Introduction
This guide explains how to get your website found in Google and named in the answers of AI systems. It is written for owners and managers at SMBs, not for specialists. You do not need to be able to code to follow it, and wherever you do need help that is stated.
Eleven chapters, free to read and without a form. Each chapter answers one question and states how much time it takes and when you may expect an effect.
One mistake makes the other forty-nine pointless
An SEO checklist with fifty items does not help you, because the items do not carry equal weight and they do not belong in a random order. One noindex tag left in place makes the other forty-nine items pointless. That is why this guide is a route and not a list.
Do it in this order. First check whether your pages are in the Google index at all, because as long as they are not, nothing else has any effect. Then put your titles, your descriptions and your headings right, fix the obvious speed problems and add structured data. Only after that comes GEO: checking whether the AI crawlers are allowed in, aligning your details outside your own site and measuring every month whether you get mentioned. Anyone who reverses that order and starts with AI visibility is improving a site that nobody finds yet.
| Order | What you do | Chapter | Time | When you see an effect |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | check whether you are in the index | 1 | an hour | sometimes within a day |
| 2 | title, description and headings | 2 | half a day | weeks |
| 3 | the obvious speed problems | 3 | varies | weeks |
| 4 | add structured data | 4 | half a day | weeks to months |
| 5 | check access for AI crawlers | 7 | five minutes | only visible in the measurement |
| 6 | align your details outside your site | 10 | two hours plus upkeep | months |
| 7 | measure and keep it up | 11 | half an hour a week | from the second month |
The times in that table come from our own work on SMB sites. They are guidelines and not measured values.
Step 5 is the cheapest of the seven and at the same time the only one that can change everything for AI answers. Five minutes of work. Anyone who skips it can work through the rest of the guide without ever being cited.
The route: four parts and eleven chapters
Click the title of a chapter to open it. The chapters still marked as coming soon will appear over the next few weeks.
Part A. The foundation
- Why is my website not in Google. Answers whether you have an indexing problem or a ranking problem. Those are two different things with different solutions and most people mix them up.
- Title, description and headings: what really counts. Answers how long a title and a meta description may be and why the description does not decide your position but does decide your click.
- Speed and mobile. Answers what LCP, CLS and INP measure and from which point another tenth of a second gains you nothing.
Part B. Machine readability
- Structured data: what search engines and AI make of it. Answers which schema types an SMB needs and which markup you must never invent.
- Multilingual sites: hreflang without mistakes. Answers when you need hreflang and why a language version without its own entry in the sitemap stays quietly invisible.
Part C. GEO
- What GEO is and how it differs from SEO. Answers how optimising for AI answers differs from optimising for a list of links. This is the hinge chapter of the guide.
- May AI systems read your site. Answers which bots there are, what each of them does and how you see whether a plugin or a CDN is blocking them without anyone having asked for that.
- llms.txt: what it is and whether it works. Answers what the file is and whether it is worth the effort. Short answer: the evidence is thin and the cost is zero.
- Do ChatGPT and Perplexity mention you. Answers how you establish whether AI engines name you: fifteen fixed questions a month, counted separately per engine.
- Your company outside your own website. Answers which six details have to read exactly the same everywhere and what a Google Business Profile does and does not deliver.
Part D. Keeping it up
- Measuring and adjusting: the feedback loop. Answers how you set up Search Console, how you find keywords for free and whether you do this yourself or hand it over.
Chapters 1 to 4 are the core. Anyone who carries out only those four has the largest part of the technical gain in hand. Chapters 6, 7 and 9 are the GEO core and belong together. Chapter 11 is the only chapter that is never finished.
Building a new site: do this up front
At SEMANU this is a standard and not a recommendation: anyone building a new website works through this route before launch and not afterwards.
The reason is not diligence but cost. The things that are expensive to fix later are free up front. Your URL structure, your language architecture, schema at template level instead of per page, and whether your pages carry real content in the server HTML or only a JavaScript shell. Up front that is a five minute decision. Afterwards it is a rebuild that needs a developer and that risks positions you already held.
What you cannot tick off in advance are the chapters that need time: mentions outside your site, the citation test and the loop. You can record the baseline right away, and that belongs to it. See chapter 9.
What this guide deliberately leaves out
A guide gains credibility from what is not in it.
Link building as a tactic. The search demand exists and the honest answer pleases nobody: bought links are a violation where the risk sits entirely with you and not with the seller. What can be said about it is in chapter 10, under earned mentions.
Tool overviews. They go out of date within a year and they turn this guide into a comparison site. Chapter 11 holds one table with free routes and beyond that we name no brands.
Lists of ranking factors. Nobody knows them. Anyone who publishes a numbered list of two hundred factors invents most of it and so loses the authority they want to build.
Placement in AI answers that you can buy. It does not exist. There is no ad space today in the answers of ChatGPT or Perplexity that you can buy as an SMB. What is for sale is measurement work you can do yourself.
Figures we have not measured ourselves. Wherever this guide states a number, it states where that number comes from. In our own baseline measurement of 2 August 2026, not one of fifteen Dutch-language searches in Belgium produced a Google AI Overview. That kind of observation we include. Estimated market percentages and predictions about how much traffic AI will swallow we do not, because we do not know them and neither do most of the sources that publish them.
What a full audit adds
The guide describes what you can measure yourself. An audit goes further on the points you cannot reach without tooling or without access.
| What | Why you cannot do this yourself |
|---|---|
| A full crawl instead of a sample | orphan pages, click depth, duplicate titles and redirect chains only surface when every page is seen at once |
| The rendered page instead of the server HTML | a site that runs entirely on JavaScript measures differently than it looks |
| Your server log files | the only hard evidence of what crawlers actually fetch and what they skip |
| Root cause at template level | not which page is broken but which line in which template causes it |
| Index coverage from the Search Console API | submitted against indexed, with the reason for exclusion per page |
| A citation test with your competitor set | who does get named on your questions and which sources those answers rest on |
We carry out that audit for 1,450 euro. That includes the report, the prioritisation and interviews with your team. A repeat measurement after 90 days costs 450 euro. If you would rather have us run the weekly loop from chapter 11 periodically than do it yourself, we charge 250 euro per month for that.
We sell no software and work on no vendor commission, so the advice stands apart from whatever you choose afterwards.
What you can do yourself and what you cannot
To do yourself, without a specialist and without a subscription:
- The diagnosis from chapter 1. An hour. It is the only step in the guide that sometimes produces a result within a day.
- Titles, descriptions and headings for your ten most important pages. Half a day.
- Checking your robots.txt for AI crawlers. Five minutes.
- Aligning your details across your profiles and registers. Two hours.
- Setting up Search Console and looking at it weekly. Twenty minutes to start plus half an hour a week.
- The citation test. An hour a month.
What you need help with:
- Putting JSON-LD in your templates when you cannot reach the source code.
- hreflang across four languages once the site grows. Handwork goes wrong quickly there and the mistake is silent.
- Speed work that touches the hosting or the theme.
- The choice of what you measure and which threshold justifies an action. That is where the time goes and not into the programming.
Frequently asked questions
What should I do first to get my website found on Google?
First check whether your pages are in the index by typing site:yourdomain.be into Google. If nothing appears, you have an indexing problem and the cause is almost always robots.txt, a noindex tag or a canonical that points to another page. If your pages do appear, it is about ranking and that is months of work instead of one setting.
Can I do SEO myself?
For the most part, yes. Checking indexing, putting titles and headings right, adding structured data, checking robots.txt and spending half an hour a week in Search Console needs no subscription and no specialist. You need help as soon as something has to happen in the source code, the templates or the hosting.
How long does it take before SEO delivers a result?
That depends on which problem you have. Solving an indexing problem sometimes works within a day. Titles, headings and structured data work in weeks. External mentions and authority work in months. Anyone who promises you a deadline without knowing which of those three problems you have is guessing.
What is the difference between SEO and GEO?
SEO aims at a position in a list of links. GEO aims at a mention in one composed answer from an AI engine such as ChatGPT or Perplexity. Most good SEO is also good GEO. The reverse does not hold: you can rank excellently and still never be cited.
Is this guide free?
Yes. All eleven chapters are online as web pages in four languages, without a form and without an email address. That is also the advice it contains: content behind a form is not read by AI systems and therefore never cited either.
Measurability and findability belong in your software strategy
Measurability and findability are part of strategic advice, not a separate discipline. If you would rather not do this yourself, we take it up in the software strategy: what you measure, which threshold justifies an action and who follows it up.