They know what web design is: that’s the colours and pictures. So everything else is called SEO. Sometimes it’s even shorthand for “getting the damn thing to work at all”.

They usually have a new website and they are puzzled why their results are so bad. They come to me asking about SEO.

I explain that all websites have 2 stages:

I explain that yes I can do SEO but maybe we need to look at the whole picture first. SEO is one way to get more people to visit a website. One of several ways.

But it’s very often the second stage that needs fixing: they do get some visitors but they don’t get any action.