SEO Is Mostly Plumbing

It's October, so start with the ghosts: the stale listings and dead links that quietly tell people you're gone.

Earlier this year I audited a camp's website. Great ministry, decades of history, a property people love. The first hour turned up four problems.

Yelp listed the camp as CLOSED. The homepage title tag was just the camp's name. The news section and the summer program cards were images with the text baked in. The donation link was HTTP, not HTTPS, which browsers flag as not secure.

None of that needed a retainer. The Yelp fix took about an hour. Every business has a few of these sitting in the background, a directory with an old phone number or an hours page that was right in 2019. Find them first, because they cost you people who were already looking for you.

Google reads text. If your summer programs live in image cards, Google sees a picture and a filename. So does a screen reader. A parent searching for a summer camp for teenagers near Columbus never lands on the page where the answer technically exists.

The fix is to type it out. Real headings, one h1 per page, paragraphs, and link text that says where the link goes ("Register for Summer Camp" instead of "Learn More"). The same work makes the site readable for people using assistive technology, so you're fixing two problems with one edit. I broke down the accessibility side in WCAG Levels A, AA, and AAA explained.

The title tag is the blue line in search results and the label on the browser tab. A lot of small sites have only their name in there. Google can't tell whether "Maple Ridge" is a camp, a golf course, or a subdivision.

Give it three things: what you are, where you are, and your name. Something like "Maple Ridge | Summer Camp & Retreat Center | Chillicothe, Ohio." Keep it around 60 characters so it doesn't get cut off. Google sometimes rewrites titles anyway, but it starts from what you give it, so give it something good.

Your Google Business Profile works the same way. It's free. Claim it, fill in every field, add real photos, set accurate hours, and link to the page where people sign up. For a local organization, that listing often shows up before your website does.

Here's the order I'd work in, with the stuff that actively says "closed" or "insecure" first:

1. Search your own name and fix every wrong listing (Yelp, Facebook, Google, old directories).
2. Claim and complete your Google Business Profile.
3. Make every link HTTPS, especially donation and registration.
4. Replace text-in-images with real text.
5. Rewrite title tags and meta descriptions, one page at a time.

Then pull up your site on your phone, on cellular, not on the office wifi. If it crawls, that's the next job. A lot of people searching for help are on a bad connection and a small screen, and they won't wait around.

Fair is fair: SEO retainers aren't always a scam. A competitive market, an online store with hundreds of products, a company publishing content every week. That's ongoing work, and I'd argue it deserves ongoing help.

But a church, a camp, or a neighborhood shop with a site that changes a few times a year usually has a one-time fix list and then light maintenance. Ask what the monthly fee buys. If the answer is "rankings" or "optimization," ask for the list of what gets done each month. If it's the list above, you're paying monthly for something you could do once and keep.

If you take donations at the end of the year, do it before Giving Tuesday on December 1. A broken donation link costs you more than a low ranking ever will.