What Is SEO and Why Your Website Isn’t Getting Customers

SEO stands for search engine optimization. According to Google, it means helping search engines understand your page, and helping people find it and decide whether to visit (Google, n.d.-c). For a business, it comes down to one thing: when someone in Brownsville searches for what you sell, they find you, not your competitor.

Sometimes Google simply doesn’t have it yet: a new page can take weeks to show up, and some never do because something is blocking them.

But the most common reason is that the page doesn’t say what people are searching for. If your page says “Welcome to our website” and people search for “dentist in Brownsville”, Google has no way of knowing it’s you. And if it does show up, it’s so far down that it might as well not: in a study of 4 million searches, the first result got 27.6% of the clicks, the top three got 54.4%, and only 0.63% of people made it to the second page (Dean, 2025).

The big advantage is that you get customers who are already looking for you. You’re not interrupting anyone with an ad: the person typed what they need into Google and found you. On top of that, once you’re near the top you don’t pay for each visit, and the work you do today keeps bringing in customers for months. It also builds trust: many people trust a business more when it shows up on Google with reviews and its own website.

The downside is that it takes time. Google says some changes show up within hours and others take months (Google, n.d.-c), and that nobody can guarantee you the top spot (Google, n.d.-a), because it also depends on what your competitors do. That’s why it isn’t a one-time job: it’s ongoing work.

SEO means showing up in Google’s regular results without paying per click: it’s slow, but it lasts. SEM means paying for Google ads to show up at the top from day one; those are the results labeled “Sponsored”. It’s fast, but when you stop paying, you disappear.

You don’t have to pick one: many businesses start with ads while their SEO grows.

There are things you can do today, for free:

1. Put your business on Google Maps with photos, hours and phone number, and ask your customers for reviews. Google ranks the map by how well your profile matches the search, how close you are and how well known your business is, and reviews count toward that (Google, n.d.-d). That’s local SEO, and I explain it step by step in how to get your business on Google and Google Maps in Brownsville.
2. Use your customers’ words. If people search for “phone repair”, don’t just write “technical services”.
3. Mention your city in your page title and in the text.
4. Answer the questions you always get: prices, hours, how to find you. Every question can be a search.

This also helps with AI: there are no special requirements to appear in Google’s AI summaries, the same basic SEO practices apply (Google, n.d.-b).

Anyone can do the steps above. What takes time and practice is everything else: finding out what people type when they look for what you sell, checking page by page what’s missing, reading Google’s data to see what works, and writing the content that answers what nobody else is answering. It’s worth hiring someone when you already have a website but nobody finds you on Google, when your competitors show up at the top and you don’t, or simply when you don’t have time to learn it and do it every month.

Why I build the website and do the SEO together. Not every website is built the same way. Many template platforms let you change the text and the colors, but not get to the code, which is where much of what Google reads is decided: how fast the page loads, how the content is structured, and the data that tells Google what your business is and where it is. That’s why I build every site from the ground up and optimize it for Google from day one, instead of fighting the limits of a template later.

How to choose who does it. Google has a guide for this (Google, n.d.-a). The main idea: a good specialist explains what they’ll do, shows you your site’s data and doesn’t promise you the top spot, because nobody can guarantee it. And to review your site, read-only access to Search Console is all they need.

Google’s tool for this is Search Console, and it’s free: it shows which searches your page appears for, in what position and how many people click. A quick test is to search for your business the way a customer would, for example “your service + your city”, and see where you show up.

If you’d like, I’ll take a look: I’ll do a free SEO audit of your website, with the searches you show up for, what it needs to appear when people look for you and what to fix first. Request it here, no strings attached.

They sound alike, but they have nothing to do with each other. SEO is search engine optimization, the topic of this article. A CEO is the chief executive officer of a company. Then again, a good CEO should care about their company’s SEO.