SEO gets sold as complicated and expensive more often than it needs to be. A real amount of it is free, doesn’t need specialist software, and comes down to doing the basics properly and consistently. Here’s what we’d tell any small business starting from nothing.
1. Claim your Google Business Profile
If you haven’t done this yet, it’s the single highest-value thing on this list. A completed, accurate profile is what gets you into the local map pack for searches with local intent, which for most small businesses is where the real buying-intent traffic is. Fill in every section: categories, opening hours, service area, photos. An incomplete profile is a missed opportunity that costs nothing to fix.
2. Get customer reviews
Reviews on your Google Business Profile, Trustpilot or Yell aren’t just for customers deciding whether to trust you, they’re a signal search engines weigh too. A steady flow of recent reviews outperforms a pile of old ones, so build asking for a review into your normal process rather than treating it as an occasional campaign.
3. Get title tags and heading structure right
Your title tag is usually the first thing anyone sees in search results, so it needs to say clearly what the page is about and give someone a reason to click. Keep it under roughly 60 characters so it doesn’t get cut off. Heading tags (H1 down to H6) should reflect the real structure of the content, one H1 per page, with H2s and H3s used to organise sections logically, not for decoration.
4. Build backlinks through directories and citations
Business directory listings are one of the more accessible ways to build backlinks, and even where the link itself is “nofollow” and doesn’t pass direct ranking value, the citation still matters for local SEO and for general visibility. Keep your business name, address and phone number identical across every listing. Inconsistent details across directories is a common, avoidable problem that quietly undermines local rankings.
5. Set up Google Search Console and Analytics
Search Console tells you what Google sees on your site, including indexing errors, and shows you the real search queries bringing people in, which is often different from what you’d guess. Analytics shows what happens once they arrive. Both are free, and running a site without them means making decisions blind. If you’re setting up analytics, make sure your cookie consent banner is compliant before it goes live, not after.
6. Submit an XML sitemap
A sitemap is a straightforward file that lists every page you want indexed, and submitting it through Search Console helps search engines find and crawl your site efficiently, particularly useful for a larger site or one that’s just launched. Most website platforms generate one automatically. Confirming it’s being read without errors in Search Console takes a few minutes and is worth doing.
7. Use internal linking deliberately
Linking between your own pages, from a blog post to the relevant service page, or from one service to a related one, helps search engines understand which pages matter most and gives visitors an obvious next step. Most small sites under-link internally simply because nobody thinks about it as a task. Once a page is published, look for two or three places elsewhere on the site that could reasonably link to it.
8. Start blogging, and write for a real question
Blog content does two jobs at once: it gives search engines fresh, indexable content, and it gives potential customers a reason to find you before they’re ready to buy. The posts that perform tend to answer a specific question a real customer would type into Google, instead of covering a broad topic in general terms. If you’re not sure what to write about, your own inbox and DMs are usually full of the questions people are already asking.
9. Do proper keyword research
Keywords are still the core signal for how search engines match your pages to what someone’s searching for. Broad, high-competition terms are hard for a small business to rank for; longer, more specific phrases (long-tail keywords) usually convert better and face far less competition. A free tool like Google’s own Keyword Planner, or simply Google’s autocomplete and “People also ask” boxes, will tell you more than most paid tools for a business just getting started.
10. Format content to win featured snippets
Answering a specific question directly, in roughly 40 to 50 words, right after the heading that asks it, gives you a real shot at appearing in the featured snippet position above the standard results. FAQ-style sections with clear question headings work particularly well for this, and adding basic FAQ schema markup helps search engines understand the format even further.
Done properly and consistently, this covers a genuine amount of ground for free. Where it usually runs out of road is the technical layer underneath it: site architecture, migrations, and the kind of analytics setup that tells you what’s converting, not just what’s getting traffic. That’s where our SEO and analytics work picks up.
