After years in web development, the honest answer isn't a formula — it's a handful of principles most people ignore.
I will be honest with you. After years in web development, I’ve never found the magic equation. Not for lack of looking. There’s no formula you can plug your website into, no score you can benchmark cleanly against a competitor, no metric that tells you definitively why one site thrives while another quietly rots. Anyone selling you that certainty is selling you something.
What I have found is a small set of principles that, taken together, separate websites that work from websites that don’t. They’re not glamorous. They won’t fill a slide deck with impressive diagrams. But ignore them and no amount of clever design or paid traffic will save you.
Does It Actually Work?
This sounds so obvious it barely seems worth saying. It isn’t obvious. You would be astonished how many websites have broken links quietly accumulating in dark corners, contact forms that eat enquiries and return silence, pages that throw a 404 to a visitor who was ready to buy.
Check your basic metrics with some regularity. How long are people actually staying? Where are they leaving? Do your forms submit correctly? Can someone contact you without jumping through hoops? A website that doesn’t function is not a website – it’s a digital embarrassment sending quiet signals of neglect to every visitor who finds it.
Quick health check — do this today!
- Test every form from a fresh browser, including your contact and enquiry pages
- Check your site on a mobile device you don't use every day
- Run a broken link checker — free tools like Dead Link Checker take five minutes
- Look at your bounce rate and average session duration in Google Analytics
- Try to find your site via a Google search — does it even appear?
What Story Are You Telling?
Here is where most websites fail, and where most people who build websites quietly conspire to let them fail. Everyone gets absorbed in the branding: the colours, the typography, the layout, the technical architecture. These things matter. But they are the vessel, not the cargo.
The content is the cargo. If you are not spending at least 70% of your website time writing, refining, and improving your content, you are missing the point. It is seductively easy to endlessly tweak a hero image or fiddle with a CTA button while your actual story – who you are, why you’re different, why anyone should care – sits in first-draft form, written in an afternoon two years ago and never revisited.
Sales landing pages and marketing funnels have their place. But they work best when the underlying story is genuinely compelling, when there is a real point of view coming through. Visitors don’t want to be processed through a funnel. They want to understand something.
"Most companies focus too much on the food and not enough on the smell."
Rory Sutherland, one of the sharpest thinkers in marketing, has spent decades arguing that perception shapes value more than the product itself. His point is that we are not rational calculators weighing features against price – we are emotional creatures responding to signals, stories, and context. A restaurant with excellent food but a bad atmosphere loses customers that a mediocre place with a warm welcome keeps. His famous argument is that the intangible – the story, the feeling, the perception – is often more powerful than any objective quality.
Your website is exactly this: a carefully constructed atmosphere. The question is whether you’ve constructed it intentionally, or just allowed it to accumulate.
Is It Actually Interesting?
Be honest. Sit down and read your website the way a stranger would – someone who found you through a search, who knows nothing about you, who has half a dozen other tabs open. Does it make you yawn? Does it sound like every other business in your sector? Does it speak in the flat corporate passive voice that signals nothing and says less?
If the answer is yes to any of those questions, rewrite. Then rewrite again. This is not a one-time task. Writing well is revision, and revision takes as long as it takes.
Google’s Helpful Content guidelines are worth reading in full, because they give you an unusually direct window into how Google’s systems actually evaluate content. They frame it around three questions: Who created the content, How was it produced, and Why does it exist?
The “Why” is the one that matters most. Google is explicit: if the primary reason content exists is to attract search engine visits rather than to genuinely help people, that’s not what their systems are built to reward. The content should be useful to visitors who arrive directly – not just useful to a ranking algorithm.
Google's self-assessment questions — ask these about every page
- Does the content provide original information, research, or analysis — not just a summary of what others have said?
- Is this the sort of page you'd want to bookmark, share with a friend, or recommend?
- Would you expect to see this content referenced by a printed magazine, encyclopedia, or book?
- After reading it, will someone leave feeling they've learned enough to achieve their goal?
- Does it present information in a way that makes you want to trust it — clear sourcing, evidence of expertise, background about the author?
- Is the content written or reviewed by someone who demonstrably knows the topic well?
Google’s quality framework – E-E-A-T – prioritises Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trust. Of these, they are clear that trust is the most important. The others all feed into it. Content doesn’t need to demonstrate all four, but it needs to give readers a genuine reason to believe what it says. That means clear authorship, honest sourcing, and writing from a position of actual knowledge — not guesswork dressed up in confident prose.
A useful final test: would you bookmark this page? Would you send it to a colleague? If the honest answer is no, it isn’t ready yet.
Are You Working on It?
A website with metaphorical cobwebs is a problem. Not merely because fresh content gives search engines a reason to revisit you – though it does – but because it signals to every visitor that nobody is home. It suggests that the business stopped caring, or got busy, or assumed the website could run itself.
It cannot. A website is not infrastructure. It’s more like a garden: it grows well when tended and runs to weeds when left alone. That doesn’t mean constant redesigns or publishing for the sake of filling a calendar. It means regular, genuine attention – adding something when you have something worth saying, updating things that have gone stale, removing things that no longer reflect who you are.
Here Google’s guidelines contain a warning that surprises most people. They explicitly flag certain common “maintenance” behaviours as red flags rather than best practice. Changing the date on pages to make them appear fresh when the content hasn’t substantially changed is one. Adding or removing large amounts of content primarily to seem active – rather than because the content genuinely needed updating – is another. Google is not fooled by busyness. Genuine improvement is what counts.
Perhaps the most liberating thing Google says on this subject: there is no preferred word count. None. If you have been writing to a target length because someone told you Google prefers 1,500 words, or 2,000, or 800 – stop. The right length for a piece of content is whatever length it takes to fully answer the question without padding. No more, no less.
"Are you writing to a particular word count because you've heard Google has a preferred word count? No, we don't."
The lesson is that quality and consistency beat volume. One well-crafted piece that you return to and genuinely improve is worth more than ten thin articles written to a brief and never touched again.
A Simple Order of Priority
If I had to distil all of this into a working order of priority, it would look like this: start with the story. Before the design, before the SEO strategy, before the analytics setup – figure out what you actually want to say and how you want to say it. Then make sure everything functions correctly. Then monitor, listen, and refine.
The equation doesn’t exist. But the principles do. They’re unglamorous, they require patience, and they reward the people willing to do the work properly rather than those looking for the shortcut.
Your website is, in Sutherland’s terms, a signal. The question worth asking every six months is: what is it actually signalling?
