describes local ranking as mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity, or prominence, as it goes on to call it. That means you should think about: Your Business Profile. Your categories. Your services.

Your opening hours. Your address where appropriate. Your website. Your photos. Your reviews. Your reputation.

Your local relevance. And your wider presence across the web. But remember: Nobody can legitimately sell you a guaranteed Google Maps position. Google itself says there is no way to request or pay for a better local ranking.

Part Six: Place three, the links

Third: The links. The traditional organic search results. This is where your website pages can appear. And this is where almost everything in this video comes together.

Technical accessibility. Search intent. Keywords. Page titles. Content. Internal linking.

Authors. Experience. Trust. Performance. Images. Structured data.

External references. Useful information. A search result is not the website. It’s the doorway to the website. And that means you need both: visibility

and a reason to click. Let’s take visibility first.

Published is not ranked: the six stages

Now we’re going to get technical. Because before Google can rank your page, it has to be able to discover and process it. And this gives us one of the most important distinctions in SEO: Crawling is not indexing. And indexing is not ranking. And ranking is not clicking.

And clicking is not becoming a customer. Let’s slow that down.

You publish a page. That doesn’t necessarily mean Google has crawled it. Google discovers URLs through links, sitemaps and other mechanisms. It then crawls the page. It processes what it finds. If the page is eligible and useful enough to be indexed, it may enter Google’s index.

Then, when somebody searches, Google’s systems decide whether that page is relevant enough to appear. Then where it appears. Then whether the searcher actually clicks it. Then whether the visitor actually becomes a customer. So: Published.

Crawled. Indexed. Ranked. Clicked. Converted. Those are six different things.

And confusing them causes an enormous amount of bad SEO advice.

Google itself says Search works in three stages, crawling, indexing and serving search results, that not all pages make it through each stage, and that knowing this can help you fix crawling issues and get pages indexed. The machinery that gets a page crawled and indexed lives inside your website, so it belongs to the door. We’ll open it up properly in Part Eight. For now, the reason to click. And that starts with two things you write yourself.

Page titles

Let’s start with the title.

The title tells users and search systems what the page is about. A good title is descriptive. It should represent the actual page. It shouldn’t be a collection of keywords. If the page is: “iPhone Screen Repair in Leeds”

then say what the page is. Don’t turn it into:

“Phone Phone Repair Leeds iPhone Repair Screen Repair Leeds Cheap Phone Repair Best Phone Repair Shop Leeds.” That isn’t optimisation. That’s noise.

Meta descriptions

Then we have meta descriptions.

This is another area where SEO mythology gets ahead of reality. A meta description is not simply: “Write this perfectly and Google will rank you higher.” Google says snippets are primarily created from the page content itself. It sometimes uses your meta description instead, if that gives a more accurate description of the page, and it might show different snippets for different searches. So think about it as search-result presentation. Its job is to help communicate what the page offers.

It’s not a secret ranking lever.

That’s an important distinction. That’s the links. Visibility, and a reason to click. But before anyone clicks, many of them look at one more thing.

Part Seven: Place four, the reviews

Fourth: The reviews. This is where your reputation becomes visible. People don’t just want to know: “Can this company provide the service?” They want to know:

“Do other people trust them?” “Have they done this before?” “What happened to previous customers?” Reviews are not a replacement for good SEO. They’re not a replacement for a good website. They’re not a replacement for a good business.

They’re part of the broader reputation system around the business.

Reviews are earned, not bought

Now reviews. Reviews are not something you buy. At least they shouldn’t be. Don’t manufacture them. Don’t create fake customers. Don’t pay random people to pretend they used your service.

Don’t build a system designed to fabricate reputation.

Google’s own policies prohibit fake reviews, and reviews that are paid for or incentivised. And in the UK, since 6 April 2025, this is no longer only Google’s rule.

Under the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act, submitting a fake review, commissioning someone else to write one, or running a review that hides the fact it was paid for, is a banned practice. The business that orders it is on that list, not just the person who types it. So when someone offers to sell you reviews, they’re not offering you a shortcut. They’re offering you a liability. Instead: Do good work. Ask genuine customers for honest feedback. Make the process easy.

Ask at an appropriate point. And respond professionally. If someone leaves a great review, thank them. If someone leaves a negative review, don’t turn your business profile into a public argument. Address the issue. Invite the conversation offline where appropriate.

And remember: A review isn’t just an SEO object. It’s a piece of information another potential customer is reading.

Don’t obsess over the number

There’s another mistake here. People ask: “How many reviews do I need?” There isn’t a universal magic number where Google says: “Congratulations. You now have 147 reviews. You may enter the top three.” Local visibility is more complicated than that.

Google explicitly describes local ranking using multiple factors, including relevance, distance and prominence. Reviews are one part of the picture. And for the customer, quality and relevance matter too. A person isn’t necessarily asking: “Does this company have exactly 4.7 stars?” They’re asking:

“Can I trust these people?” “Have they done this before?” “What do customers say?” “Are they nearby?” “Do they actually provide the service I need?”

The reviews, summed up

So, the reviews. Ask real customers. Make it easy. Don’t fabricate. Don’t manipulate. Respond professionally.

And remember that the customer is reading the review, not an algorithm.

Part Eight: Place five, the door

And finally: The door. Your website. This is where the person arrives after you’ve earned the click. And this is why I call it the door. Because your website is where someone can move from:

searcher to visitor to prospect to

customer. Remember the line from the start. Not who is best. Who is visible. The first four places make you visible. The door is where visible becomes chosen. And everything technical in SEO belongs inside this place. Technical SEO isn’t a sixth place.

It’s part of the door. Because if the door is locked, beautifully decorating the hallway doesn’t help.

If the page is noindex, the page may not enter the index. If the page is broken, the customer can’t use it. If the page is painfully slow, people may leave. If the service isn’t explained, people may leave. If the contact form doesn’t work, the conversion is lost. If nobody knows who you are, trust is weakened.

If the page doesn’t match the search intent, the visitor is in the wrong room. So the door has layers.

Technical. Content. Performance. Accessibility. Trust. Conversion.

But it’s still one place: the website. Let’s open it, one layer at a time.

Layer one: technical

This is technical SEO. And I want to make something very clear. Technical SEO is not just: “Make your website fast.” That’s one tiny part of it. Technical SEO is about making the website accessible to search systems and users, and making the site’s structure understandable and functional.

Let’s go through the major pieces. Crawling A search engine needs to be able to access your content. If a page cannot be reached, that’s a problem. If important content is hidden behind systems a crawler can’t use properly, that’s a problem. If internal links don’t lead to important pages, that’s a problem.

If your website architecture is chaotic, that’s a problem. Rendering Then there’s rendering. Many modern websites build parts of the page with JavaScript, in the browser. To see that content, Google has to render the page, much like a browser does. If your important content, or your links, only appear after scripts run, and something in that process fails, Google may not see what your customers see.

So one simple question matters: can the important content and links be seen in the page Google actually renders? The URL Inspection tool in Search Console will show you, and we’ll get to it in Part Nine. Robots.txt Then there’s robots.txt.

This file can provide instructions about which areas crawlers should or shouldn’t request. But here’s an important distinction: robots.txt is not the same thing as noindex. And blocking crawling isn’t the same thing as removing a URL from search. You have to understand what each control actually does before using it. Noindex

Then there’s the noindex directive.

This tells compliant search engines that the page should not be included in their index. And this is one of those tiny technical details that can have enormous consequences. Because if you accidentally put noindex on the page you desperately want people to find… your beautifully written page isn’t going to solve that problem.

I know that because I’ve done it. I once had a booking page on JorTech, my own repair business, carrying a noindex directive for far too long.

The page existed. The booking system worked. Customers could use it if they reached it. The page wasn’t the problem. The booking system wasn’t the problem. Being found was.

Nobody complained. Nobody emailed me saying: “Jordan, your SEO is broken.” They simply didn’t find the page. That’s an important lesson. SEO failures aren’t always dramatic.

Sometimes they’re invisible.

XML sitemaps Then we have XML sitemaps. A sitemap can help search engines discover URLs that you want crawled. But submitting a sitemap does not mean: “Google, please rank all of these.” It doesn’t guarantee indexing.

It doesn’t guarantee ranking. It is a discovery mechanism and a useful diagnostic resource. Think of it as handing the search engine a map of URLs that matter. Not a command to rank them. Canonicals Then we get to canonical URLs.

Suppose the same or substantially similar content is accessible through multiple URLs.

You might have: /service /service/ /service?source=facebook or multiple URL variations created by filters, parameters or technical architecture. Canonicalisation gives search engines a signal about which URL you consider the preferred version.

Again: signal, not magic command.

SEO is full of these distinctions. People often look for switches. Search is much messier than that. Redirects and status codes You also need to understand HTTP status codes.

A 200 generally means: “The request succeeded.” A 301 is a permanent redirect. A 302 is a temporary redirect. A 404 means the resource wasn’t found. 5xx errors indicate server-side failures.

You don’t need to become a server engineer. But if you’re responsible for SEO, you should understand what these things mean. Because moving a website without understanding redirects can destroy useful pathways into the site. Changing URLs can break links. Deleting pages can remove search visibility. Launching a redesign can introduce technical problems that weren’t there before.

This is why technical SEO matters. It’s infrastructure. Internal linking Now something much less glamorous. Internal links. The links between pages on your own website.

These matter for users. They help people navigate. And they help search engines discover and understand relationships between pages.

Imagine your website as a building. Your homepage is one room. Your service pages are other rooms. Your guides are other rooms. Your contact page is another room. If there are no doors between important rooms, people and crawlers can struggle to move through the building.

Good internal linking creates pathways. And it also communicates relationships. A page about phone screen repair might link to: battery replacement, water damage repair, charging port repair,

pricing, and relevant guides. That’s not keyword stuffing. That’s information architecture. Information architecture This is another phrase worth understanding.

Information architecture. It simply means organising information so that it makes sense. Your website should have a logical structure. People should be able to understand: Who you are. What you do.

Where you operate. What you sell. What problems you solve. How your services relate to one another. How to contact you. And search engines should be able to discover those relationships too.

This is why SEO isn’t just a marketing activity. It can expose weaknesses in the underlying structure of a business website. Mobile Now let’s talk about mobile.

Your customer is often not sitting at a desk. They’re standing in a shop. Sitting in a car. Walking down a street. Holding a phone. Searching quickly.

Your page needs to work properly on that device. Text needs to be readable. Buttons need to be usable. Forms need to work. Navigation needs to make sense. Content shouldn’t jump around unnecessarily.

And the main information shouldn’t be buried under a mountain of pop-ups. Mobile isn’t a special SEO trick. It’s simply part of building a website for the way people actually use the web.

Layer two: content

Now we’re at the part most people think SEO is. Content. And content matters enormously. But content does not mean: “Write 2,000 words because Google likes long articles.” There is no universal ideal word count.

Sometimes the best answer is 200 words. Sometimes it is 2,000. Sometimes it is a calculator. Sometimes it’s a table. Sometimes it’s a product page. Sometimes it’s a video.

Sometimes it’s a map. The right amount of content is: the amount needed to satisfy the user’s need properly. If someone wants your opening hours, don’t make them read 2,000 words. If someone wants to understand a complicated legal process, 200 words might be nowhere near enough. Content length should follow the problem.

Not a superstition. Headings Then there are headings. H1. H2. H3.

These help structure the content. But don’t turn heading levels into some kind of SEO ritual. The purpose is clarity. A page about laptop repair might have:

H1 — Laptop Repair in Leeds H2 — Common Laptop Problems H2 — Screen and Keyboard Replacement H2 — How Much Does Laptop Repair Cost? H2 — When Is a Laptop Worth Replacing? That creates structure.

It makes the page easier to scan. And it helps communicate the organisation of the information. The goal isn’t: “How many keywords can I put in H2 tags?” The goal is: Can a human understand this page quickly?

Keyword stuffing Let’s kill another old idea. You do not need to repeat your target phrase endlessly. If you’re writing: “Laptop repair Leeds” and every paragraph contains:

“laptop repair Leeds” “laptop repair Leeds” “laptop repair Leeds” the page starts sounding like it was written for an algorithm rather than a human. Search engines have much more sophisticated ways of understanding language and content than simple exact-match repetition. Write naturally.

Use the terminology your customers actually use. Cover the subject properly. Answer related questions. Explain the service. And make the page genuinely useful. What about blogging?

Let’s talk about blogging because this is where businesses get sold some nonsense. You don’t need a blog because: “Google likes websites that blog.” You need useful content because your customers have questions. Those questions can become content. Suppose you offer data recovery.

People might ask: Can you recover files from a laptop that won’t turn on? How much does data recovery cost? How long does it take? Can photos be recovered from a phone that’s been in water? Is my data kept private while you work on it?

How do I stop it happening again? Those are legitimate information needs. Create genuinely useful answers. But don’t publish: “10 reasons why our repair shop is amazing.” every Tuesday.

Content should exist for a reason. Images Now images. Images are content. And they can also create problems. A huge uncompressed image can slow a page.

A poorly named image can provide little useful context. An image without appropriate alternative text can create accessibility problems. And an image that’s important to understanding the page shouldn’t be treated as if it doesn’t matter. Think about: File size. Dimensions.

Format. Compression. Responsive images. Descriptive filenames where useful. Alt text. Captions where useful.

Surrounding text. And, above all, relevance. If the image is a photograph of a cracked iPhone screen being repaired, the filename shouldn’t necessarily be:

IMG_839201.jpg If you can meaningfully describe it, something like: iphone-screen-repair-leeds.jpg is more informative. But don’t turn alt text into: “best iPhone screen repair Leeds phone repair shop Leeds.”

Alt text is not a keyword dumping ground. Its primary job is to communicate the image’s purpose or content when the image can’t be perceived. Video And the same thinking applies to video. A video is content too. Give it a clear title and a description that says what it covers.

Put it on a page where it’s genuinely relevant. And give it captions or a transcript, which we’ll come to shortly, so the substance isn’t locked inside the audio.

Layer three: performance

Now we’re going to talk about performance. Because a website can have excellent information and still be painful to use.

Google’s current documentation says its core ranking systems use a variety of signals related to page experience, and specifically that Core Web Vitals are used by ranking systems. But Google also says good Core Web Vitals scores don’t guarantee that your pages will rank at the top, and that chasing a perfect score just for SEO reasons may not be the best use of your time. That’s exactly how I want you to think about this.

Don’t optimise the score. Optimise the experience. Core Web Vitals The current Core Web Vitals are:

LCP — Largest Contentful Paint This is about how quickly the main content becomes visible. INP — Interaction to Next Paint This is about responsiveness to interactions. CLS — Cumulative Layout Shift This is about unexpected movement of the page.

These are useful because they translate technical behaviour into things users actually experience.

A page loads. The customer sees the main content. They tap a button. The site responds. They start reading. The page doesn’t suddenly jump because an advert or image loaded above what they were reading.

That’s real user experience. PageSpeed Insights So use PageSpeed Insights.

Use Lighthouse. Use your browser’s developer tools when necessary. And use real-user data where available. But don’t become obsessed with getting a perfect laboratory score. A perfect laboratory score is not the purpose of your website. A customer doesn’t care whether your Lighthouse report says 97.

They care whether the page loads. Whether they can read it. Whether the button works. Whether the form works. Whether they can find your phone number. Whether the website doesn’t feel broken.

Whether they can actually buy or book. That is the objective.

Layer four: accessibility

Accessibility deserves its own layer.

Can somebody navigate your website using a keyboard? Can they understand the headings? Are forms labelled properly? Is there sufficient contrast? Can a screen reader make sense of the page? Are images described appropriately when necessary?

Are interactive elements usable? Are videos captioned? Can people tell where focus is? Can someone complete your contact form without needing perfect vision, perfect hearing, perfect dexterity and perfect motor control? These are not merely SEO tricks. They’re quality-of-website questions.

Don’t sell accessibility as: “Google gives you extra ranking points if you add alt text.” That’s not the right model. Build an accessible website because people use your website. And because a website that communicates clearly to a broader range of people is simply a better website. Captions

Captions are another useful example. A caption can give an image context. It can tell someone what they’re looking at. For video, captions are even more important. They make spoken content accessible to people who can’t or don’t want to hear the audio. They can also improve comprehension.

And a transcript can make the substance of a video available as text. But again: Don’t turn accessibility features into fake SEO tricks. Do them because they make the content better. Good SEO and good accessibility often overlap because both are pushing you toward clearer, more understandable content. But they’re not identical systems.

Readability and Flesch Now let’s talk about readability. You may have heard of the Flesch Reading Ease score or Flesch-Kincaid. These formulas attempt to estimate how easy text is to read using characteristics such as sentence length and word length. They can be useful editorial tools. But don’t turn them into another SEO superstition.

There is no magic rule saying: “Get your Flesch score to 72 and Google will rank you.” Instead, ask: Can people understand this? Are the sentences unnecessarily complicated? Are paragraphs too long?

Are headings useful? Can somebody scan the page? Are technical terms explained? Can a normal customer understand what we’re saying? Sometimes expert content needs technical language. That’s fine.

The answer isn’t to dumb everything down. The answer is to explain it properly.

Layer five: trust

E-E-A-T This brings us to E-E-A-T.

Experience. Expertise. Authoritativeness. Trustworthiness. You’ll hear E-E-A-T everywhere in modern SEO. But here’s what I don’t want you to do.

Don’t turn it into: “Google gives me an E-E-A-T score of 73.” That’s not how you should think about it. Think about what those ideas represent. Experience: Have you actually done the thing?

Expertise: Do you understand it? Authoritativeness: Do other credible signals support your authority in the subject? Trustworthiness: Can people reasonably trust the information and the organisation behind it?

And trust is particularly important. Who wrote this? Why should I believe it? Can I verify it? Does the business actually exist? Are there real contact details?

Are there genuine examples? Are claims supported? Does the site make it clear who is responsible for the information? That’s much more useful than trying to game a fictional score. First-hand experience Experience is particularly interesting.

Suppose I’m writing about a phone that won’t charge. I can produce an article from generic information. Or I can explain: “We see this fault regularly.” “Very often, it’s pocket lint packed into the charging port.” “Here’s what happened on a recent job.”

“Here are the three things we check first.” “Here’s the point where you should stop troubleshooting and bring it in.” That’s first-hand experience. It can make content more useful because you’re bringing something to the page that isn’t simply a rewrite of everything already online. And this is one reason businesses have a huge advantage if they actually document what they do.

Your real work contains information. Your jobs contain questions. Your customers contain questions. Your staff contain expertise. Your mistakes contain lessons. Your projects contain evidence.

Your case studies contain experience. That is content. Author SEO This brings us to authors. If you’re publishing expert material, especially in areas where expertise matters, don’t automatically hide the person who wrote it. Give the reader context.

Who is the author? What do they do? What experience do they have? Why are they qualified to discuss this? If appropriate, create an author page. Link the author to their profile.

Use accurate author information and appropriate structured data where supported. But don’t manufacture credentials. If someone has ten years of experience, say that if it is true. If they have a qualification, say what it is if relevant. If they don’t have specialist credentials, don’t invent them. SEO works much better when you stop thinking about how to look authoritative and start thinking about how to be useful and trustworthy.

Layer six: conversion

And the last layer of the door is the last of the six stages from earlier. Clicked is not converted. Here’s another simple principle. Don’t make the visitor work to discover whether they’re in the right place. If someone searched: “cracked iPhone screen repair Leeds” and your page starts with:

“Welcome to our website. We are a family-run company founded in…” you’ve made them wait. Tell them what the page is about. Then give them the information they need. Then establish credibility. Then explain the service.

Then answer questions. Then make the next step obvious. SEO and conversion optimisation overlap here. Because getting someone to the page is only half the job. That’s the door. Six layers, one place. And now that every place is open, the next question is how you know any of it is working.

Part Nine: Measuring it

Search Console

Now let’s talk about one of the most important free tools available to a website owner. Google Search Console.

If you own a website and you don’t have Search Console configured, you’re missing one of the most useful windows into how Google sees your site.

Google describes Search Console as a free service that helps you monitor, maintain and troubleshoot your site’s presence in Google Search results: whether Google can find and crawl your site, indexing problems, and your search traffic. Inside it, you can investigate things such as:

Queries. Impressions. Clicks. Click-through rate. Average position. Pages.

Indexing. URL inspection. Sitemaps. Core Web Vitals. Search appearance. And other reports depending on the site.

Impressions

An impression is essentially an opportunity for your result to have appeared in a search result. You can have impressions without clicks. That’s useful. Because it tells you: Google is showing this page for something. Now ask:

What query? What position? What page? Is the result attractive? Is the title clear? Is the page actually answering the intent?

Clicks

Clicks tell you that somebody selected your result. Now you’ve moved one step further. But clicks still aren’t customers. You can have 10,000 clicks and terrible business results. Or 100 highly relevant clicks and excellent business results. That’s why SEO metrics should eventually connect to business outcomes.

Calls. Bookings. Leads. Sales. Applications. Downloads.

Whatever the business actually needs.

CTR

CTR is click-through rate. Broadly: How often did people click compared with how often the result was shown? It’s useful. But don’t reduce SEO to: “Get the CTR as high as possible.”

Context matters. A high CTR on the wrong audience isn’t necessarily useful. And a lower CTR for a highly specific query may still produce excellent customers.

Metrics are evidence. They’re not the objective.

Average position

Then there’s average position. This one gets misunderstood constantly. People want: “What is my position?” But search results vary. Queries differ.

Locations differ. Devices differ. Search features change. Personalisation and context can matter. So average position is a measurement across a set of impressions, not a permanent physical position engraved into Google. Don’t treat it as:

“My website is number 4.” Treat it as: “Across this data set, this is the reported average position.” That’s much more accurate.

URL Inspection

Search Console’s URL Inspection tool can be incredibly useful.

You can investigate a specific URL. Is it indexed? What does Google report? Are there issues? Can you request indexing where appropriate? But again:

Requesting indexing isn’t requesting a ranking. You’re not pressing a button saying: “Please make this number one.” You’re asking Google to consider the URL for crawling/indexing. The ranking question comes later.

Part Ten: The system

SEO is not a button

This is a theme I want you to notice.

Again and again, SEO doesn’t work like a button. You don’t:

add sitemap → rank. Add schema → rank. Get 100 reviews → rank. Get a PageSpeed score of 100 → rank. Publish 50 blogs → rank. Buy backlinks → rank.

Add keywords → rank. That’s not how this works. You are building a system. And that system is evaluated through many different signals and processes.

The website as a system

Think about your website as an ecosystem.

The technical layer lets systems access it. The information architecture organises it. The content explains what you do. The pages target real needs. Internal links connect the information. Structured data can clarify certain entities and relationships.

Authors can provide context. Experience can make content genuinely useful. Performance affects how the page behaves. Accessibility affects who can use it. Local information connects your business to places. Reviews provide reputation.

External links and mentions can contribute to prominence. And Search Console gives you evidence about what is happening in Google Search. None of these exists in isolation.

The three levels of SEO

Here’s a second way to look at the same system. The five places tell you where you can be seen. These three levels tell you what has to be true in every one of them. If you want an even simpler model, think of SEO in three layers.

Layer one: Can you be found? Technical accessibility. Crawling. Indexing. Discoverability.

Layer two: Can you be understood and considered relevant? Content. Intent. Keywords. Structure.

Local information. Entities. Experience. Expertise. Layer three: Will people trust and choose you?

Reputation. Reviews. Evidence. Website experience. Brand. Conversion.

That’s a much more useful model than: “SEO equals keywords.”

Organic SEO and compounding

Now we get to one of the most misunderstood ideas in SEO. Compounding. Imagine a business that gets: 10 organic visits a day. Then, over time: 1,000.

It is possible to build organic search traffic without buying Google Ads. But I want to be extremely careful here.

I’m not promising you will go from 10 to 1,000. SEO doesn’t work like an investment calculator. There is no guaranteed growth curve. But the reason people talk about compounding is that useful search visibility can accumulate. You create useful pages. Those pages begin appearing for relevant searches.

You learn from the data. You improve them. You create additional resources. You earn mentions. You earn links. You build reputation.

You answer more questions. You cover more relevant demand. You improve your internal architecture. Your brand becomes more recognisable. And the whole system can become larger and more useful over time. That’s the compounding idea.

Not: “Google rewards old websites.” But: The information asset you’ve built can become larger and more valuable.

SEO is an asset, if you actually build one

This is where SEO differs fundamentally from simply buying traffic. If you spend £500 on Google Ads today, you can potentially buy traffic today. But stop paying and the paid traffic stops. SEO isn’t free. It costs time. It costs expertise.

It can cost writers. Developers. Photographers. Designers. SEO specialists. Research.

Technology. Content production. But you’re attempting to build something that continues to exist after the individual piece of work is finished. A useful service page can keep attracting relevant searches. A genuinely useful guide can keep answering questions. A strong reputation can keep helping people choose you.

A well-structured website can continue to work. That’s why I think of good SEO as building an information asset.

Google Ads

And that brings us to Google Ads. SEO and Google Ads are not enemies. They’re different tools. Paid search can be extremely useful when you need immediate visibility. A new service launch. A seasonal promotion.

A temporary offer. A new market. Testing demand. A time-sensitive campaign. Building awareness around something new. And paid campaigns can be useful alongside other marketing systems, including efforts to turn visitors into owned audiences such as email subscribers, where appropriate.

But paid visibility is paid visibility. You rent that exposure. Organic search is an attempt to build durable discoverability. Neither statement makes one universally better. They solve different problems. And I’ll do a separate video on Google Ads because there is a lot more to say there.

And this is why SEO takes time

Good SEO can take months. Sometimes longer. Not because SEO is magic. Because building useful infrastructure takes time. Google has to discover and process changes. Content has to establish itself.

Competitors don’t disappear. Reputation doesn’t appear overnight. Links and mentions take time. Customers take time to generate reviews. Search demand changes. And you need enough data to know what is actually happening.

So if somebody tells you: “Give me seven days and I’ll dominate Google.” Be very careful. A short-term technical fix can happen quickly. A broken page can be fixed today. A noindex directive can be removed today.

A title can be changed today. A bad redirect can be fixed today. But building sustainable visibility is different.

The long game

SEO is the long game because you’re building an information system around a business. The website becomes clearer. The content becomes better. The technical foundation becomes stronger. The business becomes more visible. The reputation becomes more established.

The data becomes more useful. And you learn what customers actually ask. That is the asset. So that’s the system. Now, how do you actually work on all of this without wasting your time?

Part Eleven: Doing the work

SEO order of operations

Here’s the order I would generally think about it.

First: Make the business understandable. Who are you? What do you sell? Where do you operate? Who do you serve?

What makes you relevant? Then: Make the website technically accessible. Can important pages be crawled? Can they be indexed? Are important URLs working?

Is the architecture sensible? Are there accidental noindex directives? Are redirects correct? Are there major technical failures? Then: Build useful pages.

Create the pages that customers actually need. Service pages. Product pages. Location pages where justified. Guides. FAQs where genuinely useful.

Case studies. Supporting resources. Then: Match those pages to real search intent. What does the customer actually want? What questions are they asking?

What information do they need? Then: Build trust and reputation. Real work. Real evidence. Real reviews.

Real authors. Real expertise. Real relationships. Real mentions. Then: Measure.

Search Console. Analytics. Conversions. Calls. Bookings. Sales.

Then: Improve. And repeat. That’s SEO. Not: “Publish 500 articles and pray.”

The biggest SEO mistake: activity isn’t progress

One of the worst SEO habits is measuring output rather than usefulness. “We published 50 articles.” Okay. Did they attract the right searches? Did anyone read them? Did they help customers?

Did they create enquiries? Did they answer genuine questions? Did they strengthen the site’s topical coverage? Did they earn references? Did they become useful resources? Or did you simply produce 50 pages?

And I think the biggest mistake businesses make is confusing activity with progress.

They say: “We’ve done SEO.” What did you do? “We wrote six blogs.” Okay. Why?

“We changed our metadata.” Why? “We added keywords.” Why? “We got an SEO report.” Okay.

What actually changed? That’s the question. Did your business become easier to understand? Did an important page become indexable? Did a broken customer journey get fixed? Did you create a genuinely useful resource?

Did you answer a high-intent search? Did your local presence become more accurate? Did customers leave genuine reviews? Did your site become easier to use? Did search visibility improve? Did enquiries improve?

That’s progress.

What SEO is not

Let’s make a list. SEO is not:

Buying number one. Keyword stuffing. Publishing endless rubbish. Changing a keyword five times. Buying fake reviews. Creating hundreds of town pages with identical text.

Getting a perfect PageSpeed score. Adding every possible schema type. Buying a mysterious “SEO package.” Receiving a monthly PDF and assuming work happened. Being promised guaranteed number one rankings. And it definitely isn’t:

“Give me £500 and I’ll tell Google to put you first.” Nobody legitimately controls Google’s organic ranking system. And Google’s own documentation explicitly warns that there is no way to request or pay for better local ranking.

Spam

And there is a more serious reason to avoid shortcuts. Search engines have spam policies.

Google defines spam as techniques used to deceive users or manipulate its Search systems into featuring content prominently, and that now includes manipulating its AI responses. Sites that violate its policies may rank lower in results, or not appear at all. So the question shouldn’t simply be: “Can I get away with this?” It should be: “Am I actually making this better for the person searching?” That is a much healthier SEO question.

SEO is a loop

Good SEO is a loop.

Research. Build. Publish. Measure. Learn. Improve.

Repeat. You don’t finish SEO. Just like you don’t finish having a website. You don’t finish understanding your customers. Markets change. Products change.

Search behaviour changes. Competitors change. Search interfaces change. Technology changes. Your own business changes. So the SEO process changes too.

How I audit a business

And this is how I would approach an SEO audit. Not: “Let’s check your keyword density.” I’d start with the business.

What does this business actually sell? Where? To whom? What searches matter? Then search. What appears?

Where does the business appear? What doesn’t appear? Then the map. Is the business represented correctly? Then the website. Can it be crawled?

Can important pages be indexed? Are there technical problems? Then the pages. Do they match search intent? Are titles useful? Are descriptions useful?

Is the content genuinely helpful? Are internal links sensible? Are images usable? Is the site accessible? Then trust. Who wrote this?

What evidence exists? What do customers say? What external references exist? Then performance. How does the website behave? Then Search Console.

What is Google actually showing? What queries? What pages? What impressions? What clicks? What indexing problems?

Then conversion. What happens after the person arrives? Can they call? Can they book? Can they buy? Can they understand what happens next?

That’s an audit. Not a PDF full of red, amber and green boxes. An audit should tell you:

What is stopping people from finding you? What is stopping them from choosing you? What is stopping them from becoming customers?

The business owner’s SEO checklist

If you run a business, here are the questions I want you to be able to answer.

Can Google find my important pages? Are my important pages indexed? Do I know which searches matter to my business? Does each important service have an appropriate page? Does each important page satisfy the search intent? Is my website technically sound?

Is my business information accurate? Is my local profile complete? Are my opening hours correct? Are my services represented accurately? Do I have genuine customer reviews? Do I respond to them?

Is my NAP information accurate? Do I have useful local pages where they are genuinely justified? Can people understand who wrote my expert content? Can they see evidence of experience? Are my images usable? Is my website accessible?

Does it work properly on mobile? Does it load reasonably quickly? Have I looked at Search Console? Do I know what queries generate impressions? Do I know which pages generate clicks? Can visitors actually contact me?

And most importantly: Am I measuring business outcomes, not just SEO activity?

What should you do tomorrow?

If you’ve watched all of this and you’re thinking: “Okay. Where do I start?” Don’t start by writing 100 blog posts. Don’t start by buying backlinks. Don’t start by changing 500 keywords. Start with the fundamentals.

Search for the things your customers actually search for. Look at what appears. Look at the map. Look at the organic results. Look at the questions. Look at the competitors.

Look at your own site. Then open Search Console. Look at your pages. Look at the queries. Look at impressions. Look at clicks.

Look at indexing. Run your site through PageSpeed Insights. Check the mobile experience. Check the important pages. Check your business profile. Check your reviews.

And then fix the biggest problems first. Not the easiest problems. The biggest ones.

The close

The audit

And if you want a starting point for that, I’ve put an audit tool at: veryseoly.com/audit You don’t need to give me your email. You don’t need to book a sales call. You run the audit. It takes roughly twenty seconds.

It looks at the major things you should know about. And importantly: It won’t tell you everything. No automated audit can. It gives you a starting point. Then you investigate.

Because SEO isn’t a score. It’s a system.

The real goal

And ultimately, ranking isn’t actually the goal. Visibility is a step toward the goal. Traffic is a step toward the goal. The goal is whatever the business needs. A booking. A phone call.

A sale. A consultation. A shop visit. A download. A subscription. An application.

A customer. And sometimes the best SEO decision is not: “How do I get more traffic?” It is: “How do I get more of the right people?”

The five places, one last time

So let’s bring it all together. When somebody searches for something you sell: One — the answer. Can your information be understood and surfaced in the answer layer? Two — the map. Can your local business be discovered where geography matters?

Three — the links. Can your pages appear in the organic results? Four — the reviews. Can potential customers see evidence from other customers? Five — the door. When they arrive at your website, does it actually work?

And inside that door are all the technical foundations:

Crawling. Indexing. Rendering. Internal links. Canonicals. Redirects.

Mobile. Performance. Accessibility. Structured data. Content. Authors.

Images. Conversion. Trust. That’s the whole system. So from now on, when somebody searches for something you sell, ask: Can I appear in the answer?

Can I appear on the map? Can I appear in the links? Can I appear through reviews? And when someone reaches the door, does the website actually do its job? That’s the framework.

Final thought

The biggest change I want you to make after watching this video is how you think about SEO. Stop thinking: “How do I trick Google?” Start thinking: “What is my customer searching for?” “Where are they searching?”

“What are they trying to accomplish?” “What information do they need?” “Can search systems understand that I provide it?” “Can people trust me?” “Can they actually use my website?” “And when they find me, can they become a customer?”

That’s SEO. Not one trick. Not one keyword. Not one plugin. Not one report. Not one backlink.

Not one AI tool. Not one Google Business Profile setting. The whole thing. And if you remember nothing else, remember the five places. The answer. The map.

The links. The reviews. The door. Because the customer doesn’t necessarily begin by asking: “Who is the best business?” They ask:

“What can solve my problem?” And search decides what they see. So the game isn’t simply being the best business. It’s making sure the things you’ve built, the expertise you’ve earned, the reputation you’ve developed, and the services you provide are actually discoverable. Because:

Not who is best. Who is visible. I’m Jordan Gilbert. This is VerySEOly. And now you understand the whole of SEO.