8. Your search visibility

Search visibility is mostly technical work we handle quietly. But one part of it is genuinely yours, because you know your business and search engines do not.

8.1 The bit that is worth your time

Every page has a search title and a description. These are what somebody reads in Google before deciding whether to click — the blue line and the grey text beneath it. Left empty, they get filled in automatically, and automatic is rarely as persuasive as something you wrote.

8.2 Writing them well

• Title: what the page is, plus where you are. “Wood-Fired Sourdough in Medford” beats “Home”.
• Description: one sentence a real person would find useful. Say what they will get, not what you wish to be seen saying.
• Use the words your customers use. If people ask for a “gluten-free birthday cake”, write that, not “coeliac-appropriate celebration confectionery”.
• Do not stuff keywords. Repeating a phrase six times reads as spam to both people and search engines, and it will cost you.

You will find these fields when editing a page, usually below the main content. If you would rather not, send us the wording and we will place it.

8.3 What we handle

The plumbing: making sure search engines can read your site, that pages are listed correctly, that your business details are structured the way search engines expect, and that nothing technical is holding you back.

8.4 An honest word about rankings

Nobody can promise a position in search results — anyone who does is selling something. What can be promised is that your site is properly built, fast, readable, and clearly about what you actually do. That is what earns rankings, and it is what we maintain.

8.5 What to leave alone

Do not change site-wide search settings, redirects, or anything mentioning sitemaps or indexing. Those are easy to set in a way that quietly removes you from search entirely, and the damage is not visible for weeks.