How To Optimise Your own Website

Short answer: yes, you can do a good deal of it yourself. Writing clear page titles and descriptions, giving every page a job, answering the questions your customers actually ask and keeping the site loading quickly are all within reach of anyone willing to spend the time. What you cannot easily do yourself is the diagnosis, the technical work underneath and the discipline of keeping it up once the novelty wears off. This is where the line usually falls.

Start by working out what each page is for

Most underperforming websites are not badly designed. They are simply vague. Before touching anything technical, go through your site page by page and write down, in one sentence, what question each page answers and what you want the visitor to do next. Any page you cannot answer that for is either doing nothing, or duplicating a page that already does the job better. That list on its own will usually tell you where the problem is.

Write proper page titles and descriptions

The page title is the blue line a searcher clicks in Google, and the description is the grey text underneath it. They are the closest thing you have to a free advert. Keep the title inside about 60 characters and the description inside about 160, make every one different from every other page on the site, and put the useful, distinguishing detail in first: what it is, where you are, what makes it worth the click. Never leave a description blank, because Google will then invent a snippet from whatever text it finds first, and that is rarely the text you would have chosen.

Answer the question in the first two sentences

Search engines now read a page roughly the way a person would, weighing whether the content genuinely answers what was searched for. AI answer engines such as Google’s AI Overviews, ChatGPT and Perplexity go further: they scan a page and lift the passage they can extract most cleanly. Both reward the same thing, which is putting the answer at the top of the page rather than after three paragraphs of throat-clearing. Your warm, well-written introduction can stay. It just belongs underneath the answer, not in front of it.

Use the questions your customers actually ask

A growing share of searches are full questions, typed or spoken. You already know what yours are, because you answer them on the phone every week. Write them down, put them on the relevant page as a short set of questions and answers, and keep the answers tight and complete. This is the single most useful piece of content work most small businesses can do for themselves, and it feeds directly into being quoted by AI search.

Keep the site fast and the images sensible

Page speed is a ranking input and it is also the thing most likely to lose you a visitor on a phone. The usual culprit is images uploaded straight from a camera or phone at full resolution and then displayed at a fraction of the size. Resize images to the dimensions they are actually shown at, save them in a modern format, and give every one a short, accurate description in the alt text field. The alt text is not decoration: it is content search engines read, and it is what a visually impaired visitor hears.

Fix the small things that signal neglect

Check that your links still go somewhere. Businesses close, domains lapse, and a site that has been running for a few years quietly accumulates links to websites that no longer exist. The same goes for pages that duplicate each other, pages with almost no text on them, and the odd typo in a menu item that then appears on every page of the site. None of these is serious on its own. Together they tell both a human visitor and a search engine that nobody is looking after the site.

Where doing it yourself stops paying

The work above is worth doing and you do not need us to do it. The point at which professional help starts to pay for itself is usually one of these four:

• You have done the obvious things and still cannot see why competitors outrank you. Diagnosis is a different skill from tidying, and guessing at it is expensive in time.
• The site is large enough that a consistent pass across every page is no longer realistic by hand. Once you are past thirty or forty pages, the consistency is the value, and consistency is exactly what people run out of patience for.
• Something underneath needs work: structure, speed, structured data, redirects, hosting. This is where a well-meant change can quietly break something that was working.
• It has to keep happening. Almost anyone can improve a website once. Very few businesses keep it up, and search visibility rewards the ones that do.

Our own view, after thirty years of this, is that the honest split is that you know your business and we know the mechanics. The best results we get are on sites where the owner supplies the questions their customers ask and the detail only they know, and we handle the structure, the titles, the technical work and the discipline of repeating it.

If you want an objective view of where your own site stands, our AI Website Health Check reports on it page by page, and you are welcome to act on the findings yourself. Or call us on 01526 352919 and we will talk it through.