Answers

By deserving to, which is a slower answer than anybody wants but the only honest one.

In practice it comes down to three things. There has to be a page that genuinely answers the search, rather than a page that mentions the words. The page has to be technically sound, which means loading quickly, working properly on a phone and being readable by the machines that index it. And other people have to link to you, because that is still how search engines judge whether anybody takes you seriously.

What matters most is which search you are chasing. A specific one, “wholesale hot dog suppliers” rather than “food”, is a realistic target for a small business and usually brings better customers, because somebody searching for exactly what you sell is much closer to buying. Broad, valuable search terms are contested by companies with budgets you would not enjoy competing against.

Nobody can guarantee a position, and anybody who does is selling something.

Almost always, yes, and it is usually worth doing, because slow pages lose customers before anybody sees what is on them and search engines mark them down for it.

The usual causes are photographs that were uploaded straight from a camera at ten times the size they are displayed, a page loading scripts it does not need before it shows anything, and a stack of plugins each adding a little more weight. Fixing it means serving images at a sensible size and in a modern format, letting the parts a visitor sees load first, and removing what turns out not to be earning its place.

The result is measurable, which is the useful part. We can show you what the page scored before and after, and what it did to how long people stay.

Two things have to be in place. You need reviews, and the page has to carry the structured data that tells Google what they are, which is a piece of code behind the page that visitors never see, marking up each review and the average score.

Reviews you have gathered yourself are perfectly good for this. Customer reviews sitting on your own product pages will produce stars, provided they are genuine and marked up properly, and there is no need to be paying a third-party review service to make it work. The exception is ratings of your business as a whole rather than of a product, where Google is far more sceptical about a company publishing its own score, and the stars people see there come from Google’s own listing and from independent review sites instead.

Doing it properly makes stars possible rather than certain, because Google decides when to show them and changes its mind periodically. It is still worth doing: a result with stars gets clicked more often than the one above it without.

The part most businesses skip is simply asking. Customers who are happy will usually leave a review if somebody asks them at the right moment, and almost nobody does. An automated review request will work for a very small – but nonetheless welcome – percentage of customers, but a personal request will have a much higher success rate.

For a straightforward small shop, most of the leading providers will do the job perfectly well. Make your decision based on cost, cash flow and how well the provider fits the way you sell, rather than on a long list of features you may never use.

Consider three factors. First, what each payment costs, including both the percentage and any fixed fee per transaction; a small difference becomes significant once you are turning over large sums. Second, when you receive the money, including normal settlement times and whether funds can be held in reserve. And third, what happens when something goes wrong: refunds, chargebacks (when a customer asks their bank or card issuer to reverse a card payment), account reviews (when the payment provider may withold payments pending a risk check) and whether you can get useful human support when you need it.

The other consideration is what you sell. Subscriptions, deposits and balance payments, trade accounts on payment terms, marketplaces, international sales and unusual payment flows can all narrow the field. It is much better to identify those requirements before choosing a provider than to discover afterwards that your preferred gateway does not handle them as neatly as you need.

A useful test is to take your actual last month’s orders and calculate what each provider would have charged.

We can, and it is usually the wrong thing to do.

A document sitting on a website is close to invisible. Search engines make little of it, it reads badly on a phone, people using screen readers often cannot get at it at all, and nobody can link to a particular part of it. It also freezes: the moment a price or a date changes, there is a stale copy of it in circulation.

Almost always the better answer is to turn the content into a proper page, which takes an hour or two and makes it findable, readable on a phone and simple to keep current. Where a document genuinely needs to be downloadable, a form or a price list somebody has to print, we do both: a page that can be found, with the file attached to it.