Most SEO advice is written for people who do SEO for a living. This is the other kind: the fifteen checks that actually move rankings for a small business, in the order they matter. Nothing here needs a paid tool, and nothing takes more than an hour.
The foundations, do these first
- One page, one job. Every page on your site should answer one search. A plumber wants a boiler repair page, a bathroom installation page and an emergency page, not one Services page that mentions all three in passing. Google ranks pages, not businesses.
- Write the title tag like a listing. The title is the blue link people click. "Boiler repair in Guildford, fixed the same week" beats "Home, Smith Plumbing Ltd". Keep it under about 60 characters and put the service and the place in it.
- Write the meta description like an advert. It does not affect ranking directly, but it decides whether people click you or the result below you. One or two sentences, 150 characters or so, a reason to choose you.
- One h1 per page, and make it say something. The main heading should state the service and the area, not "Welcome". Google reads it as the page's subject line.
- Check you resolve to one address. Your site should live at exactly one of http, https, www and bare domain, with the other three redirecting to it. Four versions of the same site splits your authority four ways.
Local signals, where small businesses win
- Claim and complete your Google Business Profile. For local searches this matters as much as the website. We wrote a separate guide to setting it up properly.
- Put your name, address and phone on the site, in the footer of every page, written exactly the way it appears on your Google profile. Consistency is the signal.
- Add LocalBusiness schema. A small block of structured data that tells Google your name, address, opening hours and service area in a format it cannot misread. Your developer can add it in minutes.
- Build a page per area you serve, if you genuinely serve distinct towns. A real page with real local detail, not the same paragraph with the town name swapped. Google noticed that trick years ago.
- Ask every happy customer for a review. Reviews are a ranking factor on the map and the strongest conversion factor everywhere. Make asking part of finishing a job.
The technical five
- Pass the speed test. Slow pages rank worse and convert worse. Run PageSpeed Insights on your phone, not your office wifi. Anything under about 70 on mobile is costing you. More on this in our speed guide.
- Make it flawless on a phone. Well over half of local searches happen on one. Text readable without zooming, buttons pressable with a thumb, no sideways scrolling.
- Add alt text to images that carry meaning. Describe what the image shows. It is an accessibility duty first and a ranking signal second.
- Submit a sitemap in Search Console. Free, takes ten minutes, and it is how you find out what Google actually thinks of your site: what is indexed, what failed, and which searches you already appear in.
- Fix broken links. Every 404 is a dead end for the visitor and wasted attention from the crawler. Search Console lists them for you under Pages.
What to ignore
Meta keywords do nothing and have done nothing since 2009. Submitting your site to directories nobody visits does nothing. Paying a monthly fee to be "kept ranked" for terms nobody searches does worse than nothing, because it spends the budget that could have fixed the list above.
Work through the fifteen and you will be ahead of most local competitors, because most local competitors have done none of them.