How to optimise PDF files for Google and get them bringing in enquiries

Open Google, type site:yoursite.co.uk filetype:pdf (swap in your own domain, obviously) and have a look at what comes back. That’s every PDF Google has found on your website, and for a lot of small businesses it’s a bit of a horror show. Price lists from 2019 with the old rates still on. A capability statement titled “Copy of Untitled design”. A course guide that weighs 18MB. A brochure credited to someone called Gemma, who built the template in Canva years ago and has never heard of you.

Your PDFs are on Google whether you meant them to be or not. Google indexes them like any other page on your site, so they can rank, get clicked and bring you enquiries. Each one is also a little advert for how much care you take, and some of them are telling on you.

I’ve just worked through a HUUUGE batch of brochure PDFs for a client, and the same problems came up file after file. None of them were hard to fix. Once you know where to look, most take a couple of minutes per PDF. This is the order I’d tackle them in, ideally with a cup of tea and the Properties box already open.

Rename your PDF file before you upload it

The file name becomes the web address. Upload service_Prices_final_for-Nikki_October-FINAl-3.pdf and it lives at yoursite.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/service_Prices_final_for-Nikki_October-FINAL-3.pdf, which tells Google and your reader the square root of fuck all (and tells anyone paying attention that there were at least three versions and probably a row about it).

Name it what it is, in lower case, with hyphens between the words: bookkeeping-services-price-list.pdf or leadership-coaching-course-guide.pdf. If there’s a phrase people search for, use it, as long as it still reads like something a human would type.

Do this before you upload. Renaming afterwards changes the address, which brings its own headache (more on redirects further down).

How to change the title and author of a PDF

Every PDF has document properties tucked behind it, and Google often uses the title from those as the clickable headline in search results. If nobody fills it in, you get whatever the design tool put there. On our client batch, a whole run of brochures was titled “Copy of” something, which isn’t the first impression anyone wants.

In Adobe Acrobat, go to File, then Properties, then the Description tab. Type a proper title, written the way you’d write a page title for your site. Put your business name in the author field, not your designer’s, and not the name of whoever made the template you bought on Etsy.

While you’re in there, open the Initial View tab and set it to show the document title rather than the file name. That’s what people see in the browser tab when they open your PDF, and “Bookkeeping prices for Shrewsbury businesses” looks a lot better up there than “final-prices-NEW”.

If you’d rather go through your own PDFs (and the rest of your site) with someone sitting alongside you, book an SEO 1:1 and we’ll do it together.

Search your PDF for hidden template text

This was the one that made me put my coffee down. Several of the client’s brochures had white text sitting behind the footer that said “Book your free discovery call at www.yourwebsite.com/discovery”. (,– yes, that exact website address, not the client’s website address). It was white on white, so you couldn’t see it on the page. Google can read every word of it, and so can the AI tools busy summarising your business for people.

Open each PDF, press Ctrl+F (Cmd+F on a Mac) and search for yourwebsite, lorem, ABC and your name here. Then skim for placeholder sentences that never got replaced. One brochure we checked still promised that “The first webinar focuses on ABC. The second webinar focusses on DEF,” which is exactly the sort of thing a prospect remembers.

Check Google can read the text in your PDF

Try to highlight a sentence with your cursor. If you can, Google can read it. If the whole page lights up as one big block, you’re looking at a picture of words, and Google will mostly see a picture.

This happens with scanned documents and with pages exported as flattened images. The fix is to go back to the original file and export it again as a proper PDF, rather than scanning or screenshotting it.

How to add alt text to images in a PDF

Your team photo and your process diagram mean nothing to a screen reader, or to Google, unless something describes them. If your software can export a tagged PDF, do that, then add alt text to each image the same way you would on a web page.

Say what the picture shows in plain words. “Sarah and Dev from our Kettering office running a payroll workshop” tells everyone something. “team-photo-final” tells them nothing. If your software can’t tag PDFs, make sure the text around each image explains what it shows, so nobody misses out.

How to reduce PDF file size for mobile

Picture someone tapping the link to your brochure on their phone in a Tesco car park in Stafford, with one bar of signal and the engine running. Nothing happens for ten seconds, so they give up and look at someone else’s.

Most brochures can come in under 2MB without looking any different. Compress the file before you upload it, using Acrobat’s Reduce File Size option or a free online compressor. Then open the compressed version and check your photos haven’t gone blotchy.

Add links and contact details to the last page of your PDF

Someone has read all twelve pages and they’re keen. They get to the last page and there’s no link, no phone number and nothing telling them what to do next. So they close it, and the moment’s gone.

Link back to the right page on your site, not just your homepage, so the person reading about bookkeeping ends up on your bookkeeping page. Put your phone number and email on the last page too. Then click every link in the finished PDF yourself, because a 404 at the exact moment someone’s ready to buy is a horrible way to lose an enquiry.

Should you host other organisations’ PDFs on your website?

Short answer, no. It’s tempting to upload a professional body’s official guide to your site so everything’s in one place, but then you’re hosting their content and your copy is competing with their page in search results. When they update the guide, yours goes out of date and you’ll never know.

Delete it and link to their page instead. You still look helpful, and you’re not the one handing people last year’s rules.

Why re-exporting from Canva undoes your PDF fixes

This is the one that catches a lot of people out. You fix the title, the author, the alt text and the ghost text. Then someone spots a typo on page seven, goes back to Canva or InDesign, exports a fresh copy and uploads it over the top. Every fix is gone, because the fixes live in the PDF, not in the design file.

Keep the fixed PDF as your master copy and make small edits to that. If you do have to re-export from the design file, go back through the title, the ghost text, the alt text, the file size and the last page before it goes live.

Set up a 301 redirect when you rename a PDF

If you’ve renamed a PDF that was already on your site, every link to the old name now goes to a 404 page. That includes links from other websites, links in old emails and the address Google has stored in its index.

Set up a 301 redirect from the old address to the new one. Most SEO plugins and hosting control panels have a redirect tool, and it takes about a minute per file.

How to check what your PDF looks like in Google

Once a PDF is live and Google has picked it up, search for its title and read the result out loud, ideally with someone else in the room. Would you click it? If you wouldn’t, nobody else will either, so go back to the title and author settings and have another go.

And if that site: search at the start turned up forty PDFs you’d forgotten existed, you’re in very good company. Book an SEO 1:1 and we’ll work through them together, along with anything else on your site that’s hurting your SEO.