HOW DOES SEO WORK
How The Work Actually Runs.
The short answer is on this page, then the long one. Search works by making a site the clearest answer to a question somebody typed, and the work is mostly unglamorous and entirely checkable.
14 years300+ Las Vegas businesses5-star rated
HOW SEARCH ACTUALLY WORKS
How Search Actually Works.
Google does three things in order. It crawls, which means it visits your pages. It indexes, which means it decides what each page is about and stores it. Then it ranks, which means that when somebody types a question it puts the pages it judges clearest and most trustworthy at the top.
Answer engines added a fourth. Increasingly the person never clicks. They read a written answer assembled from pages that were readable and citable, so a page that is fine for Google and unreadable to an answer engine is now half a page.
Everything anyone sells you as search work sits under one of four headings: whether the site can be crawled and loaded, whether the pages answer the question, whether the local signals line up so the map and the profile agree, and whether the answer engines can read and cite you.
Crawl and index
Can Google reach every page, load it on a phone fast enough to count, and understand what it is looking at. This part is binary and checkable line by line.
The pages themselves
Titles, headings and body copy on the pages meant to earn the search. This is where most sites are thinnest.
Local signals
Your Google Business Profile, your reviews, and your name, address and phone number matching everywhere they appear. Most local buyers read the profile before they ever reach your website.
Answer engines
Whether the AI answers people now read can find your pages and cite them. This is the newest place a business quietly stops appearing, and it has to be checked live rather than assumed.
SEO PROCESS
The Four Steps Of My SEO Process.
Four steps. The last one is the point, because it is what makes the first three checkable.
1. Audit
I crawl the whole site, pull the live results for the terms you care about, and check what Google and the answer engines can read. It is published at its own URL.
2. The order
Every problem found gets ranked by what it is costing you. Each item names the page it touches and what changes on it. You approve the order before I touch anything.
3. The work
I do it. Pages get written and rewritten, technical problems get closed, the profile and the citations get handled, the reviews get asked for. This is where the outcome comes from.
4. The dated record
Every shipped item is filed with the date it shipped and the page it touched, and the item stays open until it closes.
WHAT YOU GET
The SEO Deliverables You Get.
Every one of these is a thing you can point at, which is the only kind of deliverable worth listing.
Get Free Audit
I will crawl your whole site, score it 0 to 100, and send you a ranked list of what is costing you customers. Free, about a day, no call attached unless you want one.
HOW LONG IT TAKES
How Long SEO Takes.
Search is slow at the start and then it compounds, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling you a position they do not control.
In the first month the audit lands, the plan gets approved, and the technical fixes start closing. Those changes you can verify immediately.
Between the second and the third month the written pages go live and the profile work starts showing up in how the listing behaves. This is usually when the first movement appears on the terms that were closest to ranking already.
From about the fourth month the compounding is what you are watching.
It assumes the plan gets approved without long gaps, because the calendar only moves when work ships. And it is a pattern, not a promise: what your site looked like on day one changes the shape of it.
WHAT IT COSTS
What The SEO Line Costs.
$1,000 a month for the whole SEO service. It is the same number I quote everybody.
One service is $1,000. Two together are $1,799. Three are $2,499. Nothing to pay to get started, so the first invoice matches every one after it.
Three months, because nothing real happens faster. If there is no movement by month three, you leave. Month to month after that.
You own all of it: the domain, the site, the analytics, the Search Console property and the Google Business Profile. Leave in any month with thirty days notice in writing and you leave with a full export.
What I will not do is promise you a position. Google itself cautions against anyone who does. What I will promise is that every change is dated on the page it touched, and you can check all of it without asking me first.
$1,000/month
Per service line, monthly
Three months, because nothing real happens faster. If there is no movement by month three, you leave. Month to month after that. No setup or onboarding fee, and you own everything.
One service $1,000 a month, two $1,799, three $2,499. No setup or onboarding fee.
COMMON QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW SEO WORKS
How SEO works, answered.
How does SEO work step by step?
Fix what stops a search engine reading the site, write the pages that answer what buyers search, get the local profile and reviews right, then earn links and mentions. In that order, because each step is worth less until the one before it is done.
Can I do SEO on my own?
Yes, and the first stretch is genuinely learnable. Titles, headings and the Google Business Profile are a weekend of reading. Knowing which twenty pages out of two hundred are worth the work is the part that takes years.
Is SEO dead or evolving in 2026?
Evolving, and what changed is where the answer gets shown rather than whether search still matters. Your buyers still start with a search. They just as often read the answer inside an AI summary now instead of clicking through, and getting named in those answers is mostly the same work that ranks a page.
How long before any of it shows?
Profile and technical work can move something inside a few weeks. Anything competitive is a few months, which is why the term is three of them and why you can leave at month three if nothing has moved.
Who actually does the work?
I do. Nobody sits between us and nobody inherits your account after you sign.
Where this work lands
The pages a reader of this one usually wants next.
LAS VEGAS DIGITAL MARKETER
Who does the work.
I am Justin Harris, a Las Vegas digital marketer.
I do the work on your account myself, and the same person you talk to is the person who ships it.
I studied design, then spent over a decade in agencies running production, account management, creative direction and finally the sales team, on work for UFC, Caesars Entertainment, the City of Las Vegas and Supercuts. The branding won American Advertising Federation awards, and in 2025 I spoke at the Neighborly national franchise conference on AI adoption.
What you get from that is a straight answer about what is realistic and a dated record of what changed, which is the part most owners cannot get out of what they already pay for.
More about how I workGET FREE AUDIT
The audit is free, so start there.
I crawl your whole site, score it 0 to 100, and send a ranked list of what is costing you customers. About a day. No call needed.
If the audit says I am not the fix, I will tell you.