SEO for service agencies: a guide to being found in organic search.
NOTE: This isn’t a guide for content marketing. Instead, I’m focusing on the basics of being found online.
I don’t really care about SEO.
It’s a common refrain, especially now with founder-led marketing all the rage and the umpteenth ‘death to SEO’ siren call, this time because of AI agents and zero-click search results.
But here is the thing: deciding to do nothing or ignoring SEO completely could be the single stupidest thing any business could ever do. You don’t own your audience on social platforms, and unlike search engines, AI agents give one result. Not many.
Additionally, there is enough data out there to indicate that performing well in search means you’ll probably show up well within AI-generated answers for the same topic and answers as well. Where do you think they get their info from anyways, ya dummy?
All that said, content and quality content at scale is obviously a huge factor in delivering traffic via search. This guide doesn’t cover that. At all. Sorry.
This page is to help almost anyone understand if the content they’ve spent hours crafting, or paid someone to produce, or punched three words into ChatGPT to get a piece of absolute cat-turd in 650 word form (hey, I’m not here to judge) is ABLE TO BE FOUND. That’s it.
And if you’re still sceptical, consider this analogy with money matters:
1. 'Going viral' is the equivalent of investing in a startup: you have no idea if it's going to work, but if you do, the pay off can be huge. Even VCs aim for one out of 10 investments to be a x10 return and above. It’s addictive, but very difficult to repeat.
2. Investing in the stock market, even as a retail investor, is the equivalent of cold outreach: it is constantly changing, you can get absolutely nothing back if you’re unlucky or follow trends or do it poorly. But it is also the most obvious way for almost anyone to make money. You have fluctuations, some things work much better than others, but it’s all about being constant and over time your returns will be better than almost anything else, except that moon shot bet above.
3. SEO is like a high interest savings account. Usually, you’re getting between 3 and 5% per year. Keep your money in there for long enough and it compounds. Plus it’s guaranteed, provided you play along.
But there are too many people who spend time “making content”, although they have stuff-all idea whether anyone reads it. That’s silly, and dumb, and really really unnecessary. Because it’s really quite easy to do. Ready? Let’s dive in.
Search engines crawl the web looking for fresh sites, pages, and content. They use the information they find to determine how useful each may be for potential readers. The information gathered when crawling the web is then visible on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
SERPs aren’t just about keywords, but the content that people actually want to read and share. So while good content does indeed help a site rank higher in SERPs, (which in turn leads to more traffic, more potential customers, more leads, and more buyers), many people neglect the basic nuts and bolts of ensuring the search engine can actually find you, understand what you’re trying to share and then present it to the most relevant users.
This guide is about that aspect of SEO.
Google Search Console (GSC) is the first step to help you monitor and maintain your presence on SERPs. With Google Search Console, you can see how your site is being crawled and indexed (or how it isn’t). You can also identify and fix technical issues that may affect page rank, see how you’re performing on mobile devices, and understand how to optimize existing content to improve user experience and organic performance.
Google Search Console helps you understand the specific keywords that bring people to your site, your keyword rankings, and the relevant content that is most popular in search results.
The sitemap is much like a restaurant menu: this is how your site tells Google and other search engines which pages exist and how they are ordered according to their relative importance.
To make best use of the sitemap, you should first ensure that you know how to manage it, and that you can control what is included in it.
To find the site map, check if there is one submitted to Google Search Console by looking under ‘Sitemap’ in the left section of the control panel. If there isn’t, there will be nothing under ‘submitted sitemaps’.
In any case, you’ll need to find your sitemap on your live pages and understand how it is populated. You should be able to find it in your CMS (webflow, wordpress, Squarespace) usually under SEO ‘tools’ or ‘settings’. This is important because if you need to change the sitemap, you’ll need to know where it is and how it functions in your particular CMS.
Keep in mind that most sitemaps are auto-populated. This means that if you add new pages they are immediately added and published to the sitemap. But you may not want this to happen, or you may only want certain pages to appear in the sitemap.
Once you find or add the sitemap to Google Search Console, you should next check whether your pages are actually being indexed. This means that the pages can be found via Google and other search engines.
Indexing may not happen immediately. You should wait a couple of days if the sitemap - or your pages - are new. Even then, you may encounter issues or decide to submit pages directly, both of which are covered by the section below: ‘non-indexed pages’.
That’s a decision for you. A good example is where you have authors and tags that are auto created for blog content, as happens in Wordpress. It automatically creates a page for each author and each tag, but this is not necessarily valuable or relevant content.
If your site doesn’t have many pages, it probably doesn’t matter too much. But understanding how indexing functions gives you some control over the web pages of your site that are and are not being indexed. There are some examples below of pages that are not indexed, and shouldn’t be, and those that aren’t, but should be.
If you’ve been producing new, high-quality content for months but haven't seen an uplift in organic traffic, then it’s possible your web pages aren’t being indexed. The easiest way to find out whether this is the case, is to look at the sitemap section in Google Search Console.
In GSC go to ‘Sitemaps’ under ‘Indexing’ in the left menu.
In most cases, you’ll have one (and should only have ONE) site map. However if you have an exceptionally large site, or are on Wordpress and using a plug-in like Yoast, you may have more than one, and that’s ok as well. Here we’ll focus on what happens when we have just one.
Click on that sitemap and the following page will open up:
Click on ‘See Page Indexing’.
What you want to see here is that all the pages on your sitemap have been indexed, like in the example below.
Now click on ‘Pages’ under ‘Indexing’ in the left menu.
You’ll see how many pages are indexed and how many are not.
Having non-indexed web pages doesn’t necessarily mean you have problems. Any page from the entire history of your site that has not been indexed will be here.
It is important to consider the reasons why particular web pages are not being indexed.
You may not see all of these now, but here I will share potential issues and whether you should be worried about them or not.
“Alternative page with proper canonical tag”.
This implies that there are new pages that have been found, but they’re not the ‘proper’ page as they do not have the ‘canonical’ within the page code. The canonical is the “correct” URL for a page, embedded within the code.
Not everything in this section is something to be concerned about. Some website CMS’s ‘create’ new pages or sub pages or tags. If you’re unsure what you should be concerned about, then ask an expert.
But for pages that should be indexed and are not, we need to work out why. This is in the next section.
“Page with redirect”
Likewise, the screenshot below shows URL variations (http, without ‘www’ etc) which are not indexed because they redirect. This is also good because the primary domain in our case (https://www.philmvella.com/) is the only one we want Google to see.
Sometimes, you will see pages that should be indexed, but are not. This can be for a variety of reasons. Two of the main ones to look out for are “Crawled - currently not indexed” and “Discovered - currently not indexed”. There are others which may come up over time, but the reasons and their fixes are more complicated than is possible to explain in this guide. Reach out to me OR find yourself an SEO expert.
These can be fixed quite easily, but the only way to do so is manually.
If there are many pages that require indexing, create a list so you can check them off and not miss any. This is because the solution below has a daily ‘cap’ or limit to how many you can submit. This to avoid automated activity. The easiest and best way to build a list is to download it directly from Search Console. Then follow the instructions below.
1. Copy a URL and paste it into ‘Inspect any URL’ at the top of the page.
2. The page should display ‘not indexed’ as per the below (if it says ‘page indexed', then you’re fine - this process can stop here - it is only a matter of time before this web page will appear in search engine results!)
3. Click on ‘Test Live URL’ to see if it finds any reason the page may not be indexed. If it does, you’ll need to work out how to fix the page.
4. If it says ‘page can be indexed’ then click on 'Request Indexing’.
5. Be aware that there is a daily limit of 10 pages which can be submitted daily to 'Request Indexing’.
6. Do this for each of the web pages you need to be indexed.
It may take a few days for each page to be indexed after being submitted. However if you have many pages that you’re submitting, you should see something your indexed pages increase - with impressions for search engines increasing along with it: a perfect result!
Be careful that you’re not submitting pages you shouldn’t. A great example relates to the URL that has been allocated to the ‘domain property’ in the screenshot under ‘redirection’ above. ‘http’ pages shouldn’t be indexed, and in our case neither should those without ‘www’. The former are a security risk and are blocked on most browsers anyway, and the latter is because we have chosen the domain to be displayed as www.philmvella.com, so all pages should follow this convention.
It’s important to be able to measure your data. Maybe you’re doing everything perfectly and it’s going great—but if you’ve never been responsible for content creation before, how would you even know what high-quality content looks like?
The most commonly used analytics tool for analyzing the organic search performance of your web pages is Google Analytics. Other tools that provide similar data include Plausible (the best choice for data security and user privacy), Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics.
I don’t really care about SEO.
It’s a common refrain, especially now with founder-led marketing all the rage and the umpteenth ‘death to SEO’ siren call, this time because of AI agents and zero-click search results.
But here is the thing: deciding to do nothing or ignoring SEO completely could be the single stupidest thing any business could ever do. You don’t own your audience on social platforms, and unlike search engines, AI agents give one result. Not many.
Additionally, there is enough data out there to indicate that performing well in search means you’ll probably show up well within AI-generated answers for the same topic and answers as well. Where do you think they get their info from anyways, ya dummy?
All that said, content and quality content at scale is obviously a huge factor in delivering traffic via search. This guide doesn’t cover that. At all. Sorry.
This page is to help almost anyone understand if the content they’ve spent hours crafting, or paid someone to produce, or punched three words into ChatGPT to get a piece of absolute cat-turd in 650 word form (hey, I’m not here to judge) is ABLE TO BE FOUND. That’s it.
And if you’re still sceptical, consider this analogy with money matters:
1. 'Going viral' is the equivalent of investing in a startup: you have no idea if it's going to work, but if you do, the pay off can be huge. Even VCs aim for one out of 10 investments to be a x10 return and above. It’s addictive, but very difficult to repeat.
2. Investing in the stock market, even as a retail investor, is the equivalent of cold outreach: it is constantly changing, you can get absolutely nothing back if you’re unlucky or follow trends or do it poorly. But it is also the most obvious way for almost anyone to make money. You have fluctuations, some things work much better than others, but it’s all about being constant and over time your returns will be better than almost anything else, except that moon shot bet above.
3. SEO is like a high interest savings account. Usually, you’re getting between 3 and 5% per year. Keep your money in there for long enough and it compounds. Plus it’s guaranteed, provided you play along.
But there are too many people who spend time “making content”, although they have stuff-all idea whether anyone reads it. That’s silly, and dumb, and really really unnecessary. Because it’s really quite easy to do. Ready? Let’s dive in.
Background
Search engines crawl the web looking for fresh sites, pages, and content. They use the information they find to determine how useful each may be for potential readers. The information gathered when crawling the web is then visible on Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs).
SERPs aren’t just about keywords, but the content that people actually want to read and share. So while good content does indeed help a site rank higher in SERPs, (which in turn leads to more traffic, more potential customers, more leads, and more buyers), many people neglect the basic nuts and bolts of ensuring the search engine can actually find you, understand what you’re trying to share and then present it to the most relevant users.
This guide is about that aspect of SEO.
Google Search Console
Google Search Console (GSC) is the first step to help you monitor and maintain your presence on SERPs. With Google Search Console, you can see how your site is being crawled and indexed (or how it isn’t). You can also identify and fix technical issues that may affect page rank, see how you’re performing on mobile devices, and understand how to optimize existing content to improve user experience and organic performance.
Google Search Console helps you understand the specific keywords that bring people to your site, your keyword rankings, and the relevant content that is most popular in search results.
Sitemap
1. What is a Sitemap?
The sitemap is much like a restaurant menu: this is how your site tells Google and other search engines which pages exist and how they are ordered according to their relative importance.
To make best use of the sitemap, you should first ensure that you know how to manage it, and that you can control what is included in it.
2. How to find your sitemap?
To find the site map, check if there is one submitted to Google Search Console by looking under ‘Sitemap’ in the left section of the control panel. If there isn’t, there will be nothing under ‘submitted sitemaps’.
In any case, you’ll need to find your sitemap on your live pages and understand how it is populated. You should be able to find it in your CMS (webflow, wordpress, Squarespace) usually under SEO ‘tools’ or ‘settings’. This is important because if you need to change the sitemap, you’ll need to know where it is and how it functions in your particular CMS.
Keep in mind that most sitemaps are auto-populated. This means that if you add new pages they are immediately added and published to the sitemap. But you may not want this to happen, or you may only want certain pages to appear in the sitemap.
Page Indexing
Once you find or add the sitemap to Google Search Console, you should next check whether your pages are actually being indexed. This means that the pages can be found via Google and other search engines.
Indexing may not happen immediately. You should wait a couple of days if the sitemap - or your pages - are new. Even then, you may encounter issues or decide to submit pages directly, both of which are covered by the section below: ‘non-indexed pages’.
1. What should and shouldn’t be indexed?
That’s a decision for you. A good example is where you have authors and tags that are auto created for blog content, as happens in Wordpress. It automatically creates a page for each author and each tag, but this is not necessarily valuable or relevant content.
If your site doesn’t have many pages, it probably doesn’t matter too much. But understanding how indexing functions gives you some control over the web pages of your site that are and are not being indexed. There are some examples below of pages that are not indexed, and shouldn’t be, and those that aren’t, but should be.
2. Non-indexed pages
If you’ve been producing new, high-quality content for months but haven't seen an uplift in organic traffic, then it’s possible your web pages aren’t being indexed. The easiest way to find out whether this is the case, is to look at the sitemap section in Google Search Console.
In GSC go to ‘Sitemaps’ under ‘Indexing’ in the left menu.
In most cases, you’ll have one (and should only have ONE) site map. However if you have an exceptionally large site, or are on Wordpress and using a plug-in like Yoast, you may have more than one, and that’s ok as well. Here we’ll focus on what happens when we have just one.
Click on that sitemap and the following page will open up:
Click on ‘See Page Indexing’.
What you want to see here is that all the pages on your sitemap have been indexed, like in the example below.
Now click on ‘Pages’ under ‘Indexing’ in the left menu.
You’ll see how many pages are indexed and how many are not.
Having non-indexed web pages doesn’t necessarily mean you have problems. Any page from the entire history of your site that has not been indexed will be here.
It is important to consider the reasons why particular web pages are not being indexed.
You may not see all of these now, but here I will share potential issues and whether you should be worried about them or not.
“Alternative page with proper canonical tag”.
This implies that there are new pages that have been found, but they’re not the ‘proper’ page as they do not have the ‘canonical’ within the page code. The canonical is the “correct” URL for a page, embedded within the code.
Not everything in this section is something to be concerned about. Some website CMS’s ‘create’ new pages or sub pages or tags. If you’re unsure what you should be concerned about, then ask an expert.
But for pages that should be indexed and are not, we need to work out why. This is in the next section.
“Page with redirect”
Likewise, the screenshot below shows URL variations (http, without ‘www’ etc) which are not indexed because they redirect. This is also good because the primary domain in our case (https://www.philmvella.com/) is the only one we want Google to see.
3. How to fix non-indexed pages
Sometimes, you will see pages that should be indexed, but are not. This can be for a variety of reasons. Two of the main ones to look out for are “Crawled - currently not indexed” and “Discovered - currently not indexed”. There are others which may come up over time, but the reasons and their fixes are more complicated than is possible to explain in this guide. Reach out to me OR find yourself an SEO expert.
These can be fixed quite easily, but the only way to do so is manually.
If there are many pages that require indexing, create a list so you can check them off and not miss any. This is because the solution below has a daily ‘cap’ or limit to how many you can submit. This to avoid automated activity. The easiest and best way to build a list is to download it directly from Search Console. Then follow the instructions below.
1. Copy a URL and paste it into ‘Inspect any URL’ at the top of the page.
2. The page should display ‘not indexed’ as per the below (if it says ‘page indexed', then you’re fine - this process can stop here - it is only a matter of time before this web page will appear in search engine results!)
3. Click on ‘Test Live URL’ to see if it finds any reason the page may not be indexed. If it does, you’ll need to work out how to fix the page.
4. If it says ‘page can be indexed’ then click on 'Request Indexing’.
5. Be aware that there is a daily limit of 10 pages which can be submitted daily to 'Request Indexing’.
6. Do this for each of the web pages you need to be indexed.
It may take a few days for each page to be indexed after being submitted. However if you have many pages that you’re submitting, you should see something your indexed pages increase - with impressions for search engines increasing along with it: a perfect result!
Be careful that you’re not submitting pages you shouldn’t. A great example relates to the URL that has been allocated to the ‘domain property’ in the screenshot under ‘redirection’ above. ‘http’ pages shouldn’t be indexed, and in our case neither should those without ‘www’. The former are a security risk and are blocked on most browsers anyway, and the latter is because we have chosen the domain to be displayed as www.philmvella.com, so all pages should follow this convention.
Data Analytics
It’s important to be able to measure your data. Maybe you’re doing everything perfectly and it’s going great—but if you’ve never been responsible for content creation before, how would you even know what high-quality content looks like?
The most commonly used analytics tool for analyzing the organic search performance of your web pages is Google Analytics. Other tools that provide similar data include Plausible (the best choice for data security and user privacy), Mixpanel, and Kissmetrics.