Ask ten people how they found a supplier last month and you will get ten answers: a search result, an AI summary, a map listing, a recommendation in a group chat. The route changed. The destination did not.
What actually moves the needle
Search consultancy has always been oversold. Strip away the jargon and the work is unglamorous: make the site fast, make the structure obvious, and say something worth quoting.
- Technical foundations. Clean HTML, sensible headings, real page titles, no JavaScript wall between the content and the crawler.
- Speed. Core Web Vitals are a proxy for whether a human would wait. Most sites fail on mobile.
- Structure. One clear page per thing you do, in the words your customers use, not your internal job titles.
- Proof. Reviews, case studies, real photographs, a real address. AI summaries lean heavily on signals that a business exists.
Why we only advise on sites we build
We stopped offering search work on sites built by other people. Not out of snobbery — it simply does not work. Half the recommendations need platform changes the client cannot make, and the other half get undone by the next plugin update. When we build the site, we can fix the cause rather than write a report about it.
Built in, not bolted on
Every Expression build starts with the structure a search engine needs: server-rendered pages, structured data, fast responses, clean URLs. There is no later phase where someone bolts search on for an extra fee.
The uncomfortable truth
There is no point having a beautiful website if nobody can find it. There is also no point ranking for a phrase nobody searches. Pick the handful of things you genuinely want to be known for, build a proper page for each, and keep the site quick. That beats a monthly report every time.