Digital advertising
How much Google Ads costs: spend, management fees and a realistic budget
How much Google Ads costs: what you pay Google, what an agency charges to manage it and what budget you need for it to pay off.
21/09/2026
SEO stands for Search Engine Optimization. It is the set of techniques, strategies and actions applied to a website to improve its visibility in the organic (unpaid) results of search engines such as Google.
The ultimate goal of SEO is to attract qualified traffic to your website: people actively searching for what you offer and likely to become customers.
To understand SEO you first need to understand how search engines work. Google follows a three-stage process:
Google uses robots (known as crawlers or spiders) that travel the web following links. These bots visit pages and read their content. To make this easier, it is important to have a sitemap and a properly configured robots.txt file.
After crawling, Google processes and stores pages in its index, an enormous database. Not every crawled page gets indexed: Google filters out anything it considers duplicate, low quality or blocked. You can request indexing for your pages through Search Console.
When someone runs a search, Google queries its index and sorts the results using hundreds of factors. The goal of SEO is to optimise your site so Google sees it as the best answer for the searches that matter to your business.
SEO is traditionally split into three broad areas that complement each other:
Everything you can optimise inside your own website:
Actions outside your website that build its authority:
The technical foundation that lets Google crawl and index properly:
Google uses more than 200 factors to decide rankings. These are the most important ones:
On-Page SEO is where you have full control. These are the key elements to optimise:
Everything starts with solid keyword research. You need to identify the terms your potential customers search for and the intent behind them.
The text shown under the title in the search results. It is not a direct ranking factor, but it affects CTR. Maximum 155 characters.
Short, descriptive URLs containing the main keyword. For example: /what-is-seo/ instead of /page?id=123
Connect your pages to each other with relevant links. It spreads authority and helps Google understand your site structure.
Off-Page SEO focuses on building your site’s authority through external signals:
Backlinks (links from other websites) work like votes of confidence. The more quality sites link to you, the more authority you build. But not all links are worth the same:
Read our complete guide on what link building is to learn the best strategies.
SEO is one of the most profitable investments any online business can make. Unlike advertising, the results last over time and the cost per visit falls as your rankings improve.
That said, SEO takes technical know-how, time and a well-defined strategy. At JRC Web we have spent years helping businesses improve their visibility on Google with tailored, results-driven SEO strategies.
As an SEO agency in Barcelona, we offer everything from full SEO audits to end-to-end management of your rankings, including content, link building and technical optimisation.
Want to improve your website’s rankings? Get in touch and we will review your case with no commitment.
Technical SEO is the foundation everything else is built on. If your site has technical problems, the rest of the work can be wasted.
Google measures performance through Core Web Vitals: LCP (loading speed), INP (interactivity) and CLS (visual stability). A slow site loses both rankings and visitors.
Google uses mobile-first indexing: it indexes and evaluates the mobile version of your site first. If it is not optimised for mobile, your rankings will suffer.
Local SEO is essential for businesses serving customers in a specific area: restaurants, shops, home services, professionals and so on.
The first step is to create and optimise your Google Business Profile (formerly Google My Business). It is what appears in the side panel and on Google Maps when someone searches for your business or for services in your area.
The local pack is the set of three map results that appear for local searches. Showing up there can bring a lot of traffic and direct phone calls.
There are plenty of free and paid SEO tools. These are the essential ones:
Search Console and Analytics are enough to get going. Paid tools become useful when you want to dig deeper into competitor analysis and link building.
It is important to understand the difference between SEO and SEM in order to choose the right strategy:
They are not mutually exclusive. The ideal strategy combines both: SEM for immediate results while SEO builds up. Over time, SEO can carry more of the weight and reduce your dependence on advertising.
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