How to improve SEO on your website: ten fixes ranked by return

How do you improve your website's SEO? With the most return per hour: put one proven search term at the front of each page's title and H1, make sure Google can find and index every page at one fixed address, and link your pages to each other inside the text. Then come pages that fully answer a question, and only after that speed, structured data and backlinks. Start the other way round, with a plugin and two hundred backlinks, and you pay a lot for little.

This guide ranks ten fixes by what they return against the work they take, and says for each where Search Console shows whether it worked. It also covers what changes on a site in several languages, which is where most European businesses lose ground. It pairs with the SEO checklist: the checklist is what you tick off, this guide is the why and the order. To see where your site stands today, run the SEO checker on your homepage.

What it returns: five weeks at Business Centrum

The fixes below are not theory. For Business Centrum, a payroll and HR office in Ghent, we applied them in this order, in four languages: Dutch, French, English and Turkish. In mid September people found the site almost only by its name. Five weeks later:

What we did: the technical base first, with one address per page and titles on search terms; on 7 and 14 October more than 130 guides, articles and comparisons; then pay scales for 113 joint committees pulled from the federal database with a weekly check, and 13 city pages. Every term sits on its own target page in a term map of 182 terms, with 771 internal links between them. How long this usually takes for an ordinary business site is in how long does SEO take.

Where Search Console shows it

Compare the same page over time. A dip of a few days is usually noise; a drop that lasts three weeks is a signal.

Why titles and search terms come first

The title tag is the strongest signal you control: Google uses it to understand a page and often shows it as the blue link. "Home" or "Services" says nothing; "Payroll services in Ghent" does. Pick the term with evidence, from what people type into Google rather than what sounds good internally; keyword research shows how.

A term belongs on one page. When two pages target the same term, Google cannot tell which to show and both sink. That is why we keep a term map for every site: each term with its target page, and a check that no other page carries it in title or H1. Skipping that step is called keyword cannibalisation.

How to improve SEO ranking: indexing first

A page outside the index does not exist for Google. The Page indexing report shows which URLs are not indexed and why. The usual causes: the same page on http and https or with and without www, shop filters creating thousands of variants, and a canonical tag pointing at the wrong page. A sitemap helps Google find pages but does not index them by itself. The deeper technical side is in technical SEO.

Improving SEO on a site in several languages

This is where sites serving Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany or France lose most. Three rules:

1. One URL per language, such as /nl/, /fr/ and /en/, never a language switcher that changes the text on the same address. Google indexes one version per URL.
2. Hreflang between the versions, so Google shows the French page to a French searcher and not the Dutch one, and does not treat them as duplicates.
3. One term per language, researched in that language. A translated title rarely matches what people type. Belgian French speakers search for "secrétariat social", Dutch speakers for "sociaal secretariaat", and English speakers in Belgium for "payroll services Belgium". Each gets its own target page in the term map.

Business Centrum runs that way in four languages, which is why its gains show up in all of them, not only in Dutch.

Improving SEO on WordPress and on an online store

WordPress makes much of the basics easy and some of it worse. A SEO plugin gives you fields for title and description but does not fill them in sensibly. Watch tag and archive pages that create thin copies of your posts, plugins that slow the site down, and themes that make every heading an H1. Whether WordPress stays your best option is weighed in custom website or WordPress.

An online store has its own traps: product pages with the manufacturer's copy found on a hundred other stores, category pages without their own text, and filters that spawn endless URLs. Start with the category pages, because that is where people search ("safety shoes S3"), not on the product number. More is in ecommerce SEO.

What you can do yourself, and where it stops

The first four fixes you can do yourself with an afternoon a week and Search Console. Fixes five and six, pages that fully answer a question and tools people come back to, take research and build work: that is the gap between a site that ranks a little better and one that ranks for hundreds of terms. Where doing it yourself works and where it stops is in do SEO yourself. If you also want to show up in ChatGPT and other AI assistants, the same base carries over: see found in ChatGPT.