SEO guide for clients

This guide collects what we have learned working on real websites: what gets fixed quickly, what takes months, what looks like optimization and actually hurts. Every chapter starts from a measured case, with figures and the date they were measured, including our own mistakes.

You can read it in order or skip around. If you have twenty minutes and a single chapter, read the last one: it shows you how to check us, ourselves included.

Expectations

What success means and who does what. Without these chapters, the rest reads wrong.

1. What SEO does and how long it takes to show
   Three kinds of work, three different speeds. Plus a real case where we are still waiting to find out whether we were right, with the figures on the table.
2. What depends on you and what depends on us
   The real division of labor, what we ask of you and why, plus the story of three pages that got visitors for months and lost all of them at the last step.

The technical foundation

Explained for someone who runs a business, not for a programmer.

3. What a site Google can read looks like
   The page you see and the page a robot receives can be two different things. Three cases where the difference was costly, and none was visible in the browser.
4. URLs, redirects and migrations without losses
   A URL changed carelessly is traffic thrown away. How to move a site without losing what was built, and three ways we got it wrong ourselves.
5. Speed and what Google actually measures
   Three metrics, explained without jargon. Plus one improvement we refused to make: it would have raised the score but broken the shopping cart.
6. Security as a trust signal
   What visitors see when the browser warns, why cleaning an infected site is more than deleting found files, and how an infection disguised as a plugin looks.

Content and authority

Why it matters who signs, and how to write a page that actually answers.

7. Why it matters who signs, not just what is written
   Google asks not only if the text is good, but who signs it and why to trust it. What a site can prove, what is empty talk, and what a flawed tool taught us.
8. How to write a page that answers a question
   The structure that works both for the reader and for the engines that extract passages. Plus why the answer has to come first, not last.
9. What looks like optimization and actually hurts
   Practices that circulate as good advice and do the opposite. The chapter that saves you money on harmful services, with two examples from our own mistakes.

AI search and verification

What changed since search engines started answering, and how to check for yourself.

10. What has changed since Google started answering instead of listing
    The difference between ranking and being cited, what Google says you should do, and why the most important part happens outside your own website.
11. The files AI agents read
    Which bots visit your site, what you can decide about each of them, and why the file everyone talks about most is exactly the one that matters least.
12. How to check for yourself whether things are working
    Which numbers matter, which are noise, and why an audit report can show a better score just when the site is worse. The chapter that lets you check us, too.

Downloads

No form and no email address asked in return.

• The complete guide as PDF (661 KB)
  all chapters, to read at leisure or to print
• The checklist (90 KB)
  the lists from the end of each chapter, gathered in one place

How it is written

Every figure in this guide carries the date it was measured, because a figure without a date cannot be verified by anyone. Every claim about what Google requires points to Google's documentation, not to an article about it. And where we do not yet know the outcome, it says that we do not know it.