SEO for small businesses: a plain-English starter guide

Most SEO advice aimed at small businesses is either written for people who already do it for a living, or it is a sales page wearing a blog post’s clothes. This is neither. It is the short version of what we tell clients on the first call.

Start with what people actually type

Ranking for “web design” is not the goal. Ranking for the thing a customer in your town types the week they need you is the goal, and that phrase is usually longer, duller and far less contested.

Write the list before you write the pages

Open a document and put down every question a customer has asked you in the last month. That list is worth more than any keyword tool, because it came from people who went on to buy something.

Check what the phrase is really asking for

Search the phrase and look at what is already ranking. If the results are all shops and you have written a guide, you have the wrong page for the phrase, however good the guide is.

Fix the site before you add to it

A new page on a slow, badly structured site is a new page nobody finds. The order matters here: the foundations first, then the content.

Speed is a ranking factor and a sales factor

A site that takes four seconds to load on a phone loses visitors before it loses rankings. The fix is usually images, and it is usually cheap.

One page per thing you sell

If one page covers six services, it competes with itself for all six. Split it, and give each page the room to answer the question properly.

Give it time, and measure the right thing

Rankings move slowly and they move unevenly. Watch enquiries, not positions: a page that ranks fourth and gets called is worth more than one that ranks first and does not.

What to look at each month

Search Console tells you which queries brought people in and which pages they landed on. Those two numbers are enough for the first year.

Where most people go wrong

Buying links, publishing thin pages for every nearby town, and rewriting the homepage every quarter. None of it works, and the last one actively undoes progress you have already made.