SEO in Newcastle, NSW: show up where the work is.

SEO is making your website the thing Google decides to show for the words your customers type. It comes down to what is on your pages, how easily Google can read them, and how many other websites point at you.

Search for something local on a phone and three separate things come back, stacked one under the other. Each is won in a different way. That is worth knowing before anybody spends money on any of them.

At the top sit the advertisements, and those are bought. Underneath them is a map with three businesses in it. That group of three is called the map pack, and your free Google listing decides most of it. Underneath both are the ordinary blue results, and those have to be earned. SEO is the work of earning them.

What decides those positions

• Whether a page exists for it at all.

  Google matches a search to a single page rather than to a business. So a page has to exist for the thing somebody typed, written in their words rather than the industry's.

• Whether Google can read that page.

  How fast it loads on a phone, and whether anything important is hidden behind a script. The site also has to be laid out so a crawler can walk through it.

• Whether other websites point at you.

  A link from another site reads as that business putting its name to yours, much the way a referral does. A handful of genuine ones outweighs a long list of bought ones.

Google publishes its own version of this. It is in the search essentials, and it is worth reading once. It is shorter and plainer than most of what is written about it.

The map only shows three businesses, and it only shows them to people close by. The ordinary results are where everything else lands: the longer searches, the comparison searches, and the people who are further away.

The map is a short list of three. How close a business happens to be to whoever is holding the phone counts for a lot of it. That makes it worth being in, and it also makes it a slice rather than the whole picture.

Underneath it sit the longer and more specific searches. Those are usually the ones where somebody has already decided to spend money. A person typing five words has a particular job in mind, and they are much closer to ringing someone than a person typing two.

Where the ordinary results do the work

• The longer, more specific searches.

  Somebody names a particular job, product or problem. Either a page exists that answers it properly, or the search goes to whoever wrote one.

• The searches people make while comparing.

  How much it costs, what is involved, which option suits them. All of that happens before anybody rings a business, which is when the decision is still open.

• The searches coming from further away.

  Distance weighs heavily on the map and much less on the ordinary results. That is how a Newcastle business gets found in Maitland and Lake Macquarie.

Google matches a search to a page, not to a business. A site with one services page covering nine services is asking one page to win nine different searches, which is the most common reason a good business is invisible.

Open most small business websites and there is a home page, an about page, a contact page, and one services page with a list on it. A site built that way ranks for the business name and very little else. There is nothing for Google to match a specific search against.

The fix is a page for each thing you sell, named the way a customer names it. That is more writing than most businesses get around to. It is also why the ones that do it sit at the top of searches they have no other advantage in.

What each of those pages has to carry

• The words people actually type.

  Blocked drain rather than drainage services. Home loan rather than lending solutions. The businesses already ranking use the plain version, and that is not an accident.

• Enough detail to be genuinely useful.

  What the job involves, what changes the price, and what somebody should know before they call. A page that answers the question keeps the reader.

• The city, said naturally.

  In the heading and in the opening lines. The search being competed for is a Newcastle one rather than a national one, and the page has to say so.

• One clear thing to do next.

  A phone number and a form. A page that ranks well and then asks for nothing is a leaflet with a good position.

They still decide the competitive searches. For most Newcastle businesses a small number of genuine local links is enough, and buying them is the fastest way to spend money on a problem you then have to undo.

A link is another website mentioning your business and connecting through to your site. It is Google's oldest signal and it has never stopped counting. Somebody had to put your name on their own website to create it.

What has changed is that where a link comes from matters far more than how many there are. For a local business the useful ones are close to home. A club you sponsor, an industry association, a supplier who lists the businesses it works with, a local news story.

Those are slow to collect and hard for a competitor to copy, so the position they win tends to hold.

Bought links are the other route. Google is direct about them in its spam policies. Paying for links that pass ranking is against the rules, and Google treats sites accordingly. The links also keep pointing at your site long after the arrangement ends.

Settle the words customers actually use first. Then build a page for each one, clear whatever is stopping Google reading them, and earn a few real links. The order comes before the effort.

Almost every wasted SEO budget comes from doing these out of order. The later steps only pay off once the earlier ones are settled.

1. The words your customers use get found

Not the words the industry uses. What people actually type, alongside what the businesses already ranking have written. It is a couple of hours of work, and it decides everything built after it.

2. Build a page for each thing you sell

One page, one job, named the way a customer names it. This is the largest single piece of the work, and there is no version of SEO that skips it.

3. Clear whatever is stopping Google reading the site

Speed on a phone, pages returning errors, two versions of the same page, anything hidden behind a script. These are usually cheap to fix once somebody has gone looking for them.

4. Earn a few links worth naming

Sponsorships, associations, suppliers, local press. A short list of real ones rather than a long list of bought ones. It is slower, and it is the only version that survives.

5. Answer the questions that come before the sale

How much it costs, how long it takes, what tends to go wrong. Those searches happen before anybody rings anyone. A page that answers one is how a business gets found by somebody who has never heard of it.

6. Then it keeps going

Positions move slowly and then hold. The businesses at the top of Newcastle searches are usually the ones that kept publishing after the first six months, when it stopped feeling new.

The technical fixes show up quickly. Pages and links are the slow part, and the position they earn is the part that holds once it arrives.

Other agencies working here are listed separately, with their own published prices where they publish any, because a search for them returns mostly directories.

The order it happens in

• First the words are settled and the faults are cleared.

  Nothing visible moves in this stage, which is uncomfortable. It is also the part that decides what everything after it is aimed at.

• Then the pages go up, one per thing you sell.

  The first movement shows on the longer and more specific searches rather than the obvious ones, because less competition is sitting on them.

• Then the links and the extra pages build.

  Positions on the competitive searches follow. They tend to hold rather than spike, because nothing about them was rented.

SEO also does not switch off the day the invoices stop, which is the real difference between it and advertising. It fades slowly instead, as competitors keep publishing and the site does not.

Ask which searches they are aiming at, what actually gets built in the first month, who owns the pages at the end, and what the monthly report shows. The first question tends to answer the rest.

These are worth asking of any agency, including this one, so the answers given here are underneath each question.

• Which searches are you aiming at?

  A named list, with the rough monthly demand beside each one. Improving your visibility is not a target, because there is no way to tell whether it happened.

• What is built in the first month?

  Pages. Where the first month is auditing and reporting, the second month is where the work starts, and that is worth knowing before it is paid for.

• Who owns the pages if I stop?

  You do, on your own site and in your own hosting. Everything written for a client here belongs to that client from the day it is written.

• What does the monthly report show me?

  Positions on the named searches, and where the enquiries came from. A list of completed tasks describes effort rather than result.

Plenty of Newcastle businesses write their own pages and do well out of it. The part worth paying somebody for is knowing which pages to write, and in what order.

Anybody weighing up who to use can run the same checks on spareday, which the registered business, the address and the public reviews sets out.

Whether it is worth paying for at all, and what a monthly fee actually buys. Both come down to arithmetic rather than opinion.

Is SEO worth it for a Newcastle business?

It is when one customer brings in more than a few hundred dollars over a year and people search for what you sell. Below that, advertising or referrals usually return more. The full arithmetic, the businesses it suits and the cases where the answer is no are worked through on whether SEO is worth it for a Newcastle business.

What does an SEO agency do each month?

Writes pages, keeps the Google listing current, earns mentions on other local websites, and reports positions and enquiries against the searches agreed at the start. What the first month holds, what every month after holds and how to check any of it is on what an SEO agency does each month in Newcastle.