SEO

Three things decide it, in this order. Whether the page can be reached and rendered at all; whether it answers a question somebody is asking, better than the pages currently answering it; and whether anything outside the site indicates that it is worth trusting. Everything else in the discipline is a detail of one of those three.

It compounds and it lags. Structural decisions taken at build time — the URL hierarchy, what is one page versus many, what is rendered server-side — set the ceiling on everything a later engagement can do, which is why retrofitting search onto a finished site costs multiples of designing it in.

Optimising for volume instead of for intent

A keyword with ten thousand searches a month and no buying intent produces traffic that converts at nothing and drags the average down. One with two hundred searches from people about to purchase pays for itself. Rank the target list by intent first and by volume second.

Somebody will quote this number at you.

Knowing the definition is not the same as being able to check the figure. These are the procedures that do the second thing.

Testing a ranking report

“You now rank in the top ten for 47 keywords, up from 12.” · 25 minutes, 5 questions.

Somebody is accountable for this number.

A definition is free. Being answerable for the figure it produces is the part that is bought, and this term is a working part of the engagements below.

Taking a product into a new market

A campaign can only sell what the market is allowed to buy.

---

Web design and development for Dubai, built search-first

Search architecture is a build decision, not a later engagement.

---

SEO and GEO for Dubai and the UAE

You are indexed as an entity, not as a set of pages.

GEO

Being citable by an assistant that is assembling an answer, rather than merely rankable by an engine that is returning links.

---

Structured data

Machine-readable statements embedded in a page that say what its content means rather than how it looks.

---

Canonical URL

The one address a piece of content declares as its real one, so that every variant of it consolidates into a single entry rather than competing with itself.

---

Core Web Vitals

Three measurements of how a page feels to use — how fast the main content appears, how quickly it responds, and how much it moves while loading.

---

Information architecture

How the content and functions of a product are named, grouped and nested — the structure a person navigates before they read anything.

---

Impression

One appearance of your page in a result set a person was served — counted whether or not they ever scrolled far enough to see it.

---

Average position

The mean rank of your appearances weighted by how often each occurred — a single number averaging page one with page nine, and among the most misread statistics in search.

---

Domain authority

A search tool vendor’s model of how likely a domain is to rank. It is not a search engine signal, no search engine publishes one, and no quantity of it has ever caused a ranking.

---

Internal link graph

Which of your pages link to which others — the structure that decides what a reader and a crawler can reach from the page they are actually on, as opposed to what you have published.

All ninety-six termsWhat this is regulated by in the UAE

Is this one right in your own numbers?

The definitions are the easy part. Whether the figure on your dashboard was computed this way is a different question, and usually the more expensive one.