What a website needs to show up on Google and ChatGPT

Why a single long homepage does not rank

Search engines index URLs. One URL is treated as one topic. A homepage that lists every service, the team, the address and a contact form in one scroll gives Google a single thin document to work with. There is nothing else to rank for “hair colour Lisbon”, “heat pump installation”, or whatever you actually sell.

AI assistants work the same way. ChatGPT and similar tools pull from pages that clearly answer one question. If the answer is buried in paragraph four of a catch-all homepage, that page is a weak source. A dedicated service page with a clear heading is a strong one.

A site that can rank needs, at minimum:

• A unique URL for each service people search for
• A title and H1 that match that search, not a slogan
• Links from the homepage and nav so the page can be crawled
• Enough copy to answer the question — not a three-line teaser

Speed, in plain language

If the first screen takes more than a couple of seconds on a phone, people leave. Google notices. ChatGPT will not cite a page it cannot fetch quickly. “Fast” is not a design mood. It is whether the page is usable before the visitor has second thoughts.

The usual culprits on local-business sites are page builders that ship a truckload of JavaScript, unoptimised photos, and third-party widgets (chat, maps, review carousels) loaded before anything useful. None of that helps you get found.

What we actually ship:

• Compressed images at the size they display — not 4,000-pixel originals
• A host close to Portugal, not a shared plan on the other side of the Atlantic
• Less JavaScript on the first load than a typical template site
• No homepage that weighs several megabytes before the phone number appears

One page per service, in the language people search

Portuguese clients search in Portuguese. English-speaking clients search in English. One mixed homepage satisfies neither. The fix is not a language toggle that rewrites the same thin page. It is a real page per service, in each language, with matching titles and content — and hreflang so Google knows they belong together.

• Separate URLs: /pt/servicos/… and /en/services/…, not a query string or a popup
• Matching content: the same offer, written for how people search in that language — not a machine dump
• Hreflang: pairs those URLs. It does not make one page rank in two languages
• Service pages, not only a blog: a blog post can support a topic; the page you want to rank for the service should be the service page

Technical SEO that matches the real URLs — and content ChatGPT can cite

Technical SEO is unglamorous on purpose. Titles, canonicals, hreflang and schema have to describe the page that actually loads. If the canonical points at a different URL, or the schema still says last year’s address, you have asked Google to trust a page you have not finished.

• Title: a clear promise for that URL, under 60 characters. Not the brand name first.
• Canonical: this URL, with the trailing slash you actually serve.
• Schema: the organisation, the page type, and FAQs when you have real questions — not a dump of every type you can name.
• Answers: write the question in the heading and answer it in the first screen. That is what both Google and ChatGPT extract.

That is the standard we build into every Lowy site, and the standard this site follows. A brochure you paid for last year can usually be fixed in parts. A free audit will show what to change first — speed, missing service pages, or markup that does not match the live URLs.

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Frequently asked questions