Service
Being found is mostly a question of what your pages answer and how plainly they say it. The work is making a site reachable, making it legible, making it the better answer, and then measuring what moved.
Having a website and being found through one are two different problems, and they have different repairs.
Most people reading this already have a site. It was built, it was paid for, it looks reasonable on a phone, and it does not bring in work. That gap is where search engine optimization sits, and a site can be well made and still be close to invisible.
There are three separate ways that happens, and they are not interchangeable. The page may be missing from the index, which means the search engine has never stored a copy of it to show anybody. It may be stored but never chosen, because nothing on it matches the words people actually type. Or it may be chosen for the wrong question, so the visitors who arrive were never going to buy anything. Each has its own cause and its own fix, and telling them apart is the first useful thing this work does.
There is also a reason this matters more than it did a few years ago. A results page is no longer only a list of links. Google's AI Overviews and AI Mode write summaries using pages retrieved from the same index that feeds the ordinary results. So, a page that cannot be reached and understood is missing from the list and from the summary at the same time, for the same underlying reason.
Three things have to happen before your page can appear, and a fourth applies once the search is local.
First the search engine has to reach the page. Then it has to work out what the page is about. Then it has to judge that page a better answer than the others available for a particular question. Google's own documentation is unusually direct about this, and just as direct that none of the three is promised: publishing a page does not oblige anyone to store it, and storing it does not oblige anyone to show it. Once the search has a location attached to it, a fourth idea applies. Local results are worked out from relevance, distance and prominence. Relevance is how well the business matches what was asked. Prominence is how well known and how consistently described the business is. Distance is the physical gap between the person searching and you, and it is fixed. It is why the same placement across a whole metro area is not something to promise, and it is better known before you buy anything.
Everything further down this page follows from those four ideas. Make the site reachable. Make it legible. Make it the better answer to a question somebody is actually asking. Represent the business accurately in the places local results are decided.
These come up again and again, and each one points at a different repair.
None of those is a design fault. A redesign will not fix any of them on its own, and paying for one in the hope that it does is a common and expensive mistake. Each of them is diagnosed before anything is changed, which is why the work starts by looking.
Four stages, in this order, with rough timings so you can plan around them.
What the search engine can reach, what it has stored, and what it currently shows. Crawling, index coverage, redirects from any earlier site, page speed, headings, image descriptions, internal links, and whether the same business facts appear everywhere. This produces a written list ordered by what would move the most for the least disruption, not an undifferentiated list of everything imperfect. Usually one to two weeks.
The technical repairs come first because content cannot outrun them. Pages that cannot be reached get reached, broken redirects get pointed at the right addresses, duplicate versions of the same page get resolved to one, and the site gets a sitemap that reflects what actually exists. This is where a stalled site most often unsticks. Usually two to four weeks depending on what the diagnosis found.
One page per service, written to answer the question somebody types. This is where most of the durable gain sits, and it is slower than the technical work because it is writing. The same holds for the towns you serve: a page each, and each one written from its own research. Google treats scaled and doorway style pages as spam, so the writing per page is the work rather than a template with the words swapped. Ongoing, several pages a month.
Search Console and analytics set up in accounts you own, so the numbers you read come from Google directly. You get to see which queries brought people, which pages were served, and what changed after each piece of work. Ownership matters here more than reporting does, because it is what lets you take the work elsewhere. Set up early, read monthly.
Accounts and files in your name, not access to something you rent.
What was examined, what was found, and the order it should be dealt with, with the reasoning for the order. It stays useful even if you do the work yourself or hand it to somebody else.
Reachability, redirects, duplicate pages resolved, sitemap and robots rules, headings and image descriptions. The work that has to be right before anything else can help.
One page per thing you sell, plus the local pages that have something local to say. Written to be read by a person first, which is also what the guidance asks for.
Search Console and analytics in accounts registered to you, with the property verified against your domain. If you stopped working with us tomorrow you would keep every one of them.
The answer is a range with the reasons attached, and the reasons are more useful than the range.
Technical repairs can show up quickly, sometimes within days, because they remove something that was actively blocking a page from being stored or served. New pages are slower. They have to be found, stored, and then judged against everything else already answering that question, and that judgement is made by a system nobody outside Google observes directly.
For a small site, technical fixes usually settle within the first month, and new pages start showing steady query data somewhere between two and six months, with the wider end applying to more competitive terms. Google's own documentation says it does not accept payment for higher organic ranking and does not guarantee that a page is crawled, stored or shown at all, which is the reason those figures are a range.
What can be committed to is the work itself: what will be examined, what will be changed, in what order, and what you will be able to see in your own accounts afterwards.
Three things move the number.
Each of these costs nothing and tells you something specific.
Search for a full sentence copied from one of your own pages, in quotation marks. If nothing comes back, that page is very likely not stored at all, which is a different and more urgent problem than ranking badly.
Open your Google Business Profile and read it as a stranger would. Check the category, the areas listed, the hours and the description against what your website says. Where the two disagree, the site and the profile are working against each other.
Find out who owns your Search Console and analytics accounts. If the answer is a previous developer, or nobody knows, that is worth fixing regardless of what you decide about the rest, because it is the only first hand view of what search engines are doing with your site.
Type the thing you sell followed by your town and look at what comes back. Not to be discouraged by it, but to see what kind of page is currently being shown: a directory, a national brand, a competitor's service page, or a map listing. That tells you what you would need to match.
Finally, list the questions customers actually ask you before they buy. Those questions are the pages you are missing, almost every time, and you already know them better than any tool does.
Local pages are written town by town, because a page about a place has to know something about the place.
Work that makes a site easier for a search engine to reach and understand, and more useful to the person who arrives. It covers technical health, page structure and content, local representation where that applies, and measurement.
No. Google states that it does not accept payment for higher organic ranking and does not guarantee that a page will be crawled, stored or shown. What can be promised is the work, the order it happens in, and what you will be able to see in your own accounts.
Yes, and it is cheaper planned in than retrofitted. Page structure, addresses, redirects from any previous site, and what each page is meant to answer are all decisions made during a build. Retrofitting them later means undoing work that was already paid for.
It is the part that decides whether you are considered for a search with a place attached to it. It rests on accurate business information, a matching website, and evidence that the business is known. Distance from the person searching stays a factor throughout, and it is not something any provider can change.
No. Structured data helps a search engine understand a page and is useful for that. Google says no special markup or writing style is required for its generative features, and none of it makes inclusion certain. The same fundamentals decide both.
Yes, for each one you want to be found for, and the condition is that every page is genuinely its own. A service gets a page because a search engine has to decide what a page is about, and one page covering five services answers that for none of them. A town gets a page because a search with a place name attached is a different search. What fails is publishing them as one template with the words swapped, which Google identifies as scaled and doorway content, and the risk of that lands on your site. The count is not the question; whether each page was written from its own research is.
Tell us the address of your site, the thing you most want to be found for, and whether you know who owns your Search Console account. That is enough to say whether your problem is technical, whether it is missing pages, or whether the site is fine and the profile is the part letting you down.
