Mention crawlability, canonical tags or HTTP status codes and it can quickly sound like something that should be left entirely to a developer. In reality, a technical SEO audit is simply about checking whether the structure and setup of your website are helping search engines access and understand the pages you want people to find.

For a small business website, you probably do not need to spend weeks investigating every technical detail imaginable. What matters is identifying problems that could genuinely affect organic search visibility and prioritising the ones worth fixing.

Google describes crawling and indexing as fundamental parts of how pages become eligible to appear in search results. If Google cannot properly discover or process a page, the quality of the copy on it can only get you so far.

If your wider concern is that your website simply does not seem to be gaining traction, I have covered the broader causes in Why Is My Small Business Website Not Ranking on Google? 10 Things I’d Check First.

For this guide, we are going deeper into the technical side.

Here are the 15 checks I would make during a technical SEO audit for a small business website.

1. Check whether your important pages are actually indexed

I would start with the basics.

Can Google actually find the pages you want customers to discover?

A page needs to make it into Google’s index before it can appear in normal search results. Google does not guarantee that every page it crawls will be indexed, so it is worth checking rather than assuming everything is fine.

The easiest starting point is Google Search Console.

Use the URL Inspection tool to check your homepage and your most important commercial pages. This might include core service pages, category pages or important location pages.

If an important URL is not indexed, look at the reason Search Console provides.

There is a major difference between a page that Google has chosen not to index and a page that Google has never been able to access properly. Identifying which situation you are dealing with gives you a much better starting point.

I would also avoid obsessing over getting every single URL indexed. Thank-you pages, account areas and filtered versions of pages may have little reason to appear in search.

Focus on the pages that could actually bring relevant organic traffic into the business.

2. Look for accidental noindex tags

A noindex directive tells supported search engines that a page should not be included in their search index. That is useful when it is intentional. It becomes a fairly serious SEO problem when someone accidentally applies it to a service page, product category or even an entire section of the website.

Google confirms that a noindex directive can prevent a page from appearing in Google Search. This can sometimes happen during a website redesign.

A staging site may correctly be set to prevent indexing while it is being developed. The new website goes live, somebody forgets to remove the setting and suddenly pages that should be visible to Google are telling it to stay away. Check your most important URLs and make sure they are indexable.

Many SEO crawlers will flag pages containing noindex, while Search Console can help you investigate individual URLs.

If you find large numbers of unexpected noindex pages, work out why the directive is being applied before removing it blindly.

3. Check what your robots.txt file is blocking

Your robots.txt file gives crawlers instructions about which parts of your website they are allowed to crawl. This is another area where a small mistake can have a large impact. You might discover that an old rule is blocking a section of the website that should now be accessible.

One important distinction is that robots.txt is primarily a crawling control. Google specifically advises that it should not be treated as the method for keeping a page out of its index. A noindex directive is used when you want a crawlable page excluded from search results.

During an audit, I would review the file and ask whether every blocked area has a sensible reason to be blocked. For most small business websites, the file should be relatively straightforward.

If you find dozens of complicated rules and nobody knows why they are there, that deserves investigation.

4. Review your XML sitemap

An XML sitemap gives search engines a list of URLs that you consider important. Google describes a sitemap as a file that can help it crawl a website more intelligently. For a small site, I would check whether one exists and whether it has been submitted through Search Console. Then look at what is actually inside it.

The sitemap should generally contain the canonical, indexable pages you want search engines to discover. You do not want it full of redirected URLs, broken pages or URLs deliberately marked noindex.

A messy sitemap does not automatically destroy your SEO, although it can be a useful sign that the website is sending inconsistent technical signals. If the sitemap says a URL matters while another part of the site says it should not be indexed, I would want to know why.

5. Find broken pages and broken internal links

Broken links are common, particularly on websites that have existed for several years.A page gets removed, a URL changes or an old article links to something that no longer exists. Over time, those broken links accumulate.

During a technical SEO audit, I would crawl the website and identify internal links leading to 404 pages. Then decide what should happen to each one.

Sometimes the linked page still exists under a different URL, so the link simply needs updating. In other cases, the page has genuinely disappeared and the old link should be removed. You should also check whether important URLs themselves return a 404 response unexpectedly.

A broken link tucked away in a five-year-old blog post is unlikely to be a crisis. A main navigation link sending potential customers to a missing service page is a much bigger problem.

Technical SEO is partly about prioritisation.

6. Check your redirects

Redirects are useful when URLs change. If you replace an old service page with a new one, a redirect can send people and search engines to the correct destination. Problems appear when redirects become unnecessarily complicated.

Imagine:

/old-service

redirects to:

/services-old

which then redirects to:

/services-new

which finally redirects to:

/services

The visitor eventually gets where they need to go, but the route is far messier than it needs to be. I would look for redirect chains and internal links that still point towards redirected URLs. Where possible, update internal links so they point directly to the current destination.

I would also look for redirect loops, where URLs keep sending users between pages without ever reaching a working destination. These tend to become obvious during a full crawl.

7. Review canonical tags

Canonicalisation is one of those SEO concepts that sounds much more intimidating than it needs to.

Google may encounter several URLs containing the same or very similar content. It then needs to work out which version represents the main page. That preferred version is known as the canonical URL. Websites can provide canonical signals to help Google make that decision.

During an audit, I would check whether important pages point towards sensible canonical URLs. A common setup is for a page to reference itself as canonical. Problems can appear when an important service page accidentally declares another URL as its canonical version.

You may effectively be telling Google that a different page is the version you would prefer it to consider. Canonical issues become particularly relevant on e-commerce websites, where filters and product variations can create multiple URL versions.

You do not need to panic simply because your crawler reports duplicate content. Some duplication is completely normal.

The question is whether your canonical setup clearly reflects which pages you actually want competing in search.

8. Look for duplicate and near-duplicate pages

Duplicate content often appears naturally as websites grow.

Someone creates a new service page without realising an older version exists. An ecommerce platform creates several accessible URLs for a similar product. Location pages are copied with very little meaningful difference between them.

The SEO issue is usually less dramatic than the phrase “duplicate content penalty” makes it sound. What matters is whether you have several pages competing to serve essentially the same purpose.

Google groups duplicate or very similar pages and selects a representative canonical version. From a strategic perspective, I would ask whether each indexable page has a reason to exist.

If two pages target the same search intent and contain very similar information, combining them may sometimes create a stronger result. If they serve genuinely different customer needs, make that difference clear. Technical auditing therefore starts to overlap with content strategy here.

That is normal. SEO disciplines rarely sit in completely separate boxes.

9. Find orphan pages and weak internal linking

An orphan page has no meaningful internal links pointing towards it.

Imagine publishing an excellent service page and then leaving it disconnected from the rest of the website. It may exist in your sitemap and Google may still discover it, although the site architecture is giving very little indication that this page is important.

Internal linking helps search engines discover URLs and understand relationships between pages. Google recommends creating crawlable links and using useful anchor text so both people and search engines can understand where a link leads.

During an audit, I would identify important pages with very few internal links. Then look for genuine opportunities to connect them. A relevant article might link to the service it discusses. A core category page might connect to an important subcategory.

Think about how somebody would naturally move around the site. Your most valuable pages should not require detective work to find.

10. Check the overall site structure

Internal linking leads naturally into site architecture.

A small business website should usually have a reasonably clear structure. You want important pages to be accessible without visitors having to click through endless layers of menus.

I would look at how information is organised and whether similar subjects are grouped logically. For example, imagine a business offering several types of commercial cleaning.

A main commercial cleaning page might connect to dedicated pages covering the individual services. Supporting guides can then link into the relevant commercial pages where appropriate.

That structure helps users understand what the business offers and gives search engines clearer relationships between related content. A site can become messy after years of adding new pages without ever reconsidering where they belong.

A technical SEO audit is a useful opportunity to zoom out and look at that structure as a whole.

11. Check whether JavaScript is hiding important content

Modern websites often use JavaScript to load or display content.

Google can process JavaScript and uses rendered HTML when indexing pages. However, Google also explains that JavaScript introduces additional considerations when making content accessible to search crawlers.

For a straightforward small business website, you may never encounter a serious JavaScript SEO problem. It is still worth checking when something does not make sense. If important text appears perfectly in your browser but Google seems unable to see it, rendering could be part of the issue.

The same applies to links or content that only load after particular interactions. Search Console’s URL Inspection tools can help you investigate how Google sees a page. This becomes more important on heavily JavaScript-dependent websites or custom-built platforms.

If you use a standard CMS and your content is being rendered normally, I would prioritise more obvious problems first.

12. Review mobile usability

Your website needs to work properly on a phone. That goes beyond shrinking the desktop design until it fits on a smaller screen.

Google predominantly crawls websites using its mobile crawler, so the content available through the mobile version matters for indexing too. I would manually open the website on a mobile device and use it like a customer.

Can you read the text comfortably? Are links easy to select?

Try completing the actions that matter to the business. If an enquiry form becomes painful to use on mobile or the navigation covers half the page, that needs attention even before you start worrying about rankings.

You should also make sure the mobile experience is not hiding important content that remains available on desktop. For many small businesses, a substantial proportion of potential customers will encounter the website on their phone. A mobile problem can therefore become a conversion problem as well as an SEO issue.

13. Check site speed and Core Web Vitals

Website performance gets plenty of attention in SEO.

Google’s Core Web Vitals are designed to measure aspects of real-world page experience, including loading performance and responsiveness. Google recommends achieving good Core Web Vitals while also making clear that strong scores alone do not guarantee higher rankings.

That distinction matters.

I would not spend thousands of pounds chasing a perfect performance score while ignoring weak service pages or serious indexing problems.I would investigate when performance is genuinely poor.

You can start with Google’s free PageSpeed Insights tool.

Run a few representative pages through it rather than checking the homepage alone. Your homepage might perform brilliantly while an image-heavy product category is painfully slow. Look for patterns. Large images, excessive scripts and poorly configured themes can all contribute to performance issues.

Your developer may need to handle the actual fixes, but the SEO audit should identify where performance is creating unnecessary friction.

14. Review your structured data

Structured data is machine-readable markup that can give search engines additional context about a page. Google uses structured data to better understand page content and to determine eligibility for certain search features. The type of structured data worth using depends on the website.

A local business may have different requirements from an online retailer. During an audit, I would check what markup already exists and whether it accurately reflects the visible page content. I would also look for errors caused by old plugins or theme changes. More schema is not automatically better.

Use structured data where it genuinely describes the content and where the relevant search engine documentation supports its use. This is particularly important because structured data can become outdated when a website changes.

If your markup is describing information that disappeared from the visible page two years ago, it deserves cleaning up.

15. Check whether the website is accessible to the search systems that matter

Technical SEO increasingly extends beyond Google alone. Potential customers may now discover businesses through ChatGPT and other AI-powered search experiences alongside traditional search results.

That means I would include crawler accessibility within the wider technical review. For Google, the same crawling and indexing foundations continue to matter across its search experiences. For other platforms, crawler controls can differ.

If AI Search visibility matters to the business, check whether your technical setup is accidentally restricting the crawlers associated with the platforms you want visibility from. I would still keep this in perspective.

If your service pages are broken, half the website is not indexed and your internal linking is chaotic, those problems deserve attention before you start tweaking the site purely around an individual AI crawler.

Technical SEO should support your wider organic search strategy.

What should you fix first?

A technical SEO audit can easily produce a spreadsheet containing hundreds of warnings.

That does not mean you have hundreds of urgent SEO problems.

One of the most important parts of technical SEO is deciding what actually matters.

I would prioritise issues based on their likely impact and the importance of the affected pages.

An accidental noindex on a page responsible for a large proportion of your leads deserves immediate attention.

A redirect chain hidden inside an article that receives two visitors a year probably sits much further down the list.

The scale of the site matters too.

A technical issue affecting 4 pages on a 5-page website is very different from the same issue affecting 4 pages on a 50,000-page ecommerce site.

Do not let an SEO tool decide your priorities for you.

Tools identify things worth investigating. Someone still needs to decide whether those things represent genuine problems.

Do small businesses really need technical SEO?

Yes, although the amount of technical SEO needed varies enormously.

A small brochure website built cleanly on a modern platform may have relatively few technical issues.

An ecommerce store that has been running for ten years could have a much more complicated history of discontinued products, platform migrations and URL changes.

The aim is to understand what is happening underneath the visible pages.

You can write excellent SEO copy and choose sensible keywords, but technical problems can still make it harder for search engines to discover the content you have invested in.

Likewise, fixing every technical warning on a weak website will not magically make it rank.

Technical SEO works alongside content quality, keyword strategy and wider site authority.

If you are trying to diagnose a broader organic visibility problem, my guide to why a small business website might not be ranking on Google covers those other areas in more detail.

A technical SEO audit should give you a plan

The useful outcome of a technical SEO audit is not a 70-page document full of screenshots and warnings.

It is a prioritised plan.

You should know what is wrong, which problems matter and what should happen next.

For some businesses, the biggest issue might be indexation. Another site may need its internal architecture reorganising.

That is why I would always connect technical SEO back to the wider organic search strategy.

The question is ultimately quite simple:

Is the technical setup of this website making it easier or harder for search engines and potential customers to reach its best content?

Once you can answer that, the audit becomes much more useful.

Need help with your website’s SEO?

I provide freelance support across organic SEO strategy, technical SEO, AI Search and SEO copywriting.

That can include diagnosing technical issues, identifying organic growth opportunities and building a practical strategy around the areas most likely to make a commercial difference.

You can view my experience, SEO services and contact details here.

Someone looking for an accountant, local shop or specialist service might still start with Google. They might also ask ChatGPT which companies are worth considering, use Gemini to research their options or explore an AI Overview before clicking through to a website.

For small businesses, that creates a new SEO question: how do you make your website easier for AI search systems to find, understand and potentially recommend?

There is a growing industry around terms such as Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO) and Answer Engine Optimisation (AEO), although I tend to think of AI Search optimisation as part of a wider organic SEO strategy.

Google has taken a similar position. Its current guidance says that the SEO practices used for traditional Google Search continue to apply to AI Overviews and AI Mode. Google does not require a separate set of technical changes purely for its generative AI search features.

That does not mean you should ignore AI Search. It means you can approach it sensibly.

If you have already completed an AI Search audit for your small business, the next step is to turn what you found into practical improvements.

Here are ten areas I would focus on.

1. Make sure AI search crawlers can access your website

Before worrying about content strategy, check whether the systems you want visibility from can actually access the website.

This sounds obvious, although crawler access is surprisingly easy to overlook.

For Google, your important pages need to be crawlable and indexable through the normal Google Search process. Google states that a page needs to be indexed and eligible to appear in Search before it can appear as a supporting link within AI Overviews or AI Mode.

ChatGPT Search has its own crawler called OAI-SearchBot. OpenAI recommends allowing OAI-SearchBot access if you want your public website content to be discoverable and surfaced within ChatGPT Search.

Check your robots.txt file and any crawler controls applied by your hosting platform or CDN.

You should also look for accidental noindex tags on important pages. If your main service page has quietly been excluded from search engines, improving the wording on it is unlikely to solve the visibility problem.

This is one of the reasons AI Search optimisation overlaps so heavily with technical SEO. Search systems still need to access the content before they can do much with it.

2. Make it very clear what your business actually does

One of the simplest improvements you can make is also one of the most useful.

Read your homepage and ask:

Would someone who had never heard of this business understand exactly what it offers?

Brand language can sometimes get in the way.

A homepage headline such as:

Helping you create the future you deserve

might sound lovely.

It also tells a search system very little.

Compare that with:

Independent mortgage adviser helping first-time buyers across Greater Manchester

The second version provides much more context.

This does not mean every heading needs to read like an SEO keyword stuffed into a template. Your copy should still sound human. The important thing is that the business name, services and relevant locations are clearly explained somewhere on the page.

If you run a local business, make your service area clear. If you specialise in a particular sector, say so.

AI systems have a much easier job connecting your business with a relevant question when your own website explains the connection clearly.

3. Build strong pages around your important services

A surprisingly common SEO problem is that businesses offer a service without having a useful page dedicated to it.

You might have a short paragraph on the homepage mentioning six different services, with very little information about any of them.

That gives both traditional search engines and AI search systems limited material to work with.

Your most commercially important services should usually have their own useful pages.

A strong service page can explain:

• what the service involves

• who it is designed for

• how the process works

• common questions customers ask

You do not need to make the page enormous simply for SEO.

Google’s current AI Search guidance specifically says there is no ideal page length and that websites do not need to break information into artificial content chunks for generative AI systems.

Focus on answering the questions a genuine customer would have before getting in touch.

This also creates more opportunities for your website to become relevant when people ask AI tools detailed questions about the type of service you provide.

4. Create content that adds something genuinely useful

Publishing more blog posts does not automatically improve AI Search visibility.

The usefulness of those posts matters.

Generic articles have become very easy to produce. If your article simply repeats the same information already available on hundreds of other websites, there is very little to distinguish it.

Google’s guidance for generative AI search places particular emphasis on content that offers original value and first-hand expertise. It advises website owners to avoid simply recycling information already available elsewhere.

For a small business, that original value does not need to involve commissioning a huge research project.

You might publish:

• lessons learned from real customer work

• detailed answers to questions customers repeatedly ask

• useful comparisons based on your experience

• examples showing how you approach a particular problem

Imagine you run an equestrian retailer.

An article called What Is Laminitis? is competing with an enormous amount of existing content.

A detailed guide explaining How I Choose Grazing Muzzles for Native Ponies That Gain Weight Easily could contain much more first-hand insight.

That experience gives the article a reason to exist.

The same principle applies whether you sell software, provide professional services or run a local shop.

5. Answer the questions people actually ask

Traditional keyword research is still incredibly useful for AI Search.

The difference is that AI platforms make longer and more conversational searches much easier.

Someone might search Google for:

accountant small business Manchester

The same person could ask ChatGPT:

What should I look for when choosing an accountant for a small ecommerce business in Manchester?

Both searches reflect similar commercial intent.

This is why customer questions are so useful when planning AI Search content.

Look at:

• Search Console queries

• customer emails

• sales conversations

• competitor content

Then identify the questions that appear repeatedly.

You can answer some through your service pages and others through supporting articles.

There is no need to create a separate article for every slightly different wording of the same question. Google specifically warns against creating large numbers of pages designed around minor search variations purely to influence AI Search visibility.

Instead, create one genuinely useful resource that covers the subject properly.

6. Improve your internal linking

Internal linking is sometimes treated as an SEO housekeeping job, although it plays a much bigger role than that.

Links help search engines discover pages and understand how different parts of your website relate to each other. Google continues to recommend making important content easy to find through internal links as part of its guidance for appearing in AI Search features.

Think about the journey through your website.

If you publish an article answering a question closely related to one of your services, link the article to the relevant service page.

You can also link between related guides where the connection genuinely helps the reader.

Over time, this creates groups of related content around the subjects your business knows well.

For example, an independent financial adviser might have a core pension advice page supported by articles covering pension consolidation, retirement planning and common pension questions.

Those relationships make the website easier to navigate while also giving search systems more context about the areas in which the business has expertise.

7. Make your business information consistent across the web

AI Search visibility is not only about what appears on your own domain.

Search systems can draw on information from across the web when answering questions about companies, products or services.

For a small business, this makes basic brand consistency important.

Check that your company name and business description are reasonably consistent across the places where customers might encounter you.

For local businesses, your Google Business Profile deserves particular attention. Google says information supplied through Business Profile can help products and services appear across traditional Search and AI-powered search experiences.

Relevant industry profiles can also help provide additional context around a business.

The aim is to create a clear digital footprint.

If one website says you operate in Manchester and another says Liverpool, while an old profile still describes a service you stopped offering four years ago, that creates unnecessary confusion.

Keeping important business information current is good digital housekeeping anyway. It also makes it easier for search systems to build a reliable picture of the company.

8. Use structured data where it genuinely helps

Structured data gives search engines additional information about the content of a page.

For a business website, that might include organisation information or LocalBusiness structured data. Ecommerce sites may have other relevant markup depending on what they sell.

Google says Organisation structured data can help it understand and disambiguate information about a company.

It is worth adding appropriate schema markup where your website supports it.

At the same time, structured data is not a magic AI Search switch.

Google specifically states that there is no special schema markup required for AI Overviews or AI Mode. Structured data should also match the information people can actually see on the page.

I therefore treat schema as part of good technical SEO rather than something to add simply because someone has labelled it a GEO tactic.

If your website clearly explains the business and has useful content, structured data can provide additional machine-readable context.

If the website itself is vague, schema alone will not fix that.

9. Give other websites a reason to mention you

Authority still matters.

One useful question to ask is:

Why would another website ever reference this business?

Sometimes the answer is obvious. You may have unusual expertise or original research. You might offer particularly useful data or have experience that journalists regularly need.

For many small businesses, however, that authority has to be developed over time.

This could involve contributing expert insight to relevant publications or being included in legitimate industry resources. Partnerships and professional organisations can also create useful opportunities.

Quality matters much more than trying to collect mentions everywhere you possibly can.

Google’s current AI Search guidance explicitly warns against chasing artificial mentions purely to influence generative search results.

A genuine mention in a respected publication within your industry has context. Twenty low-quality profiles created purely because someone promised “AI citations” probably do not have the same value.

Look for opportunities that make sense for the business even if AI Search disappeared tomorrow.

That tends to be a useful test.

10. Measure whether your AI Search visibility is improving

You cannot optimise something very effectively if you never measure it.

AI Search tracking is still developing, so I would combine several signals rather than relying on a single metric.

Start by keeping a set of searches relevant to the business.

Repeat them periodically across the AI platforms that matter to your audience. Record whether the business appears and which competitors are being mentioned.

You can also monitor referral traffic.

OpenAI says websites that allow OAI-SearchBot can track ChatGPT referral traffic through analytics, with ChatGPT Search adding utm_source=chatgpt.com to outbound referral URLs.

Google Search Console is useful too. Google now provides reporting around visibility within its generative AI Search features, alongside the wider performance data available within Search Console.

Do not panic because your business disappears from one individual AI response.

Generative answers can vary.

Look for movement over time instead. Are you appearing in more relevant searches? Are your pages receiving AI referrals? Is organic visibility improving alongside that?

Those trends tell you much more than testing one prompt on a Tuesday afternoon.

AI Search optimisation works best as part of SEO

AI Search can feel like an entirely new branch of digital marketing, especially when every week seems to bring another acronym or optimisation technique.

In practice, a lot of the work is familiar.

Your website needs to be accessible. Search systems need to understand what the business does. Your content should genuinely help the people you want to reach.

AI Search adds another layer to that strategy because people are discovering businesses through a wider range of interfaces.

That means I would optimise for AI visibility alongside your existing organic search strategy rather than treating GEO or AEO as an isolated project.

Technical SEO supports discovery. Strong commercial pages explain what you offer. Useful supporting content demonstrates expertise. Wider brand authority gives search systems more context about who you are.

Those pieces reinforce each other.

If you are unsure where your business currently stands, start with my AI Search Audit for Small Businesses. It walks through how I would check visibility across generative search before deciding what needs improving.

Want help improving your organic and AI Search visibility?

I work with businesses on organic SEO strategy, AI Search optimisation, technical SEO and SEO copywriting.

That can mean identifying why a website is struggling to gain visibility, building a wider organic search strategy or carrying out the technical and content work needed to put that strategy into practice.

You can view my SEO experience, portfolio and contact details here.

If your small business website is not ranking on Google, there is rarely one single explanation. Poor organic visibility can come from technical problems, weak keyword targeting, uncompetitive content or simply trying to rank for searches where your website has very little chance of competing yet.

The useful part is that most ranking problems can be investigated methodically.

When I look at a small business website with weak organic visibility, these are the ten areas I would check first.

1. Has Google actually indexed the page?

Before worrying about rankings, establish whether Google knows the page exists.

A webpage cannot rank if it has not been indexed.

Google Search Console is the easiest place to begin. Use URL Inspection to check an important page and see whether Google reports it as indexed. If it is missing from the index, you can then investigate why.

Common problems include accidental noindex tags, incorrect canonical tags and pages that are difficult for Google to discover through internal links.

Your XML sitemap is also worth checking. Important commercial pages should be included and submitted through Search Console.

I would also make sure your website is not blocking sections through robots.txt.

This distinction matters because:

Not indexed means Google may not currently be able or willing to include the page in search results.

Indexed but not ranking means Google knows about the page, but does not consider it competitive enough for the searches you want.

Those are very different SEO problems.

2. Are you targeting keywords you can realistically rank for?

Small businesses often begin SEO by choosing the biggest keyword they can find.

A local independent business might decide it wants to rank for something extremely broad because the search volume looks attractive.

The problem is that high-volume keywords often come with powerful competitors.

If the first page is dominated by household brands, major publishers or established websites with enormous backlink profiles, a relatively new small-business site may struggle to compete directly.

That does not mean SEO cannot work.

It means the keyword strategy needs to be more selective.

I would look for searches where the business has genuine relevance and where the current results leave room for a specialist provider.

Longer and more specific searches can be especially useful.

Instead of only targeting a broad service, you might target the service combined with a location, customer type or specific problem.

The aim is to find the overlap between:

what your customers actually search for

and

what your website has a realistic opportunity to rank for.

Good keyword research should help prioritise opportunities rather than simply produce an enormous spreadsheet of phrases.

3. Does the page match the search intent?

Ranking problems are often caused by targeting the right keyword with the wrong type of page.

Search intent describes what somebody is actually trying to achieve when they type a query into Google.

If someone searches for a service, Google may favour commercial pages from companies providing that service.

If they search a question, the results may be dominated by detailed informational guides.

This is why I always look at the current search results before deciding what content to create.

Suppose you have written a blog article targeting a phrase where Google consistently ranks service pages.

Even if your article is excellent, it may still struggle because the format does not match what users appear to want.

The reverse can happen too. A thin service page may struggle for a search where users expect detailed advice.

Look at the first page and ask:

What type of pages are ranking?

What information do they contain?

What would somebody searching this phrase reasonably expect to find?

That SERP analysis should shape both your content strategy and your on-page SEO.

4. Is your content genuinely competitive?

Sometimes a page is indexed and correctly targeted, but the content simply is not strong enough.

This does not mean you need to write the longest article on the internet.

It means your page needs to satisfy the search better than the alternatives available.

Compare your content against the pages currently ranking.

Do competitors answer questions you have ignored? Do they demonstrate stronger expertise or provide clearer explanations?

A useful content audit should look beyond word count.

I would consider whether the page is accurate, whether important subtopics are covered and whether the content gives the reader a reason to trust the business behind it.

Original expertise can make a significant difference.

A small company may not have the domain authority of a huge publisher, but it may have years of direct experience solving the exact problem being discussed.

Use that.

Case studies and practical examples can make a page far more valuable than generic content assembled from information already available elsewhere.

5. Does your website have technical SEO problems?

Strong content can still be held back by technical issues.

Technical SEO covers the underlying structure and accessibility of a website.

For a small-business site, I would usually begin with a crawl using a tool such as Screaming Frog and look for obvious problems.

That might include broken links, redirect chains or pages returning incorrect status codes. I would also review duplicate pages and canonicalisation.

Site speed and Core Web Vitals are worth monitoring, particularly if performance is poor enough to affect the user experience.

Mobile usability matters too.

Google primarily needs to be able to crawl, render and understand the pages you want to rank.

For smaller websites, technical SEO does not necessarily require months of development work. Sometimes a relatively small number of issues are creating a disproportionate amount of friction.

If you are also interested in how technical accessibility affects newer search experiences, I have covered that in my AI Search Audit for Small Businesses:

AI Search Audit for Small Businesses: How to Check Whether ChatGPT, Gemini & Google AI Can Find You

6. Is your internal linking helping important pages?

Internal links are one of the most useful SEO tools available to a small business.

They help visitors discover related information and help search engines understand how pages connect.

Yet they are frequently overlooked.

Imagine you have a detailed service page buried in the navigation with almost no other pages linking to it.

Google can still discover the URL, but your website is doing very little to signal that the page is important.

Relevant blog articles can link naturally to commercial pages.

Service pages can connect to supporting guides and related services.

If you have a cluster of pages about one subject, sensible internal links can help establish the relationship between them.

I would also look for orphan pages, which are pages with no meaningful internal links pointing towards them.

Internal linking becomes particularly important on content-heavy websites because older pages can gradually disappear beneath newer material.

A good internal-linking strategy should make your most useful and commercially important content easy to find.

7. Are stronger websites simply outranking you?

SEO is competitive.

You can do plenty of things correctly and still struggle because other websites currently have stronger signals.

Competitor analysis helps explain why.

Look at the businesses ranking above you.

How established are their domains? How much relevant content have they built around the subject?

Their backlink profiles can also provide context.

A backlink is a link from another website to yours. Relevant links from credible websites can help demonstrate authority, although quality is far more important than collecting large numbers of random links.

Brand mentions and wider industry visibility can contribute to the overall picture too.

If competitors are regularly featured in professional publications or referenced by respected organisations, they may have developed considerably stronger authority around the topic.

This is not a reason to give up.

It is a reason to choose your battles carefully.

Start with search opportunities where your experience and relevance give you a realistic advantage, then build authority over time.

8. Is your local SEO strong enough?

For businesses serving a particular area, local SEO deserves its own review.

A company could have a perfectly respectable website and still struggle to appear for searches involving its location.

Make sure your Google Business Profile is complete and accurate.

Your business name, website details and services should be consistent.

Location information should also be clear on your own website where appropriate.

If you operate across several genuine service areas, useful location-specific content can help explain where you work. Avoid creating dozens of near-identical pages with little more than the town name swapped out.

Customer reviews can also play an important role in local discovery.

For many smaller businesses, winning strong local visibility is considerably more commercially useful than chasing national rankings for enormous keywords.

The search volume may be smaller, but the people searching are often much closer to becoming customers.

9. Are your pages competing against each other?

More content does not automatically mean more rankings.

Sometimes a website publishes several pages targeting essentially the same search intent.

Google then has to decide which one represents the best result.

This can contribute to keyword cannibalisation.

For example, you might have:

• a service page targeting a phrase;

• an older blog article targeting the same phrase;

• another guide covering almost identical information;

• and a category page optimised around the same subject.

That can dilute the signals around the topic.

I would map important keywords against your existing URLs and look for unnecessary overlap.

Sometimes the best solution is to differentiate the pages more clearly.

In other cases, two weaker pages can be consolidated into one stronger resource.

Older content may also need redirecting if it no longer serves a useful purpose.

This is where content auditing becomes important because good SEO is partly about deciding what not to publish.

10. Are you measuring the right things and giving SEO enough time?

Finally, make sure the website genuinely is underperforming before concluding that SEO has failed.

Rankings fluctuate.

Personalised search results can also make manual checks misleading.

Google Search Console gives you a much better picture of organic performance.

I would look at impressions and clicks over time, alongside the queries generating visibility and the pages receiving search traffic.

Analytics can then tell you what those visitors do after arriving.

This distinction is important because a website can experience substantial ranking and traffic growth without generating much additional business.

If organic visibility is increasing but leads are not, you may have a search-intent or conversion problem rather than a traffic problem.

SEO also takes time.

A new website may need months to build meaningful visibility, particularly in competitive markets.

Instead of judging progress based on one keyword, look for broader trends.

Are more relevant pages receiving impressions? Is organic traffic increasing?

Are commercially important searches beginning to move towards the first page?

Those signals can show that the strategy is developing even before the biggest rankings arrive.

What about AI Search?

Google rankings are no longer the only form of search visibility worth monitoring.

Potential customers are also using tools such as ChatGPT and Gemini to research businesses and compare options.

There is significant overlap between traditional SEO and AI Search optimisation.

A website that is difficult to crawl, unclear about its services or lacking useful content may struggle across several search experiences.

If your website ranks in Google but your business appears to be absent from ChatGPT, I have written a separate diagnostic guide covering that specific problem:

[Internal link: Website Not Showing in ChatGPT? 7 Reasons Your Business Isn’t Being Mentioned]

You can also use my broader AI Search audit process to assess visibility across several platforms:

AI Search Audit for Small Businesses: How to Check Whether ChatGPT, Gemini & Google AI Can Find You

When should you bring in an SEO specialist?

You do not necessarily need professional SEO support every time a page drops a few positions.

It becomes more useful when you are struggling to identify the underlying problem or when several issues overlap.

Perhaps your website has technical problems alongside weak content.

You might have traffic but very few enquiries.

Or perhaps competitors are consistently outranking you and it is unclear where their advantage comes from.

A proper SEO review should establish where the biggest opportunities are and prioritise them according to commercial value.

If you would like help working out why your small business website is not ranking on Google, I provide freelance support across content SEO, AI Search, technical SEO and organic strategy.

You can see my portfolio, current services and contact details here

Final thoughts

When a website is struggling to rank, the temptation is to immediately start rewriting pages or publishing more content.

Diagnosis should come first.

Check whether Google has indexed the page. Review the keyword opportunity and search intent, then assess whether your content is competitive.

From there, investigate the technical health of the website and how your internal linking supports important pages. Compare your authority with competitors and make sure local signals are strong where they matter.

Finally, use real performance data to judge whether the changes are working.

SEO becomes much easier to manage when you stop viewing rankings as a mystery and start treating organic visibility as something that can be systematically investigated.

If you would like me to investigate your website and identify the areas most likely to improve your organic visibility, you can find my SEO services and contact options here:

https://linktr.ee/keiramaeseo

It is an increasingly common frustration for business owners.

ChatGPT can search the live web and provide answers with links to web sources, so businesses now have another form of search visibility to think about alongside Google. If your website is not showing in ChatGPT, though, there usually is not one magic setting that will suddenly make it appear.

The issue may be technical. It may relate to your wider SEO foundations, the content available on your website or simply the way you are testing your visibility.

Here are seven areas I would investigate first.

1. OAI-SearchBot cannot access your website

This is the first technical check I would make.

OpenAI uses OAI-SearchBot to surface websites within ChatGPT’s search features. OpenAI’s current crawler documentation states that sites which opt out of OAI-SearchBot will not be shown in ChatGPT search results, although navigational links may still appear in some circumstances.

Access can be controlled through your site’s robots.txt file.

It is also important to distinguish OAI-SearchBot from GPTBot. OpenAI documents these separately. GPTBot relates to the potential use of web content for improving generative AI models, while OAI-SearchBot is the crawler associated with search visibility.

That means a website owner can make separate decisions about the two crawlers.

If your site is missing from ChatGPT Search, check whether OAI-SearchBot is being blocked intentionally or accidentally. Security services, CDN settings and wider crawling restrictions can also be worth reviewing if your robots.txt file appears correct.

Allowing OAI-SearchBot does not guarantee that ChatGPT will mention or cite your website. It simply removes one possible technical obstacle.

2. Your wider SEO and indexation foundations are weak

AI Search does not operate in complete isolation from the wider web.

If search engines struggle to discover, crawl or understand your website, that is a warning sign regardless of whether your immediate concern is Google or ChatGPT.

I would check whether your important pages are indexable, whether canonical tags make sense and whether your XML sitemap contains the URLs you actually want search engines to discover. Internal linking should also make important pages easy to reach rather than leaving them isolated several levels deep in the website.

Google Search Console is particularly useful for diagnosing your broader organic visibility. If your service pages are not appearing properly in conventional search either, there is a good chance the problem extends beyond ChatGPT.

Technical issues can include accidental noindex directives, incorrect redirects or duplicate pages competing with one another.

This is why technical SEO remains relevant to AI Search optimisation. Before worrying about advanced GEO tactics, make sure the basic infrastructure is sound.

If traditional organic visibility is also causing problems, I have a separate guide covering the checks I would make first:

[Internal link: Why Is My Small Business Website Not Ranking on Google? 10 Things I’d Check First]

3. Your website does not clearly explain what your business does

Businesses often know themselves so well that they do not realise how vague their website has become.

A homepage might lead with something like:

Transforming possibilities into extraordinary experiences.

That may fit the brand voice perfectly, but it tells a search system very little about the actual company.

Clear language matters.

Your website should make it easy to understand what you offer, who it is for and where you operate when location is relevant. Service pages should describe individual services properly rather than relying on a few sentences and a contact button.

Consistency helps as well.

If your homepage describes you as a digital agency, one profile calls you a web-design studio and another describes the business primarily as a branding consultancy, the overall picture becomes less clear.

For ChatGPT visibility, I would review the website from the perspective of somebody who knows nothing about the company.

Could they quickly establish what you do?

Would they understand the problems you solve?

Would they know whether your service was relevant to their location or situation?

If the answer is unclear, improving that information can benefit both human visitors and search visibility.

4. Your content does not answer the questions potential customers are asking

Your website can explain your services clearly and still have very little visibility around the wider questions customers research.

Imagine you run an independent accountancy practice.

Your service page may target terms around accountancy services, but potential customers could also be asking ChatGPT questions about choosing an accountant, tax responsibilities for a particular type of business or whether they need professional help at a certain stage of growth.

Those queries create opportunities for content SEO and AI Search.

Start with genuine customer questions. Search Console data, keyword research and conversations with customers can all help uncover useful topics.

Then look at what you have already published.

Does your content answer those questions properly, or does it provide a short generic response that could apply to almost any business in the industry?

Useful content should demonstrate real understanding. First-hand examples can add value, as can practical explanations based on experience and detailed answers to problems that customers repeatedly encounter.

This is also where SEO copywriting becomes valuable. Search visibility and good writing should support each other. A technically optimised page that says very little is unlikely to make a strong impression on either customers or search systems.

5. Your competitors have a stronger online authority footprint

Sometimes there is nothing obviously wrong with your website.

The competition is simply stronger.

If ChatGPT repeatedly mentions three competing businesses, investigate what those companies have that you do not.

Start with their websites. Compare the depth of their service pages, supporting content and overall topical coverage.

Then look at their wider online presence.

They may appear on respected industry sites, professional associations or relevant directories. They could have received press coverage or contributed expert commentary elsewhere.

This does not mean collecting hundreds of random mentions purely because you hope an AI system will notice them.

The useful question is:

Where does the wider web provide credible evidence that this business is established and relevant to this subject?

For a small company, that might come from industry involvement, genuine customer coverage or partnerships with recognised organisations.

A strong website provides the foundation. A credible footprint beyond that website can strengthen the wider picture around the brand.

6. Your website gives AI systems very little worth citing

One useful part of an AI visibility audit is checking where citations actually come from.

If ChatGPT searches the web for an answer, it can provide links to the sources used in that response.

Look at those sources.

Why was that particular page useful?

Often, the answer is straightforward. It contains information that directly helps answer the user’s question.

Businesses can create more useful source material by publishing information grounded in their own expertise. Case studies are valuable because they contain real experience. Original research can be useful where you genuinely have data worth sharing.

Detailed explanations of specialist processes can also provide information that is harder to find elsewhere.

If every article on your website is simply a rewritten version of the same basic information available across the industry, there is very little to distinguish your contribution.

For AI Search, I would therefore ask:

What does this website know that it can explain particularly well?

That is often a much more productive content question than asking how many articles you should publish each month.

If you would like to take a broader look at your visibility across ChatGPT, Gemini and Google’s AI search experiences, I have written a complete audit process here:

AI Search Audit for Small Businesses: How to Check Whether ChatGPT, Gemini & Google AI Can Find You

7. You are testing the wrong prompts or expecting a fixed ranking

This is one of the easiest mistakes to make when measuring ChatGPT visibility.

Traditional rank tracking encourages us to think in positions.

Keyword A ranks third. Keyword B ranks seventh.

AI responses are different.

The wording of a question can change the answer, and ChatGPT may choose to search the web depending on the query. OpenAI confirms that ChatGPT can automatically search when web information would improve the response.

You therefore need a broader testing method.

Build a small collection of commercially relevant prompts and repeat them over time. Include branded searches and non-branded questions that potential customers might genuinely ask.

Record whether your company appears and which competitors are mentioned. Where citations are shown, record the domains and individual pages being referenced.

Do not panic because your business fails to appear in one highly specific response.

Look for patterns.

If you test 20 meaningful prompts and the same four competitors dominate while your business never appears, that is much more useful information than the result of one isolated question.

Can you track traffic from ChatGPT?

Yes.

OpenAI says publishers that allow OAI-SearchBot can track referral traffic from ChatGPT using analytics tools such as Google Analytics. ChatGPT Search referral URLs automatically include utm_source=chatgpt.com, which can help identify visits originating from ChatGPT search results.

For a small business, I would combine this with wider SEO measurement.

Track ChatGPT referrals where they exist, alongside Google organic traffic and leads generated from organic landing pages.

Over time, this gives you a much more useful view of whether search visibility is contributing to actual business outcomes.

What should you do if your business still isn’t showing in ChatGPT?

Start with diagnosis.

Check OAI-SearchBot access and review the technical health of the website. Then examine whether the business is clearly represented through its own content and wider web presence.

After that, compare your visibility against competitors and identify where they have an advantage.

The resulting work could involve improving service pages, fixing technical SEO problems or creating better supporting content. It may also involve strengthening your authority around the areas where you genuinely have expertise.

The exact answer will vary by website.

If you would like someone to carry out an AI Search visibility review and identify where the strongest opportunities are, I offer freelance support across AI Search, content SEO, technical SEO and organic strategy.

You can see my portfolio and contact me here

ChatGPT visibility is becoming part of wider search visibility

Businesses do not need to abandon Google SEO because people are beginning to search through AI tools.

They do need to recognise that customer discovery is spreading across more places.

A person might discover a company through Google and later ask ChatGPT to compare their options. Someone else may begin their research through an AI assistant before visiting several websites directly.

That changes the visibility landscape.

For small businesses, the strongest approach is to build a website that is technically accessible and easy to understand, while developing content that demonstrates genuine expertise.

From there, you can monitor where your business appears and improve the areas where competitors currently have an advantage.

If your website is not showing in ChatGPT, there is usually something useful you can investigate. The challenge is working out which part of the search ecosystem is holding you back.

If you would like help doing that, you can find my SEO and AI Search services, case studies and contact options here:

https://linktr.ee/keiramaeseo

That creates a new question for small businesses: can these systems actually find, understand and recommend your business?

An AI search audit for a small business is designed to answer that question. It looks at how visible your company is across AI-powered search, where that visibility comes from, how you compare with competitors and whether problems with your website could be limiting your chances of appearing.

The good news is that AI Search optimisation does not require abandoning everything we already know about SEO. Technical accessibility still matters. Clear, authoritative content still matters. So do brand signals, relevance and the wider information available about your business online.

The difference is that we now need to think beyond conventional rankings and consider whether search and AI systems can confidently use your business as part of an answer.

What is an AI Search audit?

An AI Search audit is a review of your visibility across generative and AI-powered search experiences.

You may also see the process described as an AI visibility audit, AI SEO audit, GEO audit or AEO audit. GEO generally refers to generative engine optimisation, while AEO is commonly used for answer engine optimisation.

The terminology is still developing, so I tend to focus less on the label and more on the objective: understanding whether your business is visible when people use AI tools to research the products, services and questions relevant to you.

For a small business, an audit should answer questions such as:

Does ChatGPT mention the business for relevant searches?

Does Gemini recognise the company and its services?

Do Google AI Overviews or AI Mode surface the website or competing businesses?

Which competitors are receiving AI citations or recommendations?

Are there technical or content problems preventing AI search systems from understanding the site?

It should also establish a baseline. AI Search visibility can change over time, so knowing where you stand now gives you something meaningful to measure against later.

Start by checking the searches that actually matter

One of the easiest mistakes to make is checking a handful of random prompts and deciding that your AI visibility is either excellent or terrible.

Instead, think about the questions a potential customer might genuinely ask.

A local business might test prompts around services and location. An ecommerce company might investigate product comparisons. A B2B company may need to understand whether it appears when users ask for providers that solve a particular problem.

This is where traditional SEO research becomes useful.

Your existing keyword research, customer questions and Search Console data can all help identify the topics worth testing. You can then turn those topics into realistic conversational searches for ChatGPT, Gemini and other AI systems.

For example, somebody looking for an accountant is unlikely to search only for the exact company name. They might ask an AI system which accountants specialise in a particular sector, what to look for when choosing one or which providers operate in their area.

Those are the searches where AI search visibility begins to become commercially interesting.

Check branded and non-branded visibility separately

I find it useful to divide AI Search testing into two broad areas.

The first is branded visibility. Ask questions specifically involving your business name and see how accurately the system describes the company. Does it understand what you do? Are services represented correctly? Is the information current?

The second is non-branded visibility. These searches are usually more valuable for growth because the user does not already know who you are.

This might involve prompts such as:

“Which businesses offer [service] in [location]?”

or:

“What companies specialise in [specific problem]?”

If competitors repeatedly appear and your business does not, that gives you somewhere to investigate.

You should also note the websites and sources AI systems appear to rely on when constructing their responses. AI citations can give useful clues about the types of pages and third-party sources carrying authority within a topic.

Compare your AI visibility with competitors

Competitor analysis is one of the most useful parts of an AI Search audit.

If three competitors are repeatedly mentioned when your business is absent, ask why.

Look at their websites first. They may have stronger service pages, clearer explanations or more comprehensive supporting content. Their sites may also make their expertise and location easier to understand.

Then look beyond their own domains.

Are they being discussed on industry websites? Do they have authoritative profiles elsewhere? Are journalists, directories or professional organisations mentioning them? Do they appear in useful comparison articles?

These brand mentions can help establish the wider context around a company.

The objective here is not to copy everything a competitor does. You are trying to understand the information environment that makes one business easier for search systems to recognise and trust than another.

That can uncover valuable content gaps and wider opportunities for your own AI search strategy.

Make sure AI search crawlers can access your website

Before changing your content, check whether there is a technical barrier.

ChatGPT Search uses a crawler called OAI-SearchBot to discover content for search experiences. Website owners can control access to crawlers through their robots.txt file.

If relevant crawlers cannot access important pages, your chances of gaining useful search visibility may be limited.

This is one reason why AI Search optimisation still overlaps heavily with technical SEO.

During an audit, I would check whether important pages are crawlable and indexable, whether redirects behave correctly and whether canonicalisation is sensible. I would also review the XML sitemap and general site structure.

Google Search Console remains useful here because it can tell you whether Google is discovering and indexing the pages you expect it to.

If your website is also struggling with conventional Google visibility, there may be a wider SEO problem rather than something specific to AI Search.

Why Is My Small Business Website Not Ranking on Google? 10 Things I’d Check First

Likewise, if the problem is specifically that your company appears to be missing from ChatGPT, I have a separate diagnostic guide covering the most common causes.

Website Not Showing in ChatGPT? 7 Reasons Your Business Isn’t Being Mentioned

Look at how clearly your website explains the business

AI systems need context.

A beautifully designed website can still be surprisingly vague about what a company actually does. Brand language and clever slogans may sound appealing to humans who already understand the business, but search systems need enough clear information to identify the company and connect it with relevant topics.

Review your homepage and important commercial pages from that perspective.

Is it obvious what the business offers? Are locations or service areas clear where relevant? Does the site consistently describe products and services using terminology customers actually understand?

This is where entity clarity becomes important.

Your business name, services and expertise should form a coherent picture across the website. Conflicting information makes that picture harder to understand.

Structured data and schema markup can also support machine understanding where appropriate, although they cannot compensate for weak content or an unclear website.

Audit the quality of your content

Content remains central to both SEO and AI Search.

An AI visibility audit should therefore look closely at the pages that demonstrate expertise.

Does the website genuinely answer customer questions? Are important topics covered with enough depth? Do articles contain useful information that goes beyond what a searcher could find on dozens of competing sites?

Generic content is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate.

A useful article should give the reader something concrete. That might be first-hand experience, original examples or practical explanations drawn from real work.

Clear structure also matters. Headings should accurately describe the sections beneath them and important points should be easy to locate.

The objective is to make individual pages genuinely useful while also helping search systems understand what expertise the business has.

That is one of the strongest overlaps between content SEO and AI Search optimisation.

Check whether your website contains information worth citing

Appearing in an AI answer and being cited as a source are related, but they are not always the same thing.

If you want stronger AI citations, consider what information on your website another source could reasonably reference.

Original research can help. So can detailed case studies, clearly explained methodologies and expert commentary.

A business that simply repeats the same basic information as everyone else gives an AI system little reason to treat it as a particularly useful source.

This does not mean every company needs to publish huge research studies. A small business might contribute useful first-hand insights from customer work, explain a complicated process particularly well or publish genuinely helpful comparisons.

Your existing commercial experience can become part of your search strategy.

Measure AI Search visibility over time

AI Search measurement is less settled than traditional rank tracking, but that does not mean you should ignore it.

Start with a repeatable prompt set.

Record whether your business appears and which competitors are mentioned. Note citations where they are visible, along with the pages being referenced.

You can also monitor AI traffic in analytics. ChatGPT referral traffic, for example, can sometimes be identified through referral information and campaign parameters.

Traditional SEO metrics remain useful too.

Search Console can show whether organic impressions and clicks are moving in the right direction, while analytics can help determine what those visitors do once they arrive.

The key is to avoid treating a single ChatGPT response as a ranking report. AI responses can vary, which is why trends across multiple prompts and repeated checks are more meaningful.

Turn the audit into an improvement plan

An audit only becomes valuable when it leads to action.

For one business, the priority might be technical SEO because key pages cannot be crawled properly. Another may discover that its content never explains the subjects customers actually research.

A third might have strong content but very weak authority outside its own website.

This is why I prefer to prioritise recommendations according to likely impact and effort rather than handing a client an enormous list of theoretical SEO tasks.

A sensible plan might begin with fixing technical blockers and improving high-value commercial pages. From there, the business can address content gaps and strengthen the wider authority around the brand.

If you would like somebody to review your current SEO and AI Search visibility, I offer freelance support covering content SEO, AI Search optimisation, technical SEO and organic search strategy.

You can find my portfolio and contact details here

Do small businesses really need AI Search optimisation?

For most businesses, AI Search should be treated as an extension of a broader organic-search strategy.

Google still drives enormous amounts of discovery, and conventional SEO foundations remain essential. At the same time, the way people search is becoming more fragmented.

Some customers will search Google. Others will use ChatGPT or Gemini as part of their research process. Many will move between several platforms before making a decision.

That makes visibility across both traditional and AI-powered search increasingly valuable.

You do not need to chase every new acronym or rebuild your entire website because GEO has appeared in your marketing feed. Start with the fundamentals.

Make the website accessible. Explain what the business does clearly. Publish genuinely useful content and establish credible signals around the brand.

Then measure how those improvements affect both conventional search and AI visibility.

Final thoughts

An AI Search audit for a small business is ultimately a diagnostic exercise.

It helps you understand whether AI systems can discover your website, whether they understand the business and whether competitors have built stronger visibility around the topics that matter to your customers.

From there, you can make decisions based on evidence rather than guessing which AI Search tactic might work.

For many businesses, the most valuable improvements will overlap heavily with good SEO anyway. Better technical accessibility, stronger content and clearer expertise support visibility across the changing search landscape.

If you would like help carrying out an AI visibility audit or developing a wider SEO and AI Search strategy, you can see my current services, case studies and contact options here:

https://linktr.ee/keiramaeseo

While working as an Educational Content Writer at The Jump Digital, I led a project to redevelop elements of a coding curriculum and its supporting digital resources.

The project required combining content development, educational thinking and technical research.

The central goal was to ensure that the learning material continued to work for students while also reflecting current technical standards and developments within the subject.

The challenge

Coding and digital education can age unusually quickly.

A learning resource that was accurate when originally written may become less effective as:

• software changes;

• interfaces are redesigned;

• technical specifications evolve;

• tools are deprecated;

• terminology changes;

• and expectations around digital learning develop.

The existing course therefore needed more than conventional proofreading.

It required a wider review of both what students were being taught and how that information was being presented.

The project needed to answer three questions:

Is the information still technically accurate?

Does the curriculum still follow a logical learning journey?

Are the digital resources clear and usable for the students completing them?

My role

I took a lead role in researching, reviewing and redeveloping the curriculum and supporting materials.

The work involved approximately 20–40 individual lesson, curriculum and resource elements across the wider project, including both instructional content and associated digital materials.

My responsibilities included:

• auditing existing curriculum content;

• reviewing lesson sequencing;

• identifying outdated information;

• researching current technical specifications;

• rewriting educational material;

• updating supporting resources;

• improving instructional clarity;

• checking terminology;

• editing and proofreading;

• considering the learner journey;

• and ensuring consistency between related resources.

The approach

Curriculum review

The first stage was understanding how the existing course operated as a complete learning journey rather than treating every resource independently.

This included identifying:

• where concepts were introduced;

• what prior knowledge students were expected to have;

• whether later lessons built logically on earlier material;

• and where inconsistencies had developed.

This allowed content changes to be made within the context of the wider curriculum, rather than simply rewriting individual paragraphs.

Technical research

Because the subject involved coding and digital technology, technical accuracy was particularly important.

Existing material was reviewed against current specifications and practices.

Where information had become outdated, I researched the modern equivalent and translated those changes into language appropriate for the intended learners.

That required balancing two competing considerations:

technical accuracy

and

educational accessibility.

There is little value in making a resource technically perfect if it becomes impossible for the intended student to understand.

Content redevelopment

Once the key issues had been identified, lessons and resources could be rewritten and restructured.

This included improving:

• explanations;

• sequencing;

• terminology;

• instructions;

• consistency;

• examples;

• and overall readability.

Supporting digital resources were also reviewed so that the materials students interacted with aligned more closely with the revised curriculum.

Results

The project resulted in a substantially refreshed set of curriculum and digital learning materials.

Approximately 20–40 curriculum/resource elements reviewed

The project covered dozens of individual content and resource components rather than a single isolated article or lesson.

Outdated technical guidance replaced or revised

Content that no longer reflected current specifications or technology was identified and updated, reducing the likelihood that students would encounter obsolete instructions.

Improved consistency across the course

Terminology, structure and instructional approach were brought into closer alignment across related resources.

Clearer learner journey

Reviewing the curriculum at programme level allowed individual resources to sit within a more coherent learning progression.

More maintainable digital content

The redevelopment created a stronger foundation for future updates, making it easier for subsequent changes to be incorporated without needing to rebuild the course from scratch.

What this project demonstrated

This work shows a different side of my professional background from my SEO projects.

It demonstrates my ability to take complex, technical subject matter and transform it into content that is:

accurate | structured | accessible | useful | publication-ready.

The project drew on:

Research | Content strategy | Curriculum development | Technical writing | Editing | Proofreading | Digital content | Educational publishing

It also reflects one of the things I value most about content work:

Good writing isn’t simply about making sentences sound better.

Sometimes the real job is understanding what information the audience needs, what is no longer working and how an entire body of content can be redesigned to serve them better.

Project volume is approximate, based on my recollection of the curriculum and resource redevelopment work completed during the period.

Looking for support with complex digital content?
Alongside SEO consultancy, I provide professional content strategy, research, writing and editing for digital projects.

Rather than improving the performance of an established website, I was involved from the launch of the site, meaning its organic-search presence effectively started at zero.

The goal was to establish a strong SEO foundation from the beginning and then develop two complementary areas of organic visibility:

1. searches directly related to the Needle & Tide brand; and

2. broader discovery searches surrounding coastal apparel, clothing and related products.

Over the campaign period, the site progressed from having virtually no search presence to achieving dozens of first-page rankings, several hundred organic visits each month and a consistent stream of ecommerce revenue attributable to organic search.

The challenge

New websites face a very different SEO problem from established domains.

At launch, Needle & Tide had:

• virtually no existing keyword footprint;

• little search-engine history;

• limited brand-search demand;

• no established organic traffic;

• and competition from significantly larger apparel and lifestyle businesses.

This meant there was no existing pool of rankings simply waiting to be optimised.

The organic presence had to be built from the ground up.

My role

I led the SEO work around the website launch and subsequent development of its organic presence.

My work included:

• launch-stage SEO planning;

• keyword research;

• competitor research;

• search-intent analysis;

• website and content architecture;

• on-page optimisation;

• product and category optimisation;

• metadata;

• internal linking;

• brand-search optimisation;

• broader non-branded keyword targeting;

• SEO copywriting;

• content development;

• and ongoing monitoring and optimisation.

The strategy

The campaign effectively operated across two parallel search strategies.

1. Owning brand search

The first priority was ensuring that as awareness of Needle & Tide developed, search engines clearly understood which pages were associated with the brand and its products.

Brand-focused optimisation helped establish stronger visibility for searches surrounding:

Needle & Tide

alongside relevant branded product and navigational searches.

This provided the foundation for capturing users who had already encountered the business through another channel.

2. Building non-branded discovery

The second campaign focused on users who didn’t yet know the Needle & Tide name.

Keyword and competitor research identified opportunities surrounding the broader coastal clothing and lifestyle market.

Pages could then be optimised around relevant search themes while retaining the personality and tone of the brand.

The aim was not to chase every remotely related apparel keyword.

Instead, the focus was on searches where Needle & Tide’s products and brand positioning represented a genuine fit.

Creating SEO-friendly commercial content

Product and website copy needed to perform two roles.

It needed to provide search engines with sufficient context to understand the products while still reading naturally and supporting the brand.

This meant incorporating SEO considerations into:

• category copy;

• product information;

• page titles;

• metadata;

• internal links;

• website content;

• and supporting editorial material.

Results

Starting from effectively zero organic visibility made the growth particularly easy to see.

0 → approximately 25–50 first-page rankings

As the domain became established, the site began achieving first-page positions across a combination of branded, product-related and broader coastal-apparel searches.

The exact number naturally fluctuated over time, but the campaign established a meaningful first-page keyword footprint from a standing start.

~300–600 organic visits per month

Organic search developed into a regular acquisition channel, generating several hundred visits during established campaign months.

For a young specialist ecommerce brand, this represented a meaningful new source of potential customers without having to pay for every visit through advertising.

Approximately £300–£700 per month in organic-attributed sales

Organic traffic also began translating into direct commercial results.

During established and stronger campaign periods, organic search generated hundreds of pounds in monthly ecommerce sales, with approximately £300–£700 per month being a reasonable range based on historical campaign performance.

The value extended beyond direct last-click sales, as organic search also helped expose new users to the Needle & Tide brand.

Why this project matters

This is one of my favourite examples of SEO because there was no established organic footprint to inherit.

The campaign demonstrated my ability to take a website from:

no visibility

to

rankings → traffic → customers → revenue.

It also gave me hands-on experience bringing together:

Launch SEO | Ecommerce SEO | Keyword strategy | Brand SEO | Organic acquisition | SEO copywriting | Content optimisation

It is a useful reminder that SEO is not only a traffic channel.

Done properly, it becomes a business-development channel.

Historical performance figures are approximate ranges based on campaign reporting and my records/recollection from the period.

Need help building an organic-search presence?
I’m available for freelance, fractional and contract SEO work covering technical SEO, organic strategy and content.

The objective was to increase the visibility of Twinkl’s Scottish educational resources, strengthen performance across commercially and educationally relevant search terms, and improve the journey from organic search through to account creation.

Over the course of the campaigns, the number of keywords achieving first-page positions grew from roughly 200–300 to more than 1,000, accompanied by substantial growth in organic traffic and a measurable improvement in users progressing towards Twinkl’s signup journey.

The challenge

Twinkl Scotland already had a substantial library of educational resources, but the size of that library also created a significant SEO opportunity.

Teachers, parents and other educators were searching for highly specific curriculum topics, learning objectives and classroom resources, but existing pages did not always fully capitalise on that search demand.

The challenge was therefore not simply to produce more content.

It was to understand:

• what Scottish educators were searching for;

• where Twinkl already had relevant content;

• where genuine content gaps existed;

• which pages had the potential to perform better;

• and how the wider site architecture could more effectively connect users with useful resources and eventual signup opportunities.

My role

I worked across the research, strategy, optimisation and analysis stages of the campaigns.

My responsibilities included:

• keyword research across Scottish curriculum areas;

• competitor and SERP analysis;

• search-intent analysis;

• identifying content gaps and opportunities;

• planning SEO-led content;

• optimising existing landing pages and educational content;

• developing SEO content briefs;

• improving page titles, headings and metadata;

• supporting internal-linking strategy;

• reviewing organic performance;

• and identifying ways to better connect informational search traffic with Twinkl’s signup journey.

A major part of the work involved balancing search performance with educational usefulness.

The objective was never simply to place keywords into existing content. Pages still needed to work for teachers, parents and learners while satisfying the intent behind the searches bringing users to them.

The strategy

Building visibility around the Scottish curriculum

Keyword research was used to identify opportunities across different curriculum subjects and stages.

Rather than focusing exclusively on a small number of high-volume phrases, the campaigns also targeted the large number of specific searches educators make when looking for classroom resources.

This created opportunities across both broader curriculum themes and more focused long-tail searches.

Improving existing content

A significant amount of value could be generated from resources Twinkl already had.

Existing pages were reviewed for opportunities including:

• stronger alignment with search intent;

• improved headings and structure;

• better metadata;

• clearer topical targeting;

• additional supporting copy;

• and stronger connections to related resources.

This allowed established pages to capture additional search demand without every opportunity requiring an entirely new piece of content.

Internal linking

Internal linking became an important part of the strategy.

Relevant curriculum pages and resources were connected more deliberately, helping both search engines and users understand relationships between topics.

The campaigns also considered the commercial journey after the initial organic visit.

Where appropriate, users arriving through informational and curriculum searches were given clearer paths towards related resources and account-signup areas.

Results

Across the campaign period, Twinkl Scotland experienced substantial growth in organic visibility.

~200–300 → 1,000+

First-page keyword rankings

The number of tracked terms appearing on the first page of search results grew from a few hundred to more than one thousand — representing approximately a 4x to 5x increase in first-page visibility.

Significant organic traffic growth

The increased keyword footprint translated into a considerable increase in organic visits across the curriculum areas being targeted.

Based on historical campaign performance, targeted areas saw traffic improvements broadly in the region of 40–60%, with some individual pages and topic clusters performing considerably more strongly.

~15–25% uplift towards signup journeys

Internal-linking and user-journey work also produced a double-digit improvement in organic visitors progressing towards key signup pages, with a corresponding increase in users creating at least a free Twinkl account.

The important result was therefore not simply increased rankings.

The campaigns helped turn greater organic visibility into meaningful user acquisition.

What this project demonstrated

This project gave me extensive experience managing SEO across a large digital content ecosystem.

It required me to combine:

SEO strategy | Keyword research | Content SEO | Search intent | Internal linking | Content optimisation | Analytics | Conversion journeys | Educational publishing

Most importantly, it reinforced something that continues to shape how I approach SEO today:

organic growth is most valuable when rankings, content quality and the user journey are considered together.

Historical performance figures are approximate ranges based on campaign reporting and my records/recollection from the period.

Looking for freelance or fractional SEO support?
I’m currently available for contract work across technical SEO, organic search, content strategy and SEO copywriting.