SEO is the work that makes Google think your page answers best what somebody typed. It is neither a trick nor a deal: Google does not know what you sell, it only sees what you wrote, how the site is built, and how many people found it useful.
SEO has three layers: technology, content and time. The first can be fixed in an afternoon, the second takes months of writing, and the third cannot be bought.
What can you do without paying?
More than you think. The free part of Google SEO is not a watered-down version — it is the same work, done by you. Four things that need no paid tool at all:
Google Search Console. Free, from Google, and it shows which terms you appear for, how many click, and which pages it could not crawl. Anyone discussing SEO without opening this is guessing.
Google Business Profile. If you have premises or a service area, this often brings more enquiries than the website itself. It is free, and we have written up the setup in eight steps.
Sorting out titles and headings. Every page needs its own <title> naming the question that page answers. It is word-processing-level work and the most commonly skipped step.
Speed. PageSpeed Insights tells you free of charge what is slowing the site down. Half the fixes — oversized images, unused fonts — need no developer.
What does it cost if you don't do it yourself?
Google SEO prices in Hungary sit in roughly three bands, and what separates them is scope, not quality.
A one-off audit typically costs tens to hundreds of thousands of forints. You get a list of what is wrong and work from there yourself. Good if you have a developer or marketer of your own to do it.
Ongoing work runs on monthly retainers. For a local service business this is considerably less than for a national online store, because there are fewer pages to fix and a smaller field to compete in.
Large one-off projects — a migration, adding languages, a rebuild — are priced per project. The spread is widest here, because most of the work is untangling the old system.
What you should not hear in any band: a guaranteed first position. First place is decided by Google's ranking, which changes constantly. Anyone guaranteeing it either does not understand, or does and says it anyway.
How long before it shows?
Technical fixes can show within weeks, because Google re-crawls the site. Movement from content usually becomes measurable around the third or fourth month. That is not slowness but how the system works: Google first watches what people do with your page, and only then decides.
Which is also why switching provider every three months is a bad idea. Month four is when you find out whether the first three were worth anything.
And if you have an app rather than a website?
App store optimisation — ASO — is its own trade, because it happens in the App Store and Play Store rather than in Google. The logic is similar but the levers differ: title, short description, keyword field, screenshots and reviews decide it.
What they share: the stores also watch what the user does after finding you. An app that is downloaded and deleted two days later slides down — like a page everyone bounces off.
If you have a website alongside the app, the two help each other: search traffic arriving at the site turns into downloads, and the other way round.
What not to do
Do not buy links. Do not copy your competitor's copy. Do not stuff the same phrase everywhere — Google has understood synonyms since 2011, and keyword stuffing now does more harm than good. And do not start at all if the site is so slow or confusing that the visitor bounces anyway: fix the site first.
SEO is not about traffic but about turning up for the right question. A hundred visitors looking for what you sell are worth more than ten thousand who are not.
Where to next
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