A company paid good money for a new website. Everyone who sees it says it is beautiful. The animations run smoothly, the photography is professional, the colours match the logo. There are fewer enquiries than before. Nobody understands why — the site is better, after all.
The site really is better. For someone who has already arrived on it. The problem is that fewer people now arrive, because of things you cannot see on the screen.
Three questions a search engine asks
Before Google shows you to anyone, it has to answer three questions in order: can I reach your page, do I understand what it is about, and is it good enough to show instead of a competitor’s. If it fails at the first, the rest doesn’t matter. Most “inexplicable” drops in traffic happen right there, at the first question.
First: is the site reachable at all
The most painful mistakes in this trade are also the most stupid. A few that genuinely happen:
- The site was left closed to search engines. During the build it is quite correctly hidden, so unfinished content doesn’t reach Google. At launch that has to be removed. If nobody thinks of it, you have months of a completely invisible site that works perfectly.
- The canonical URL points at the wrong address. Every page tells the search engine which address is its “real” one. If that field is filled in wrongly during a rebuild, a dozen pages start claiming they are actually something else. Google obediently stops showing them.
- No redirects after a redesign. The old addresses existed for years and carried weight. The new pages have new addresses. If the old ones don’t point at the new ones, you have thrown away all that history and started from zero — except nothing says so anywhere.
Which is why the most useful question at any redesign is the one clients almost never ask: who is handling the redirects, and who will check after launch that the site is visible?
Second: is it clear what the page is about
A search engine doesn’t look at the design, it reads the structure. If the entire content is a run of equally sized paragraphs with no headings, it has to guess what matters.
What helps here is unglamorous and effective. One main topic per page, with one main heading. Subheadings that say what follows, rather than “Solutions”. Link text that makes sense out of context — “website price list” rather than “more”. Links between your own pages, so the site can be walked through at all. URLs in human language.
Two elements the visitor almost never notices are the most visible of all here: the page title and the meta description. That is your shop window in the search results. If five of your pages share a title, or it reads “Home | Homepage”, you have papered over the window with newspaper.
Third: speed, as a person experiences it
Speed is the one technical topic where the search engine’s interest and the customer’s interest overlap completely. People won’t tolerate slow pages, and Google knows it.
It is almost always the same five things: oversized photographs somebody uploaded straight from a phone or a camera; no caching, so the page is rebuilt on every visit; too many plugins and scripts, half of which load something from other servers; cheap hosting, where three hundred other sites live on the same machine; and fonts and advertising scripts that block the first render.
With speed, the only measure that genuinely matters is how fast the page loads on an average phone on a mobile connection — not on a new laptop in the office on fibre. The difference is bigger than you would expect.
Structured data, without the jargon
Structured data is a short message in the background of the page telling the search engine: this is a company, this is the address, this is the phone number, these are the opening hours, this is an article and it was published then. A person doesn’t see it, and a search engine trusts it more than it trusts guessing from the text.
For a trade or a service business it is a cheap advantage — often the difference between an ordinary result and a result that also shows a phone number, an address and ratings. Same content, more space, more clicks. It has become more important still because language models would also rather take a fact that is clearly labelled than one that has to be unpicked from a sentence.
What not to worry about
There is no need to chase a perfect hundred in every speed tool. The difference between ninety and a hundred is imperceptible to a customer and costs disproportionately. There is no need to count how many times a keyword appears in the text — that is a tactic from 2008 and today it reads as badly written copy, which is the only result it produces. And there is no need to add a new page every month just so the “content is fresh”, if that page says nothing.
How to check this yourself, today
Two free tools tell you almost everything. In Google Search Console you can see which of your pages are in Google, which aren’t and why, and which searches people find you through. In PageSpeed Insights you can see the speed on mobile and desktop and a concrete list of what is slowing it down.
If Search Console says a large number of your pages are not indexed, that isn’t a detail. That is your biggest problem and, at the same time, the fastest to fix.
What technical and content optimisation covers with us is described on the SEO and visibility page, and the prices are in the optimisation price list. If you would first just like to know what is wrong with your site — with no subscription and no commitment — that is what a website audit is for: a written review of visibility, speed and security within two working days. Or simply call +386 40 529 425 and ask.