Being found, on Google and in AI answers

Getting more business from a website depends on three things happening in order. First, customers have to find your page, whether it's cited by an AI assistant, listed in Google search results or in a social media post or another website. Second, enough of them have to click through rather than passing by. And third, the page they arrive at has to be good enough to turn a visitor into an enquiry or an order.

Most of what goes wrong is a break in that chain rather than a general failure of the website. We work on both the off-site and on-site aspects of SEO, because fixing one part on its own rarely gets results.

What has changed

Google’s AI Overview is the new normal in search results. Our job is to get you into that space.

And it’s arguably better than being in the top three search results – always considered to be the Holy Grail of SEO – because coverage in the AI Overview is presented as expert advice. Google is no longer telling your customer “here’s a list of pages, pick one you like the look of”. It’s telling them “the page you need is this one”, and showing its reasoning.

For a lot of searches, the enquiry will end there, which is why clicks are plummeting for many websites. But if someone is a potential customer looking for a supplier, they will inevitably click. And that means you’re getting a lead on a customer who is predisposed to buy from you because (accurately or otherwise) Google has presented itself as an authority on who is the best in your business.

So the work now has two aims that mostly overlap. Rank where ranking still counts, and be the source that gets quoted where it does not.

What we actually do

It’s a game of increments. Concentrate on producing original writing, artwork, photography or video and you stand the best chance of success. To be found online, each page needs substantive and informative (or entertaining) content. It’s not enough to reproduce the product description from a supplier’s spreadsheet. The tech giants set the rules and all we have to do is follow them. Pages that succinctly answer a direct question tend to be the ones that get quoted by generative AI agents, so we make sure we’re presenting our clients in the right way.

Then there is the technical side, which nobody sees but everybody feels. Google penalises pages that load slowly, or glitch while they are loading, or are bloated with code. Websites can drift into that state gradually without anybody noticing. We measure it, fix what is slowing things down, and check that the latest update isn’t lowering your ranking.

The rest is upkeep. New pages get listed, broken links and redirects get sorted out when a site changes, and monthly figures get read, analysed and compared so that a fall in visitors gets investigated in the month it happens rather than at the end of the year.

What we will not promise

Nobody can guarantee a position in organic search results, and anybody who does is selling snake oil. What can be said honestly is that the work is measurable: you will know what was done, what moved, and what it cost, because we produce a plain English report each month explaining what changed and why.

The other honest thing to say is that this takes time. If you need business tomorrow, seriously consider pay-per-click advertising. In the meantime, investing in SEO will gradually ease your reliance on advertising. A site that has been neglected for two years does not recover in a fortnight, and a new site has to earn its place against sites that have been there for a decade.

If your site has dropped out of Google

It happens, and it is usually one of a handful of causes rather than a mystery: a redesign that lost the old addresses, a setting that told search engines to stay away and never got switched back, a penalty, or a competitor who simply started trying harder. Finding out which is a short piece of work, and worth doing before anybody spends money on fixing the wrong thing.

Where to start

Tell us the searches you would like to be found for, and what you think you are currently missing out on. We will look at where you actually stand today and tell you what it would take, even if your money would go further doing something else.

0118 950 7617 [email protected]