Thirty-three SEO FAQs, answered straight.

SEO (search engine optimisation) is the work of getting a website higher in the unpaid search results for the terms your customers actually type. It breaks into three jobs: technical work so search engines can find and read your pages, content so those pages answer real questions, and authority so other sites and profiles back up that you exist and can be trusted. You are not paying per click, which is why it compounds over time and why it is slow to start.

SEO is important because search is how most people find a business they do not already know, and the unpaid results below the ads take the majority of clicks on most searches. For a local business it is more concentrated still: the three map pack results take most local-intent traffic, so moving from fourth to third is worth more than moving from fifteenth to fifth anywhere else. The deeper reason is compounding. A page that ranks keeps producing enquiries without further spend, while advertising stops the day you stop paying.

Yes, though the job has widened. AI overviews and assistants now sit above or in place of the blue links for a growing share of searches, which has cut clicks on some purely informational queries. What has not changed is that those systems pull their answers from ordinary web search, so a site that ranks is a site that gets cited. And commercial searches, where somebody is choosing who to hire, still end in a list of businesses.

SEO earns unpaid rankings over months; PPC buys placement today and stops the moment you stop paying. PPC gets you enquiries this week and tells you fast which terms convert, which is worth having. SEO costs more up front in time and far less per enquiry over a two-year horizon. Run together they feed each other: three months of ad data shows exactly which terms turn into customers, and that is where organic content should aim.

Google crawls pages by following links, indexes the ones it can read and thinks worth keeping, then orders them when somebody searches. Ranking weighs how well a page matches the query, how useful and trustworthy it looks, how fast and usable it is, and what other sites say about it through links. Local searches add three factors of their own (relevance, distance from the searcher, and prominence), and distance is the only one you cannot work on.

On-page SEO is everything on your own website: page titles, headings, content, internal links, structured data and speed. Off-page SEO is everything that happens elsewhere: links from other sites, directory citations, reviews and press mentions. Start on-page every time. It is fully under your control, and paying for links to a badly structured site is money spent propping up something broken.

UK SEO retainers run from about £300 to £5,000 a month, and most competent small business work sits between £600 and £1,200. A local business competing in one town should budget £500 to £1,000; one competing across a county or a sector should budget £1,000 to £2,500. Below about £300 a month nobody is looking at your account by hand. The margin does not allow it, so what you are buying is automated reporting with a logo on it.

Because the price is really a number of hours multiplied by the seniority of whoever spends them. Two agencies quoting £800 a month can be doing twelve hours at £65 or four hours at £200, and both are telling the truth. The only comparison that works is to ask how many hours a month, who does them, and how they split between content, technical work and reporting. If the answer is vague, the hours probably are too.

Below roughly £300 a month it is usually worse than doing nothing, because you pay for the look of activity and sometimes inherit a link profile that costs more to clean up later. If that is honestly your budget, spend the money on nothing and the time on your Google Business Profile. It is free, it is the highest-return hour in local marketing, and our full checklist is published without an email gate.

Four situations. If you need leads this month, buy ads, because SEO cannot move that fast. If your website cannot convert the traffic it already gets, fix that first or you are paying to prove a point. If nobody searches for what you sell, no ranking will help. And if you cannot commit for at least six months, you will stop before the compounding starts and the whole outlay is wasted.

Twelve-month terms are normal in UK SEO, and there is a fair reason: the work compounds and results lag the effort by three to six months, so neither side commits properly on a rolling monthly deal. What is not fair is a contract you cannot see the end of. Ask one question before signing, "what do I keep if I leave?", and the answer tells you which kind you are being offered.

Search "site:yourdomain.co.uk" first. If nothing comes back you have an indexing problem rather than a ranking one, and the two need different fixes. The commonest causes of a truly invisible site are WordPress’s "Discourage search engines" box left ticked after launch, a Disallow rule in robots.txt, or a stray noindex tag left over from staging. Each takes minutes to fix. If pages do come back, the site is indexed and the problem is that your pages are not targeting anything specific.

A crawler is a program that follows links around the web fetching pages so a search engine can index them; Google’s is called Googlebot. It finds your pages through links, your sitemap, and from having visited before. If it cannot reach a page, that page cannot be indexed and cannot rank, however good it is. Everything else in SEO assumes the crawler got there first, which is why a new site with no inbound links stays invisible.

One primary term and a handful of close variations. A page trying to rank for six unrelated services convinces Google of none of them, because the signals contradict each other. If you offer six services, build six pages. The visitor wanted the one thing they searched for, not a list, so it converts better as well as ranking better.

Yes, and they are still among the strongest ranking signals, but relevance beats volume and so does whether the link was earned. A handful of links from suppliers, trade bodies, local press and genuine partners outperforms hundreds of directory submissions. Buying links is the fastest way to acquire a problem that takes longer to clean up than it took to create, and you pay twice.

Only if you have something commercially useful to say. Publishing to a schedule for its own sake produces thin content that waters down the site, which is worse than publishing nothing. What works is answering the questions customers actually ask before they buy (pricing, timescales, comparisons and problems), because those bring in people close to a decision rather than students doing homework.

Yes, though modestly. Core Web Vitals are a real signal, but they act as a tiebreaker between pages of similar relevance rather than beating a better answer. The stronger reason to care is commercial: more than half of local searches happen on a phone, often on a poor connection, and a page that takes six seconds loses a big share of visitors before rankings come into it at all.

It can, and badly handled rebuilds lose more rankings than penalties do. The risk is almost entirely URLs changing without every old address redirecting to its new equivalent. Decide every destination before the build starts rather than compiling a redirect list afterwards, and check that every URL the search engines already know resolves to a 200 or a deliberate 301. Skip that step and you can lose years of rankings in a weekend.