How to get found online: where a small business should start

You have a business, you have a website. Yet almost no one finds you unless they already know you. Where do you actually start?

What getting found actually depends on

It's not one thing. It's three, and you need all three together: being readable for whoever is searching (engines and assistants need to be able to understand your site), being found for the right words (the ones customers actually use, not the ones you'd use yourself), and being present where people search today — which is no longer just Google.

The most common starting point: a site nobody reads

Before anything else, there's a simple question: does anything actually read your site? If an engine or assistant can't read it, everything that comes after never gets started. Dig deeper in crawlers and indexing.

The second obstacle: the wrong words

A perfectly readable site can still stay invisible if it speaks the company's language instead of the customer's. People don't search the way you'd write a brochure: they search with concrete phrases, often different from how you'd describe your own business. Dig deeper in keywords.

The third: being present beyond Google

More and more searches go through assistants like ChatGPT, or stop at a written answer at the top of Google before the click even happens. Dig deeper in AI Search and LLMs and the AI answer at the top of Google.

Where to actually start

You don't need to fix everything at once. The most effective approach is to start with a diagnosis: figure out first which of the three obstacles affects you most, instead of working blindly on all three. A free SEO report exists exactly for this — to tell you where to start, not to promise an immediate result.

If you sell products online, the same logic applies to product pages too: see is your product recommended by ChatGPT?