Most small business websites don’t need clever SEO. They need the basics done properly, because they usually aren’t. When I audit a site that “isn’t ranking”, the problem is nearly always something mundane and fixable rather than some dark art. Here are the seven things I check first, in the order I’d fix them.
1. Make sure Google can actually see the site
It sounds obvious, but a surprising number of sites are telling search engines to stay away without anyone realising. A “discourage search engines” tick box left on from when the site was being built. A noindex tag copied over from a staging site. A robots.txt file that’s broken and quietly saying “crawl nothing”.
Nothing else on this list matters if this is wrong. Check Google Search Console: if your pages aren’t indexed, that’s the whole job for today.
2. Give every page a proper title and description
Every page needs its own title of around sixty characters that says what the page is and, where it’s natural, where you are. “Boiler Repairs in Portsmouth | Smith Heating” beats “Home”. The description underneath, up to about 155 characters, doesn’t affect ranking directly, but it’s the sentence people read before deciding whether to click, so it earns its keep.
The common failure is that every page has the same title, or the title is just the business name. It’s invisible page by page and glaring the moment you crawl the site.
3. Sort out your Google Business Profile
For a local business this is arguably more important than the website itself. It’s the panel on the right, the map pin, the three businesses that appear under the map. Claim it, fill in every field, choose the right categories, add real photos, list your services and reply to reviews. Then make sure the name, address and phone number match exactly what’s on your website and everywhere else you’re listed. Inconsistency here is the single commonest reason a business is described wrongly, both by Google and, increasingly, by AI assistants.
4. One page per service, not one page for everything
If you offer six services and they all live on a single “Services” page, you’re asking one page to rank for six different searches. It won’t. Each service deserves its own page with its own title, a clear opening paragraph that says exactly what you do and where, and enough plain detail for someone to decide.
Write like you’re explaining it to a customer at the counter. Answer the question in the first paragraph, then elaborate. That’s what people want and, conveniently, it’s what search engines and answer engines want too.
5. Speed and mobile
Most of your visitors are on a phone, and Google measures how the site performs for them in the real world, not in a lab. Huge uncompressed images are the usual culprit; a page builder loading every feature it owns is the next. Compress the images, use modern formats, lazy-load anything below the fold and switch off what you’re not using. A site that loads in a couple of seconds on a mobile signal isn’t a luxury any more.
6. Fix the broken bits
Links that go to pages that no longer exist. Redirects that chain three deep. Images with no alt text at all. Headings that skip from an H1 to an H4 because someone liked the font size. None of these is a disaster on its own, but together they tell Google the site isn’t looked after. A crawl of the site lists them all in a few minutes; fixing them is usually an afternoon.
7. Add structured data
This is the one almost nobody has, and it’s becoming the one that matters most. Structured data is a small block of code that tells search engines and AI tools, unambiguously, who you are: your business name, address, phone, logo, and links to your other profiles. It’s how an answer engine confirms that the company on your website is the same company on Google Maps and Facebook. Yoast gives you a decent starting point on WordPress; filling in the gaps properly is a short job with a long payoff.
What comes after the basics
Once those seven are right, the site is in a position to build on. That’s when content starts earning its place, and in particular what I call search-term articles: pages written around the exact phrases your customers type, each one steadily picking up traffic for months and years without a monthly ad budget. But there’s no point writing articles for a site Google can’t see, which is why the boring list comes first.
Want a second pair of eyes?
If you’d like to know which of these your site is failing, I’m happy to run a quick audit and tell you plainly what’s broken, what’s missing and what’s worth doing. Get in touch and send me the address.
