What actually moves a small business up the search results
Most SEO advice is written for sites with a marketing department. Here is the short list that matters when the site belongs to a business with none.
Every business owner who has ever paid for a website has been told to "do SEO". Almost nobody is told what that means in practice, which is why so much money goes into it for so little return.
Here is the honest version. Search engines are trying to answer a question somebody typed. Your site ranks when it is the best available answer and when nothing about it makes answering awkward. Everything below is one of those two things.
Write the page somebody is actually searching for
The single most common failure is a site with five beautiful pages when the business sells eleven things. Somebody searching for the eleventh thing finds a competitor, because the competitor wrote a page about it.
This is not a trick. If you fit commercial kitchens in Laois, there should be a page whose subject is fitting commercial kitchens in Laois. Not a paragraph on a services page. A page.
- One page, one subject. Two pages competing for the same phrase split their own strength.
- Write it for the buyer. "How much does it cost, how long does it take, what happens if it goes wrong" beats any amount of keyword arrangement.
- Two hundred words cannot answer those questions, so a two hundred word page will not rank for them. That is the whole reason long pages win, and it has nothing to do with word count as a target.
Say who you are in a way a machine can read
Structured data is the least glamorous item on this list and one of the most reliable. It is a small block of JSON in the page that states plainly: this is a business, here is its name, address, phone number, opening hours, and here is what this particular page is about.
Google does not have to guess, and the result shows up as the extra detail under a search result — the star ratings, the FAQ that unfolds, the address and hours. Those cost nothing and take space that would otherwise go to a competitor.
Be the same business everywhere
Your name, address and phone number appear on your site, on Google Business Profile, on directory listings, on your invoices. When they disagree — an old phone number here, a former address there — every one of those disagreements is a reason to trust you a little less.
Fixing this is dull, unpaid work with no visible output on the day it is done. It is also one of the few things that reliably moves local results.
Make the site quick, then stop
Speed matters, with a caveat that is rarely said out loud: it matters until the site is quick, and then it stops mattering. Going from a four second page to a two second page is worth real money. Going from 96 to 100 in a testing tool usually is not, and the pursuit of that last point has eaten more agency hours than it has ever earned.
We wrote about where that line sits, and why a perfect mobile score is sometimes unreachable no matter what you do, in the article on site speed.
Earn a mention somewhere real
Links still matter, and buying them still works right up until it catastrophically does not. The version that survives is unglamorous: the local paper, the trade association, the supplier who lists their installers, the customer who writes about the project. A handful of those beats a thousand purchased ones and cannot be taken away from you in an update.
What we do not bother with
- Keyword density. Not a thing. Has not been a thing for a long time.
- Meta keywords. Ignored by every major search engine for close to two decades.
- Submitting your site to hundreds of directories. At best inert.
- Blogging weekly because somebody said to. Twelve pages nobody searches for do not add up to one page somebody does.
The order to do it in
- Write the missing pages — the ones for things you sell but never described.
- Fix the business details so they match everywhere.
- Add structured data.
- Get the site quick enough to stop being a problem.
- Then, and only then, worry about links and publishing.
Most sites we are asked to rescue are stuck on step one, and most SEO proposals they have been sent start at step five.