Put your key information in text format too

Many entrepreneurs have their website built by someone who mainly focuses on how it looks. A beautiful photo with opening times overlaid, a video where the owner explains the services, a logo with the company name incorporated. For a visitor who opens the site and browses around, that works fine. For Google and AI assistants, it does not. They read the text that literally appears in the source code of your page. What is in an image, in a video, or in a separate PDF file that has not been crawled, a search engine does not recognize as text. At best, it can guess based on a filename, and that is not a reliable way to be found. What this means in practice Suppose you have an installation company and on your homepage is a large banner with the text "We operate throughout North Brabant". That banner is an image. For a visitor, that is clear, but for a search engine, that sentence does not exist. If someone searches for "installer North Brabant", your site has no chance based on that banner. The same applies to opening times that only appear in an embedded Google Maps widget, or to a list of services that you have scanned as a picture from a brochure and placed on the page. It seems complete, but it is invisible to a machine. This is also exactly why AI assistants like ChatGPT sometimes do not mention a business even though the website looks great. Those assistants work the same way as search engines — with text. No text, no match. What you can check today Go to your own website and try to select with your mouse text that you consider important: your services, your location, your opening times, your specialization. If you can select that text and copy it, it is in plain text on the page and a search engine can read it. If you cannot, it is probably hidden in an image. The solution is not complicated. You do not need to remove the beautiful banner or the video. Just put the core information there as plain text next to or below it as well. A sentence like "We are active throughout North Brabant and surrounding areas" under the banner costs you nothing in appearance, but gives search engines and AI assistants something to work with. It is a small point of attention, but it is exactly the kind of detail where many websites get stuck without the owner noticing. The site looks good, loads quickly, has a neat design, and yet it is barely found. Often the answer does not lie in complicated technology, but in something simple like this: is the information you consider important actually readable as text on the page.