What Machines Read When They Read You

There is a version of your website that no visitor ever sees, and it is the version that decides whether you get recommended.

Strip away the design. What is left is text, structure, and a set of quiet declarations in the code that most business owners have never been shown. That is what a search engine indexes and what an assistant summarises. If that version of your site is vague, you are invisible to the parts of the internet that now do a lot of the recommending.

Four things make up that version.

Your headings, read on their own. Take any page and read only the headings, in order, ignoring everything else. Do they tell a coherent story? On most sites they do not. They read like a list of moods. "Who We Are." "Our Approach." "Why Us." "Let's Chat." A machine reading that learns nothing. Compare it with "Bookkeeping for Sydney trades businesses." "What is included each month." "What it costs." "How to start." One of those two pages can be recommended. The other cannot.

Your first paragraph. Assistants weight opening text heavily, because that is where humans put the summary. If your first paragraph is a mission statement, you have spent your most valuable real estate on something nobody can act on. Put the plain description there and move the atmosphere below it.

Your structured data. This is the part in the code. It is a small block of information that states, in a format machines agree on, what kind of thing this page is: a business with an address and opening hours, a service with a price range, an article with an author and a date, a question with an answer. It is unglamorous, it takes a developer an hour, and it is the single most neglected item on most small business websites. It does not make you rank. It makes you legible, which is now a different and more important thing.

Your consistency across the web. Your name, address, and phone number should be identical everywhere they appear: your site, your Google listing, your directory entries, your social profiles. Not similar. Identical. Machines build confidence about an entity by matching records, and a business that appears as "Suite 3, 100 Main St" in one place and "100 Main Street, Level 1" in another looks like two half-confirmed businesses rather than one confirmed one.

None of this is glamorous work. It is the website equivalent of labelling your stock properly. It does not feel like growth while you are doing it, and then one day you are the firm the assistant names.

One warning. There is a growing industry selling this back to you as a new discipline of services. You might recognise it as GEO or AEO. In our opinion this is all part of good SEO and content work, not a separate line item.

So if somebody pitches it to you as a separate body of work, ask them to show you which of the four things above is currently wrong on your site, and what they would change. If they cannot, you are buying a subscription rather than an outcome.