SEO basics
How Google finds, reads and shows web pages, what people want when they search, and how your pages should link together.
- How Google finds and stores your pages
- What people really want when they search
- How your pages link to each other
Plain guides to being found on Google and in AI answers.
People find businesses through Google and, more and more, through AI assistants such as ChatGPT. These ten guides explain how each one works, in plain English, with a check you can run on your own site and what each approach cannot promise.
Written for business owners and small marketing teams. You do not need to be technical.
- Written for
- Business owners and small marketing teams
- Topics
- Google search, AI answers, content
- Length
- Under 10 minutes each
- Each guide ends with
- A 10-minute check on your own site
- What you will not find
- Ranking promises or tricks
- Last reviewed
- 30 October 2026
Watch the Learn guides in under a minute.
A short film: how people find you, what the first seven guides cover and who they are written for. Three newer guides, on workflow automation, custom software and AI readiness, are listed on this page.
47 seconds, with a voice-over and captions.
Read what the film says
People find businesses through Google and, more and more, through AI assistants such as ChatGPT. Our Learn guides explain how each one works, in plain English. There are seven. SEO basics. Answers search engines can quote. How AI tools describe your business. How AI search finds pages. Planning content. Technical SEO. And measuring organic growth. Each guide has a check you can run on your own site, and says what it cannot promise. They are written for business owners and small marketing teams. You do not need to be technical. And if you would rather someone else did the work, our team can. Start with the guide that matches your question, at tractionora.com/learn.
Ten guides.
Each guide covers one way people find you online, with a check you can run yourself and what it cannot promise.
Answers search engines can quote
How to write pages so Google and AI assistants can lift out a clear answer: question headings, answers that come first, and structured data.
- Organising pages around questions
- Structured data: labels that tell search engines what a page is
- Clear, short and accurate answers
How AI tools describe your business
Where ChatGPT and other AI tools get facts about a business, and how to make yours clear and the same everywhere.
- Saying the same true things about your business everywhere
- Publishing what only you know
- Which AI claims to ignore
How AI search finds pages
How AI search tools look up pages, pick passages and credit their sources, and what you can and cannot measure.
- How AI tools look up web pages
- How AI tools credit their sources
- What AI visibility numbers can and cannot tell you
Planning content
Deciding what to publish from what buyers search for, grouping pages by topic, writing briefs and keeping older pages up to date.
- Grouping topics by what buyers want
- Briefs that writers can follow
- Keeping older pages up to date
Technical SEO
Speed, mobile, secure and clean addresses, sitemaps and structured data, with checks you can run yourself.
- How fast a page needs to be
- Why Google reads your phone version
- What to fix yourself and what needs a developer
Measuring organic growth
Three layers to track, how to set a baseline, which data to connect and how to compare fairly.
- Visibility, visits and enquiries
- Setting a baseline before you change anything
- What not to chase
Workflow automation
Which repeated tasks to automate first, how to test them and where a person should still decide.
- How to find work worth automating
- What to test before you switch it on
- Where a person should still approve
Custom software
When a custom tool is worth building, what to settle before you pay and what you should own at the end.
- Build, buy or connect: the questions to ask
- What a scoping sprint should produce
- What you should own at the end
AI readiness
Where AI helps a business, what to check about data and privacy first and how to run a safe pilot.
- Where AI helps and where it does not
- What to check about your data and privacy
- How to run a small pilot
Would you rather someone did it?
The guides help you make good decisions. If you do not have the time or the people to do the work, our team can.
- Growth Assessments
- Website design and development
- Managed content research
Why the basics still matter.
Search pages and AI summaries keep changing, but the basics of being found have stayed steady.
Google and AI tools both look for answers that are true, trustworthy and easy to read. Tricks to game them tend to stop working when the tools change.
Clear answers beat repeated keywords
Repeating a phrase twenty times does not work. Google looks at whether a page covers its topic properly and does the job the searcher came for.
Pages that load fast and work for everyone
Fast pages, clear headings and text that is in the page itself help visitors, Google and AI tools alike. If a page is slow or hard to read, all three may give up on it.
Consistent facts about you
Keep your business name, address, services and the names of the people who run it the same on your website, in your structured data and in outside listings. When the details match, Google and AI tools have fewer reasons to doubt any of them.
Prefer our team to do the work?
Ten Done For You services, each starting with a written proposal you approve. Start with a Growth Assessment, or go straight to the service you need.
- Growth AssessmentI do not know what is holding my website back.
- Search & AI VisibilityCustomers should find us on Google and in AI assistants.
- Website DevelopmentOur website is slow, dated or does not bring in enquiries.
- Content ResearchWe do not know what to publish, or what people search for.
- B2B OutreachWe want to reach the right companies with messages worth reading.
- Paid AdsWe want ads that bring qualified calls.
- Managed GrowthWe need someone to keep this moving every month.
- Custom SoftwareWe need a tool that does not exist yet.
- Workflow AutomationOur team loses hours to repeated manual work.
- AI ConsultancyWe are not sure where AI fits in our business.
See where your own site stands.
Rapid Scan reads up to 25 of your public pages and shows the few changes worth making first. Or ask our team for a Growth Assessment.