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The plain-English guide to getting found

Everything a small business needs to understand search: from how Google finds your pages to being named in AI answers and keeping click fraud off your ad bill. Free, no sign-up, about 19 minutes end to end.

The guide

Chapter 1 · 3 min

How search engines work

Crawling, indexing and ranking in plain English, and what each stage means for a small business website.

Chapter 2 · 2 min

Keyword research

How to find the searches your customers actually make, judge which ones are worth pursuing, and match each one to the right page.

Chapter 3 · 2 min

On-page SEO

Titles, descriptions, headings, copy, images and structured data: what to put on each page so search engines and people understand it.

Chapter 4 · 2 min

Technical SEO

The health checks that let search engines crawl and index a site properly: status codes, redirects, canonicals, sitemaps, internal links and speed.

Chapter 5 · 2 min

Links and authority

Why links from other websites still matter, how authority scores are estimated, how Site Strength works, and how a local business earns good links.

Chapter 6 · 2 min

Local SEO

How businesses that serve an area get found in map results and "near me" searches: Google Business Profile, consistent name, address and phone, reviews and local pages.

Chapter 7 · 2 min

AI search and answer engines

How ChatGPT, Claude, Perplexity and AI Overviews find and cite businesses, how to avoid blocking them by accident, and how to measure whether you appear.

Chapter 8 · 2 min

Measuring SEO results

Which numbers show whether SEO is working, how to read ranking changes without panicking, and how to report progress to a client or a boss.

Chapter 9 · 2 min

Click fraud in Google Ads

What click fraud and invalid clicks are, the signs to look for in your data, what Google already filters, and practical ways to protect your budget.