How Search Works and Where We Stand

1The three searches that matter

Every search that brings a client to an MSP is one of three kinds. Each one needs a different page, and the whole course is organised around that.

Our site already has pages aimed at all three. The problem, covered in section 4, is that it has far too many pages aimed at the first kind and 57 pages aimed at none of them.

2How a result gets built

Google does three things to every page on the web, in order. It crawls the page (fetches it, following links and the sitemap). It indexes it (reads it, decides what it is about, stores it). Then, when somebody searches, it ranks the stored pages and builds a results page. A page that is never crawled cannot rank. A page that is crawled but told "do not index" cannot rank either. Most of Rank Math's settings are instructions to those first two steps.

Here is what the results page for a service-plus-place search looks like, and which part of it each piece of our work controls.

Two things follow from the picture. The local pack and the organic results are separate systems. The local pack is fed by the Google Business Profile, which is managed at business.google.com and is not part of the website at all. Rank Math cannot put us in the local pack. What it can do is make the website agree with the profile (same name, address and phone, marked up so Google can read it), which is what module 08 sets up. And the title link and snippet under an organic result are, most of the time, the title and description we write in Rank Math. That is the one place in this whole picture where a sentence we type is shown to the searcher, so modules 05 and 07 spend real time on it.

3What Rank Math does and does not do

Rank Math is a WordPress plugin. It adds a settings area and a box under every page and post in the editor. Everything it does falls into four jobs.

It does not do four other things, and knowing that now saves a month of waiting for a plugin to fix something it cannot touch.

• It does not write the page. Its SEO score is a checklist of whether the page contains the words it should. A page can score 100 and say nothing a client wants to read. Module 07 covers which checks to take seriously.
• It does not manage the Google Business Profile. Reviews, categories, hours and photos live at business.google.com.
• It does not get other sites to link to us. Links from other sites are one of the things Google ranks on, and no plugin creates them.
• It does not make the site fast. Page speed is a theme, hosting and image question. Module 10 points at Google's own tool for measuring it.

4Where the site stands today

These facts come from reading www.hermeticnetworks.com from the outside on 2026-09-29: the page source of the homepage, the sitemaps, and robots.txt. Cloudflare blocked automated reads of the other pages, so page-level titles beyond the homepage are not known yet.

The plugin and the theme

The site runs WordPress with the Beaver Builder theme and page builder, and the SEO plugin today is Yoast SEO. It was built with the agency Tech Pro Marketing, which still has an author archive on the site. Moving from Yoast to Rank Math is a supported, one-click import (module 03), so nothing written in Yoast is lost.

The homepage as Google sees it

The title names two cities and no company. The description repeats "IT Support & Cybersecurity Services" from the title and spends its first four words on "Elevate your business with". Module 05 rewrites both. The missing Organization and LocalBusiness data is the gap module 08 fills.

Four problems the crawl shows

1. Several pages compete for the same search. Three pages are about managed IT in Richmond: /managed-services/, /managed-it-support-richmond-va/ and /managed-it-services-in-richmond-expertise-to-elevate-your-business/. Backup and disaster recovery has three, including one ending in -old. VoIP has two. Google picks one and the others dilute it. Module 02 decides which page survives each search.
2. 57 pages are about parks, museums and racetracks. Metro Richmond Zoo, Maymont, Richmond Raceway, Hollywood Cemetery (twice, at two URLs). They were built to say "Richmond" many times. They send Google the message that this is a travel site, and they are a third of the sitemap. Module 10 gives the options for them.
3. Pages nobody should find from Google are in the sitemap. Two thank-you pages, the appointment page, the cookie opt-out page, the author archive of a shared mailbox, and an "uncategorized" category. Modules 05 and 06 remove them.
4. Some addresses are wrong or too long. /phising-protection-service/ and /vulnerablity-assessment-service/ are misspelled. The cybersecurity page for Virginia Beach has a 91-character slug. Fixing an address means a redirect, which is module 09.

5The plan, in order

The course runs in the order the work has to happen. Nothing is installed until the page map exists, because the page map decides what the settings are for.

6Do this now

1. Open a private browser window and search each of the three kinds: "managed IT services Richmond VA", "Hermetic Networks", and one problem search from a recent client ticket. For each, write down whether a local pack appears, whether we are in it, and which of our pages (if any) appears in the organic results. This is the baseline; there are no numbers yet, only a yes or no per search.
2. Open https://www.hermeticnetworks.com/sitemap_index.xml and click into page-sitemap.xml. Scroll it once. Seeing the 57 tourism pages in a list makes module 02's decisions easier.
3. Find out whether a Google Search Console property exists for hermeticnetworks.com and who owns it. If the agency set one up, ask for owner access now, because module 06 needs it and access requests take time.
4. Find out whether the Google Business Profile for Hermetic Networks is claimed and who has manager access. Module 08 needs it.
5. Write one paragraph, from memory, that says what SEO is for Hermetic, what Rank Math will handle, and what it will not. Keep it for module 10, where it becomes the first line of the monthly review.

7Check yourself

1. A Richmond dentist's office manager searches "IT support Henrico". Which of the three search kinds is that, and which part of the results page would the call most likely come from?

   Answer

   Service plus place. The call most likely comes from the local pack or the first organic results. The local pack is fed by the Google Business Profile, the organic result by the Henrico service page and its Rank Math title and description.

2. Rank Math's SEO score on a page reaches 100. What does that prove, and what does it not?

   Answer

   It proves the page passes Rank Math's checklist: the focus keyword is in the title, URL, description and body, the page is long enough, it has links and images with alt text. It proves nothing about whether Google will rank it or whether a client will read it. The score is Rank Math's checklist. Google's ranking is a separate thing.

3. Three pages on the site are about managed IT services in Richmond. Why is that worse than one?

   Answer

   Google shows one page per site for a search most of the time. With three candidates it picks one, and the links, content and history are split three ways instead of building up one page. Module 02 picks the survivor and module 09 redirects the other two to it.

4. Why can Rank Math not put Hermetic in the local pack?

   Answer

   The local pack is built from Google Business Profile, which is managed at business.google.com and is separate from the website. Rank Math can only make the website confirm the profile: same name, address and phone, marked up as LocalBusiness data.

5. The site has 392 URLs in its sitemaps. Roughly how many of them are archive pages (tags, categories, authors), and why does that matter?

   Answer

   105: 84 tags, 18 categories, 3 authors. Archive pages are lists of links with no content of their own. Sending Google 105 of them alongside 287 real pages spends its crawl on pages that will not rank and can make the site look thin. Modules 05 and 06 take most of them out.

8Glossary

SEO

Search engine optimization. The work of making our pages the ones Google shows for the searches that matter to us.

Crawl, index, rank

The three things Google does to a page: fetch it, read and store it, and order it against other pages for a search.

Local pack

The map with three businesses that appears for a search with a place in it. Built from Google Business Profile. The website does not feed it.

Organic result

An unpaid result: a title link, a URL and a snippet. The title and snippet usually come from the page's Rank Math title and description.

Title and meta description

The two sentences about a page that Google starts from when it builds the result. Written in Rank Math.

Schema, structured data

Machine-readable facts about a page or business, such as LocalBusiness with a name, address and phone, that Rank Math adds to the page code.

Sitemap

An XML file listing the pages we want crawled. Ours is at /sitemap_index.xml.

robots.txt

A text file at the root of the site telling crawlers which paths they may fetch.

Noindex

An instruction on a page telling Google not to store it. Used for thank-you pages, search results and archives.

Redirect

An instruction that one address has moved to another. A 301 is permanent.

Google Business Profile

Our listing at business.google.com: name, address, hours, category, reviews. Feeds the local pack.

Google Search Console

Google's free tool showing which searches show our pages, how often they are clicked, and whether each page is indexed.

Yoast SEO

The SEO plugin on the site today. Rank Math imports its settings and page data.

9Sources

• Google Search Central, In-depth guide to how Google Search works: crawling, indexing, serving.
• Google Search Central, Title links and Snippets: Google chooses the title link and snippet and may rewrite them.
• Google, Google Business Profile Help: the profile is managed at business.google.com and feeds local results.
• Rank Math, How to score 100/100 in Rank Math tests: what the SEO score checks.
• Rank Math, Pricing: free and PRO plans, read 2026-09-29.
• Rank Math, Migrating from Yoast SEO to Rank Math: the import exists and what it carries over.
• Site facts from a crawl of www.hermeticnetworks.com on 2026-09-29: homepage source, sitemap_index.xml and its five child sitemaps, robots.txt.

Documentation read 2026-09-29. Rank Math changes often; where this page and the documentation disagree, the documentation is current.