When you type a question into Google, or ask ChatGPT, somebody's page ends up being the one that answers you. My job is making sure the right page is there, that it actually answers the question, and that you can trust what it says.
That's it. The industry calls it SEO, which stands for search engine optimization, a name almost nobody outside the industry finds helpful. Here's the version I'd give you over dinner.
Picture a great hardware store on a street with no sign out front. Everything you need is inside, and nobody ever walks in. A lot of websites are that store. Being found means that when someone asks the exact question your page answers, your page is one of the first things they see.
The technical side of that, in plain terms: what technical SEO is for.
Once someone clicks, they want the answer now, in the words they'd use, not buried under four paragraphs of throat-clearing. Google and the AI tools read the page too, and they only send people to pages they can make sense of. So the page has to be clear to a person in a hurry and to a machine at the same time.
Then they have to believe it, and trust is built out of boring stuff. A number with a date next to it beats a number without one. Saying "we don't know yet" (when you don't) beats guessing. People pick the page they trust, and so do the AI tools when they're deciding whose answer to repeat.
These are real questions people type, and real pages I built to answer them. Pick one.
Every search is somebody raising their hand and saying "I need this." When your page isn't the one that answers, they go with whoever's is. That's the whole business case, and it's the same for a corner bakery as it is for a national brand.
At my full-time job I do this for big companies, which is about all I'm allowed to say about them. On nights and weekends I do it for my own sites, where I can show you everything, mistakes included.
The part I'm proudest of is the boring part: I build automated checks that read a site before it goes live and refuse to publish anything wrong. It means the same mistake doesn't happen twice, which is most of the job, honestly.
The portfolio has every site I've built, a story that worked and one that didn't, and the numbers behind both.