What is SEO and how does it work?

SEO has a reputation for being a dark art, mostly because the people selling it benefit from it seeming that way. It is not. Google has a job, which is to show the most useful result for every search, and SEO is the work of making your site the obvious choice for the searches that matter to you.

What SEO actually means

Search engine optimisation. Someone types "physio Richmond" into Google. Google shows a map with three businesses, then a list of ten links. The businesses on that first page get nearly all the clicks. SEO is everything you do to be one of them, without paying for an ad.

The important word is unpaid. Google Ads can put you at the top today, and you will vanish the day you stop paying. A page that ranks on its own keeps bringing in work for years, which is why owners who have done it well treat their website as their best salesperson.

How Google works: crawl, index, rank

Google runs in three steps, and each one can go wrong.

• Crawling. A program called Googlebot follows links from page to page and reads what it finds. If your site is slow, broken, or blocks the crawler, Google never sees it.
• Indexing. Google stores what it read and works out what each page is about: a laundrette in South Yarra, a guide to website costs, a page of opening hours. Text it can read and a clear page title do most of the work here.
• Ranking. For every search, Google scores every indexed page it knows about on hundreds of signals, then sorts them. The signals cluster into a few questions. Does this page match what was searched? Is it from a site people seem to trust? Does it work well on a phone? Is it near the person searching?

Local searches get a fourth step. For "near me" style searches Google shows the map pack, the box of three businesses drawn from Google Business Profiles rather than from websites. That has its own rules, which we cover in How do I rank in the Google map pack?

The three parts that matter for a small business

Most SEO advice is written for large sites. For a small business, three things account for nearly all of the result.

1. A site Google can read

The technical side. Your site loads fast, works on a phone, runs on https, and puts its words in text rather than inside images. Each page has a title that says what it is, in words a customer would use. There is a sitemap so Google can find every page. None of this is glamorous, and a well-built site has it from day one.

2. Pages that answer what people search for

Google matches searches to pages, not to businesses. If you offer three services, you want a page for each, with a title like "Sports massage in South Yarra" rather than "Services". If your customers ask the same questions on the phone, a page that answers each one can rank for it. This is the part most small sites skip: one home page, a vague "about", and nothing for Google to match.

3. Proof from elsewhere that you are real

Google trusts a site more when other places vouch for it. Reviews on your Google Business Profile, a listing in the right directories, a mention from a local organisation, a link from a supplier or a client. This is where competitors with older sites often win, and where a steady trickle of genuine reviews does more than any trick.

What it looks like in practice

When we rebuilt the website for Sud's Laundrette, a family laundrette in South Yarra, the SEO work was nothing exotic. A fast hand-coded site with plain text about what they do and where. Page titles that say "laundrette" and "South Yarra" rather than clever slogans. A Google Business Profile with the same name, address and hours as the site, and a nudge to happy customers for reviews. Organic search traffic rose 280% after launch. The three parts, done properly, nothing more.

How long it takes, and why

Google is cautious with new or changed sites. It takes weeks to recrawl and months to trust. Expect three to six months before a new site settles into its rankings, and longer for competitive searches like "lawyer Melbourne". Local searches in a particular suburb move faster, because the competition is thinner.

The upside of the slowness is that it compounds. Each review, each page, each link adds to a score that does not reset. Ads are rent. SEO is equity.

What you can do yourself this week

• Claim your Google Business Profile and fill in every field. Categories, services, hours, suburbs covered, photos.
• Check your page titles. Open each page and look at the browser tab. If it says "Home" or your business name alone, it is telling Google nothing.
• Read your home page as a stranger. Does the first screen say what you do and where? If not, write that sentence and put it at the top.
• Ask your last five happy customers for a Google review. Send them the link.
• Search your own business name. If your details differ between Google, Facebook and your site, fix them so they match.

What SEO is not

It is not stuffing keywords into every sentence, which Google penalises. It is not a one-off job you finish, though a good foundation is. It is not a guarantee of being first, because nobody controls Google. And it is not a separate thing from AI search: Google has said its AI features draw on the same pages as its normal results, and ChatGPT does much the same.

The bottom line

SEO is making your website the clearest answer to the searches your customers actually type. A site Google can read, pages that answer real questions, and proof from elsewhere that you are who you say. It costs patience more than money, and the foundation is something a good build includes from the start. If you want to know what it costs when you do pay for it, read How much does SEO cost in Australia? And if you would rather have the foundation built in, that is part of every site we make.