SEO, short for search engine optimization, is the work of making your website easy for a search engine like Google to find, read, and rank, so more of the right people land on it. It covers the words on your pages, the structure behind them, how fast the page loads, and whether other sites link to you.
For a small business, SEO decides whether a person searching for what you sell ever sees your name. Someone two towns over is typing your service into Google right now. If your site is clear and well built, you are in the running. If it is slow or thin, you sit on page three, where almost no one looks.
The ground shifted recently. People still search Google, but many now read an AI answer at the top instead of clicking, and some ask an assistant directly. Good SEO is the base for both: the same clarity and structure that help you rank also help a machine read you.
Every site I build is measured against Google’s own SEO audit, so the technical groundwork is checkable rather than a promise. A search engine can only rank a page it can read cleanly, so that is where the work starts. See how it fits into a full build, or read The Art of Being Found.