A beautifully designed website that nobody finds isn't doing its job. SEO is the work of making your site findable to the people already searching for what you offer. The mechanics have shifted meaningfully — Core Web Vitals, AI-driven search results, more sophisticated quality signals — but the underlying logic is unchanged: match search intent, prove credibility, make the page fast, and give Google a reason to surface you.
Start with search intent, not keyword volume
The most common SEO mistake is picking high-volume keywords and writing pages around them without checking what users actually want when they search those terms. "Plumber" has high volume, but the searcher might want a local hire, a definition, a price guide, or a how-to. The page that ranks is the one that matches the dominant intent.
Before targeting a keyword, search it yourself and look at what's already ranking. If the top results are all how-to articles, a product page won't rank. If they're all local listings, a national page won't compete. Match the format and depth that's already winning, then do it better.
Once you have intent right, then bring in keyword tools — Google Keyword Planner for volume, Ahrefs or Semrush for competition data. Aim for a mix of primary terms (broad, competitive), long-tail (specific, easier), and local (city- or suburb-scoped where relevant).
Core Web Vitals: speed in concrete metrics
"Make your site fast" is too vague. Google's Core Web Vitals are the specific signals that affect rankings, and they have concrete targets:
- Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) — under 2.5 seconds. The time to render the largest visible element (usually a hero image or headline). Hero image size is the most common LCP killer for small business sites
- Interaction to Next Paint (INP) — under 200 ms. The responsiveness when users tap or click. Heavy JavaScript and third-party scripts (chat widgets, analytics, ads) are typical culprits
- Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) — under 0.1. How much content shifts as the page loads. Caused by images without dimensions, late-loading fonts, or injected ads pushing content around
PageSpeed Insights tells you exactly which metrics fail and where. Fix the biggest offender first; the rest often improve as a side effect.
Mobile-first indexing
Google indexes the mobile version of your site, not the desktop one. If something exists on desktop but not mobile, Google effectively can't see it.
The non-negotiables: responsive design that adjusts cleanly across screen sizes, readable text without pinching to zoom, tap targets at least 48×48 pixels, no horizontal scrolling on standard phones, and no intrusive interstitials (full-screen pop-ups Google explicitly penalises on mobile).
Test in Chrome DevTools mobile emulator and on a real phone. Emulators miss things — touch lag, font rendering differences, viewport quirks — that real devices catch.
Heading structure and semantic HTML
Headings aren't just visual hierarchy — they're how crawlers parse the structure of your content. The rules are simple:
- One
<h1>per page, expressing the page's primary topic <h2>for major sections, in document order<h3>and below for nested subpoints, never skipping levels (don't jump from<h2>to<h4>)- Include relevant keywords naturally in some headings; never stuff them
The same applies to other semantic tags: <article>, <section>, <nav>, <aside>, <main>. Modern Google understands semantic markup and uses it for everything from rich snippets to AI Overview citations.
On-page basics that still matter
Page titles and meta descriptions remain a strong on-page ranking factor and the most important determinant of click-through rate from search results:
- Page title — under 60 characters, primary keyword in the first half, brand at the end. Each page gets a unique title; never repeat across the site
- Meta description — under 160 characters, summary of what the page offers, with a soft CTA where natural ("Learn more", "See pricing")
- Image alt text — describe the image factually, mention relevant keywords only when they actually fit. Stuffed alt text reads as spam to crawlers and hurts accessibility
- Internal linking — every page should link to related pages with descriptive anchor text. "Our home baking kits" beats "click here". This distributes authority and helps Google understand the site's topic structure
- Image filenames —
custom-sofa-sydney.jpgis better thanIMG_4729.jpg. Small signal individually, meaningful in aggregate
Schema markup and structured data
Schema markup tells Google exactly what your page is — a product, a recipe, a local business, a review, a FAQ — and lets it surface that content as rich results in search.
The schema types worth implementing for most small business sites:
- LocalBusiness — name, address, phone, hours, ABN. Critical for local search and Google Business Profile alignment
- Product — for e-commerce, with reviews, price, availability
- Review / AggregateRating — gets you star ratings in search results
- FAQPage — surfaces FAQ entries as expandable items in some results
- Article — for blog posts and editorial content
JSON-LD is the recommended format. Google's Rich Results Test validates your markup. Most modern CMSes have plugins; for hand-built sites the schema.org documentation covers the syntax.
One increasingly important reason to do this: AI Overviews and other AI search tools rely heavily on structured data to extract information cleanly. Pages without schema get crawled but cited less often.
Content that earns rankings
Google's quality framework is built around E-E-A-T — Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, Trustworthiness. The signals are partly direct (author bylines, credentials, citations) and partly inferred (depth of content, accuracy, originality).
What this means in practice:
- Original information beats restated information. A page with first-hand insight (your own data, your own customer outcomes, your own opinion) outperforms a page that summarises what's already on the internet
- Depth matches intent. Don't pad pages to hit a word count, but don't truncate when the topic genuinely needs explanation. Match the depth of the pages already winning for that keyword
- Author credibility, where it exists, is worth surfacing. Real names, real photos, real bios with relevant credentials
- Update old content. Old pages with stale information drop in ranking; refreshed pages with current information climb. A regular content audit identifies which articles need updating
- Useful is the bar, not "SEO-optimised". Modern Google is good at recognising content written for humans versus content written to game keyword density
Technical hygiene
The unglamorous work that prevents your rankings from being undermined by avoidable issues:
- HTTPS everywhere — SSL certificate from your host (most include it free), all internal links using
https://, no mixed-content warnings - Submit a sitemap via Google Search Console
- Fix crawl errors as Search Console reports them — 404s, server errors, redirect chains
- Set canonical tags to prevent duplicate-content issues from URL parameters, pagination, or printer-friendly versions
- Robots.txt blocks crawling where you want to (admin areas, search results pages); never block resources Google needs to render the page
Google Analytics 4 covers traffic and behaviour; Search Console covers search performance and crawl health. Both are free, both are essential.
Backlinks: less weight than they used to carry, still important
Backlinks remain a ranking factor but the weighting has shifted. Google has gotten much better at distinguishing authentic citation from manufactured link-building. The tactics that worked in 2015 — guest post networks, directory submissions, blog comment links — are now mostly neutral or negative signals.
What still works:
- Original research and data that other sites cite. Industry surveys, original analysis, proprietary metrics
- Genuinely useful tools and resources people share without being asked
- Digital PR — earning coverage in real publications because you have something newsworthy to say
- Strategic partnerships with complementary businesses — co-published content, mutual citation
- Local business associations and industry bodies — usually high-quality, naturally relevant
What to avoid: paid link networks, blog comment spam, low-quality directory submissions, link exchanges. These either get filtered out or trigger penalties.
The AI Overview era
Search results in 2026 increasingly include AI Overviews — Google's generated summaries that answer questions directly above traditional results. ChatGPT, Perplexity, and other tools are also pulling from web sources to answer queries without sending traffic to those sources.
The implication: ranking #1 organically gets you fewer clicks than it used to, because the answer often appears in the overview. The mitigating tactics:
- Be the source the AI cites, not just the page that ranks. Original information, structured data, clear authorship and citations make pages more "citation-worthy" to AI tools
- Optimise for high-intent commercial queries — "buy X near me", "X service [city]", "X consultation" — where AI Overviews rarely substitute for clicking through to a real business
- Build brand searches — when people search your business by name, AI tools point them to you, not to a generic answer
- Monitor zero-click trends in Search Console — impressions without clicks growing faster than clicks is a sign your content is being summarised rather than visited
This is the biggest structural shift in SEO in a decade. The fundamentals still apply, but the volume of clicks for informational queries is genuinely declining. Plan accordingly.
Closing thoughts
SEO that works in 2026 isn't a checklist of tricks — it's matching search intent, building pages that genuinely satisfy it, and maintaining the technical foundations so Google can find and trust the work. The signals get more sophisticated; the underlying principle doesn't.
If you'd like a hand auditing where your site is leaking ranking potential, see Digital Marketing or get in touch.
