When I list what is included in a monthly plan, one of the lines says SEO. And I know, every time I write it, that a fair number of people reading it have already flinched.
Because most business owners have been sold SEO at least once, and it did not go well. There was a monthly invoice, a report full of numbers, a lot of talk about algorithms, and no discernible increase in the phone ringing. Then it quietly stopped, and everyone agreed not to mention it again.
I have thought about dropping the term. Calling it something else, something newer and less contaminated. Plenty of people are doing exactly that at the moment, wrapping the same work in a fresh acronym and putting the price up.
I am not going to, for two reasons. It is still what the work is called, and running away from a word because it has been abused by other people feels like the wrong instinct.
But I do owe you an explanation of what I mean by it, because it is not what most people have been sold.
Where the baggage came from
I have spent fifteen years in search, a lot of it in the discount code and affiliate world, which is about as competitive and as ruthless as it gets. I have been in-house and I have watched agencies from the client side of the table. So I have seen a fair amount of how this gets sold.
The model that took hold was straightforward. Find the thing the algorithm currently rewards, do a lot of it, bill monthly, and produce a report showing the numbers going up.
For a while that genuinely worked. There was a period where you could out-rank a better business by understanding Google’s mechanics more thoroughly than they did. Buying links worked. Then it did not. Stuffing keywords worked, then it did not. Building thin pages at scale worked, then it very much did not.
I have cleaned up after some of that, recovering sites from the updates that ended those particular parties. The businesses whose sites I was fixing were not villains. They had paid somebody who told them it was fine, watched a graph climb for a couple of years, and then found out.
That is where the baggage comes from. An entire industry trained business owners to expect a service they could not evaluate, measured by numbers that did not connect to anything, chasing techniques that had a shelf life.
The bit that always bothered me
Here is what I never liked about it, even when I was reasonably good at it.
The whole model treats the algorithm as the customer. You are not trying to be the best answer, you are trying to satisfy a machine’s current rules, and hoping being a decent business is enough to keep you there when the rules change.
That is backwards, and it puts you in a permanent arms race you did not ask to enter. Every update becomes a threat. Every competitor doing something slightly dodgy becomes a reason to consider doing something slightly dodgy. And the actual quality of the business you are promoting becomes almost incidental to the work.
I have never been able to get comfortable with that. Partly on principle, but mostly because it is a rubbish deal for the client. You are renting a position that somebody else can take away.
So what do I mean by SEO?
Something considerably less exciting.
Make the site genuinely the best answer to what your customers are actually asking. That is it. That is the whole method.
In practice it comes down to a handful of things, none of which are secret:
- Build it properly, so it loads fast and nothing is broken. Mostly a one-off job.
- Have the pages that need to exist. A page per service, a page per town you cover. Most small sites are missing half of them.
- Say plainly what you do, where you do it, and roughly what it costs. In sentences a customer would use, not trade jargon.
- Answer the questions people actually ask, including the awkward ones about price.
- Keep your Google Business Profile complete, accurate and active, because for most local businesses it does more work than the website.
- Earn reviews steadily and reply to them.
- Watch what actually happens, and adjust.
There is no trick in that list. There is nothing that stops working when Google ships an update, because there is nothing to catch. It is just being a findable, credible business that has written down what it does.
The point is that if the algorithm changed tomorrow, none of that work would be wasted. That is the test I apply to everything.
Why AI has settled the argument
This has always been how I thought it should be done. What has changed is that it is now demonstrably the thing that works.
The thing answering questions now is not ranking documents against keywords. It is forming a view of a business out of everything written down about it, which is a good deal harder to out-manoeuvre. You cannot out-clever your way into being well thought of. I have written separately about why that is good news for anyone who is actually good at the job.
So the boring approach and the effective approach have converged. That is a nice position to find yourself in after fifteen years of arguing for the boring one.
What this means if you buy a plan from me
Practically, three things.
You will not get a thick monthly report of numbers going up. You will get told what was done, why, and what happened in Search Console and in your actual enquiries. If a month was flat, I will say it was flat.
I will not do anything I would be embarrassed to describe to you. No bought links, no manufactured mentions, no paying to be on a “best of” list that somebody assembled to sell placements. Partly because it is dishonest, mostly because it eventually costs you more than it earns.
The work will look unglamorous. Pages written, questions answered, profile kept up, reviews chased. Month after month. It is not thrilling and it does not make an impressive slide deck.
It also does not stop working when something changes, which is the only feature I have ever really cared about.
The honest caveat
None of this is fast. Anyone promising you page one in thirty days is either lying or planning something you will regret.
And it is not magic. If your prices are wrong, your service is poor, or nobody wants what you sell, no amount of this will fix it. The work makes a good business findable. It cannot make a bad one succeed, and I would not want the job of trying.
But if you are decent at what you do and quietly baffled as to why nobody can find you, that is the gap I am interested in closing.
That is what I mean when I write SEO on the list. I appreciate it is not what the word usually means.
Want a straight assessment of where you actually stand? Get your free audit, or email hello@inkon.co.uk. I read every message myself, and I will tell you plainly, even if the answer is that you do not need me.