SEO Basics
What Is SEO? A Plain-English Guide for Local Business Owners
SEO stands for search engine optimization. At Bone & McMurran Media we explain it to every client the same way — strip away the jargon and it means one thing: making it easy for Google to understand what you do, who you do it for, and why someone searching should trust you over the shop down the road.
How Google actually decides who shows up
Google crawls the web, reads pages, and stores what it finds. When someone types "roofer near me" or "web design Indianapolis," it sorts through everything it has stored and ranks the pages it believes answer that search best.
Three things drive that decision: relevance (does the page match what was searched?), trust (do other real sites and reviews back you up?), and experience (does the page load fast and work on a phone?). Everything else in SEO is a detail underneath those three.
The parts of SEO that matter for a local business
You don't need a hundred-page strategy. For a local business, the short list Bone & McMurran Media works through does most of the work:
- A clear page title and description for every page — this is the text people read in search results.
- One honest H1 heading per page that says what the page is about.
- Real words on the page about your services and the towns you serve, written for humans first.
- A fast, mobile-friendly site — most local searches happen on a phone.
- A complete Google Business Profile with photos, hours, and reviews.
- Structured data (schema) so Google can read your business details without guessing.
What SEO is not
SEO is not stuffing your city name into every sentence. It is not buying a thousand junk links. And it is not instant — a new site usually takes a few months of being live, linked to, and updated before it earns steady rankings.
If someone promises you page one next week, they're selling something else.
Where to start this week
Search your own business the way a customer would. Look at what comes up, click your own result, and ask whether you'd contact that business. Then fix the first thing that made you hesitate — a slow page, a missing phone number, a homepage that never says what you do.
That's SEO. Removing every reason for someone to bounce before they call — and it's baked into every site Bone & McMurran Media builds.
SEO is not a trick. It's making your business easy to find, easy to understand, and easy to trust — in that order. That's the standard Bone & McMurran Media builds to on every project.
Want this handled for you?
Every site we build ships with the SEO basics done properly. Send us your business and we'll send back a free homepage mockup.