How to rank higher on Google: the 9 steps we always follow after 160 websites
Ranking higher on Google is not a trick, it is a matter of order. These are the nine steps we have followed in the same order on more than 160 websites, with real timelines for each step.
Your site is live, it looks good, and still nobody calls. You want to rank higher on Google, but when you search for your own service plus your town, you scroll three screens down before you find yourself. Meanwhile a company you have never heard of sits above you.
That is rarely down to how your website looks. It is down to the order in which the work was done, and usually there never was an order. Below are the nine steps we have followed in the same order on more than 160 websites, with the timeline you can realistically expect for each one.
The short version: how to rank higher on Google in nine steps
After more than 160 websites, this is what we have learned: the order decides the result, not the amount of work. This table is the whole article in a nutshell.
| Step | What you do | First results |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Find out what your customers actually search for | straight away, it steers everything |
| 2 | Split up pages that compete with each other | 2 to 6 weeks |
| 3 | Fill in every field of your Google Business Profile | 1 to 3 weeks |
| 4 | Make your site fast on a phone | 2 to 8 weeks |
| 5 | Rewrite your page titles and meta descriptions | 2 to 4 weeks |
| 6 | One page per service and per town | 2 to 5 months |
| 7 | Make asking for reviews a routine | ongoing |
| 8 | Add internal links | 3 to 8 weeks |
| 9 | Measure and adjust every month | from month two |
Prices and timelines in this article are our own, as of September 2026.
Why does the order matter so much?
Most business owners start in the middle. They pay for copy written around search terms nobody types in, or they buy links while their site takes thirteen seconds to load on a phone. Then nothing happens and the verdict comes quickly: SEO does not work.
What is really going on is that the foundation is missing. Google first needs to be able to read your site, understand where you are based and see what you are good at. Only then does it make sense to aim for anything. That is why we always run through the same nine steps, in this order.
The order is the product. Anyone can write a text. Few know which text has to come first.
Step 1: what do your customers actually search for?
Almost nobody types in the words you use on your website. A contractor calls himself a general contractor, while his customer searches for “facade renovation Beveren”. A home nurse talks about tailored care, while her client searches for “home nursing Kieldrecht”.
We pull those numbers from real data: how many people search for a term each month, how tough the competition is, and what a visitor from that term is worth. That is not a hunch but a list. It usually turns out that three or four terms account for half of everything there is to win, and that the term you had in mind is not one of them.
What to look for in a search term
- Does it show buying intent, or is someone just looking for an explanation
- Is there a local result at the top, or only national players
- What type of page ranks in the top ten right now: a service page or an article
- Can you realistically get in there with the site you have
That last point matters most and is almost always skipped. For a term where five national players with hundreds of referring domains rank, a local business will not win. Add your town to the term and you usually will.
Step 2: are your own pages competing with each other?
This step brings results fastest, and almost nobody takes it. Many sites have three or four pages that are all loosely about the same topic. Google then does not know which one to show, so none of them ranks well.
We put all your pages side by side and check which ones target the same question. Then we pick one as the main page and either rewrite the others to answer a question of their own or merge them with a redirect. The number of pages goes down, your rankings go up.
For one client with nine city pages competing with each other, that alone produced a solid jump, without adding a single word of new copy.
Step 3: is your Google Business Profile complete?
For a local business this is the cheapest win there is. The map sits above the regular results, and whoever appears there gets the phone calls. Yet we keep seeing profiles without services, without photos, with opening hours from two years ago and three reviews.
What belongs in it: the right category, every service filled in separately, your service area, photos of your own work and at least a handful of recent reviews. Fill it all in today and you often see a rise within one to three weeks in how often your profile is shown. Which fields carry the most weight is covered in our piece on the eleven fields of your Google Business Profile.
Step 4: how fast does your site load on a phone?
Seven in ten visitors to our clients’ sites arrive on a phone. In construction, healthcare and hospitality the share is even higher. And on a phone, three seconds already feels long.
In practice the problem is almost always in the same place: photos uploaded straight from the camera. We bring a four megabyte building site photo down to a few hundred kilobytes without any visible difference. On top of that we look at hosting, caching and the number of scripts that load with the page.
Speed alone will not make you number one, but a slow site does hold you back. And a visitor who leaves before your page has loaded does not count anyway.
Step 5: what do your page title and meta description say?
The page title is the line of text Google shows in the results. On most sites it says something like Home, Services or the company name. That is next to useless, even though it is the first thing anyone reads.
A good title puts the search term first, stays under sixty characters and says what you offer. The meta description below it is your ad: why should someone click on you and not on the other four? This takes half a day for a whole site and often brings more clicks within two to four weeks, even if your ranking does not change.
Step 6: do you have a page for every service and every town?
Google prefers to show the page that answers the question most literally. If someone searches for “roofing Temse”, a page about roofing in Temse beats a general page where ten services and twenty towns are thrown together.
The key is not to create them all at once. Publishing thirty thin location pages at the same time is one of the few moves Google really punishes. We add one a month, with our own photos, real references from that area and copy that is genuinely about that place.
Allow two to five months before such a page takes its spot. That sounds long, but after that the page stays there for years without you paying anything more for it.
Step 7: how many reviews do you have, and how recent are they?
Reviews do two jobs at once. They push you up in the map results, and they convince the person who sees your listing. A business with forty reviews beats a business with four, even if those four are all five stars.
You do not need a hundred. What matters is that new ones keep coming in. Ten reviews from 2022 count for less than five from this month. So make it a habit: ask the moment the work is done and the client is happy, not three months later by email.
Step 8: do your pages link to each other?
Internal links tell Google which pages are important and what they are about. A page that nothing links to is, as far as Google is concerned, a page that does not matter.
In practice: link every service page to the matching location pages, link your articles to the service they are about, and use anchor text that says what the reader gets. “Click here” is wasted space.
This is a few hours of work and it often brings movement within three to eight weeks, precisely because it is free and almost nobody does it systematically.
Step 9: what should you measure every month?
Without figures, SEO is just an opinion. Every month we look at four numbers: which terms you rose or dropped on, how many people found you, how many of them got in touch, and which page sits just outside the top ten.
That last one is the goldmine. A page in position eleven or twelve usually needs only a small push, while a page in position sixty still needs months of work. Measure every month and you always work on the next win instead of whatever happens to be at the top of the list.
Do you need a separate strategy for AI search?
An AI answer in ChatGPT or at the top of Google is built from sources that already rank well in the search results at that moment. If you are not among them, you are not in that answer either. So these nine steps are your AI work too. Want to know whether you already show up today? Then run through the five minute test.
What does come on top is how you write. Short, concrete answers with your town, your price and your timeline in them get picked up more easily than a paragraph of pretty words. How that works is explained on our page about getting found in AI answers.
What does it cost to have SEO done for you?
You can take these nine steps yourself. Steps 3, 5 and 7 mostly cost time, not money. Where it usually goes wrong is step 1 and step 9: knowing where you can win, and keeping at it for months on top of your regular work. Where exactly that line falls, task by task and with the hours next to it, is covered in outsource SEO or do it yourself.
| Approach | Price | For whom |
|---|---|---|
| Do it yourself | your own time | anyone who can handle steps 3, 5 and 7 and has patience |
| One time fix | from €349 | a business in one town that wants the foundation sorted and then carries on alone |
| Monthly, local | from €249 per month | your town and the ones around it, one new page every month |
| Monthly, regional | from €449 per month | a whole region, several services |
We list what other Belgian agencies charge, and why prices differ, in what SEO costs in Belgium.
Prices exclude VAT, with no minimum term, as of September 2026. Your audit, which we wrote out block by block from a real report, shows what suits you, and we say so even if the answer is doing it yourself. Read more about how we work on our page about SEO as a service, and if you work in construction, SEO for construction companies is the page you are looking for.
Is SEO worth it? A worked example
Figures say more than promises. Take a contractor in the Waasland region with an average job of €12,000 and a fifteen percent margin. That is €1,800 profit per job.
Around 300 people a month search for terms related to his trade in his five towns. Rank consistently in the top three for those and you get roughly a third of them, so a hundred visitors. At a three percent conversion rate that makes three quote requests a month, and in construction about one in three of those usually goes ahead.
| What | Figure |
|---|---|
| Searches per month for his terms | around 300 |
| Visitors with a top three spot | around 100 |
| Quote requests per month | 3 |
| Jobs won | 1 |
| Profit per month | €1,800 |
| Cost of the monthly package | from €249 |
In this example, one job a month is more than seven times the cost of the package. That is why SEO pays off faster in construction than in sectors with small order values: you only need a few jobs.
Run the numbers with your own average job value. If you end up below the cost of the package, SEO is not the right channel for you, and we will tell you so.
What we deliberately do not do
A few tactics impress in the short term and cost money in the long term. We leave them alone, even when a client asks for them.
Four tactics we do not use
- Buying links. Google has become good at spotting it, and a penalty can set you back for years.
- Publishing thirty location pages in one go. That is the fastest way to get judged as thin content.
- Repeating keywords until a text is unreadable. That worked in 2012.
- Sending a dashboard with forty charts. If you cannot get anything out of it, it is not a report but a smokescreen.
What we do is slow but lasting: one page a month, measuring every month, and the foundation first. It is less exciting, but it is the only approach still standing after two years.
How does SEO differ per sector?
The nine steps are the same everywhere, but the focus shifts.
Construction and installation
Here almost everything comes down to step 6. A contractor does not have one search term but thirty small ones: one for every trade in every town. Build pages for those systematically and you beat the big name that has no local page, and why such a location page outweighs your homepage is something we counted on three searches in the Waasland region. The biggest gains are in the towns right next to your own, because the competition there is usually weaker than you think.
Healthcare and professional services
Here, steps 3 and 7 carry the most weight. People choose a care provider on trust, and they judge that from your reviews and from a complete profile. A home nursing service that went from three to forty pages in a year did it mainly by explaining exactly what it does in each town.
Hospitality and retail
Here it is almost entirely about the map results and speed on a phone. People often search on the go and decide in ten seconds. Up to date opening hours, recent photos and a menu that is not hidden in a PDF do more than three new pages.
Work in construction? We go deeper into that in our step by step plan on how a construction company reaches the top of Google around Sint Niklaas.
How do you know if your SEO is working?
A higher ranking is nice, but it is not the goal. The goal is more enquiries. That is why we always look at the whole chain: impressions, clicks, enquiries, jobs. If there is a gap somewhere, you see straight away where it is.
Lots of impressions but few clicks? Then your title is the problem, not your ranking. Lots of clicks but no enquiries? Then it is the page itself: no clear button, no price, no reason to call now. That last one happens more often than people think, and we wrote a separate piece about it: your website gets visitors but no enquiries.
How does Google decide what to show?
It helps to know what happens under the bonnet, because then you understand why the order above works. In practice, Google does three jobs one after the other.
First crawling: a program goes through your site and reads what is on it. If it cannot reach your page or the page loads too slowly, it stops there. Then indexing: Google decides whether your page is worth keeping and what it is about. Pages that look too much alike get dropped at this stage. Only then comes ranking: from all the stored pages, Google picks ten to show for a given search.
Most business owners work on that third step while their problem is in the first or second. A page that is not indexed can never rank, however good the copy is.
Three questions to ask yourself
- Is my page on Google? Type site: followed by your web address into the search bar and count the results.
- Is every page about something different? Or do I have three that say the same thing?
- Does my site load within three seconds on a phone, on mobile data rather than wifi?
What can you do yourself this week?
You do not need to wait for an agency to get started. This is the list we tick off ourselves, and you can do most of it on your own.
- Search Google for your own service plus your town and note your position. That is your baseline, and in three months it is worth its weight in gold.
- Do the same for your three main competitors and note what kind of page they have at the top.
- Open your Google Business Profile and fill in every empty field: services, service area, opening hours, photos of your own work.
- Ask five happy clients for a review this week. Do it in person the moment the work is done, with the link ready on your phone.
- Test your site on your own phone with the wifi off. If it takes longer than three seconds, your photos are usually the culprit.
- Check your page titles: do they say Home or your company name, or do they say what you offer and where?
- On every service page, add at least one link to another page on your site, with anchor text that says what that page is about.
Seven points, half a day of work. That alone puts most local businesses ahead of half their competitors.
The five SEO mistakes we see most often
After 160 sites you start to see patterns. These five come up most, and they all cost money.
One page with everything on it
A page called Services, with six trades and ten towns mixed together. Google does not know what that page is about, so it shows it nowhere. Split it up and give every service its own page.
Targeting a term nobody searches for
Target your own slogan and you will always rank first for it, because nobody else searches for it. Always check the search volume before you write a page.
Not mentioning your town anywhere
You know where you work. Google does not. If your copy never says which towns you cover, Google cannot connect you to those searches.
Wanting everything at once
Twenty pages in one week, then nothing for a year. Google rewards sites that grow steadily. One page a month for twelve months beats twelve pages in one month.
Stopping after three months
This is the most expensive of the five. Quit after three months and you have paid all the costs and miss the return just before it arrives, because that usually starts in month four or five. So do not start unless you are willing to give it at least six months.
When is SEO not worth it for you?
We would rather say no upfront than sorry afterwards. There are three situations in which we advise you to spend your money elsewhere.
If you only work as a subcontractor for two regular clients, you do not need to be found. If you sell something that gets searched twenty times a month across all of Flanders and your margin is small, you will not earn back the cost. And if you need revenue next month, SEO is the wrong channel: run ads for a while as the SEO builds up in the background.
In every other case the question is not whether it works, but whether you keep it up.
Frequently asked questions
How long does it take to rank higher on Google?
The technical steps and your Business Profile often bring movement within two to six weeks. For search terms where you compete with other companies, allow three to six months. Anyone who promises you otherwise is selling hot air.
Do I need a new website first?
Usually not. In most cases we can work with your existing site. If it is beyond saving technically, we tell you upfront so you know straight away where you stand.
Can I do these nine steps myself?
For the most part, yes, and we say so honestly. You can sort out your Business Profile, your reviews and your page titles yourself. The research and keeping it up are where most people drop out.
Does SEO still work now that everyone uses ChatGPT?
Yes, and it matters more than before. An AI answer takes its names from sources that already rank well in the search results, so if you are not there, you are not in that answer either.
How do I find out where I stand today?
That is what the free audit is for. You get your ten most important search terms, your ranking, your competitor’s ranking by name, and everything that needs fixing, each with a starting price.
Want to know which of the nine steps will help you most?
Request your free audit. Within 24 hours on working days, a report lands in your inbox, with every issue and everything that needs fixing, and a starting price for each. No sales call required, and you are welcome to take the report and get to work on it yourself.
Would you rather we took care of it?
Tell us briefly what your business does and what you need your website to bring in. Silvio reads every enquiry himself and replies by the next working day.
