Are you discovering that SEO is daunting? Do you lack time to learn the intricacies of this ever-changing and often puzzling field? Here’s the guide for you.

We all know a fair amount of small businesses owners. They’re busy people! They’re fantastic at what they do, but when it comes to marketing their business online, most are amateurs, to say the least.

This is not meant to be mean. Simply said, they’re busy—they don’t have time to learn SEO.

But even if they did, they’d likely face the same issues as many other small businesses:

They don’t have much technical expertise: SEO isn’t that complicated, but “being good at computers”—as my Nana would say—is a definite requirement if you’re doing this yourself.

They don’t have the budget: Knowing what needs doing is only half the battle. Hiring marketing staff to do the work is the other more expensive half.

Everything above sound familiar?

This article focuses on simple, low-cost and quick wins, many of which need only be done once to have a positive lasting effect. I’ll also talk about outsourcing some of this stuff, so you have more time to focus on the crucial business activities that put money in your pocket.

Still, I’m going to assume that you already have the absolute basics covered in that:

You have a website.

You’ve already installed Google Analytics, Search Console, Bing Webmaster Tools, etc.

You’ve claimed or created your Google My Business listing (if relevant).

You get some traffic—not necessarily from search engines.

You’re a local business with only a few locations or are in a service-based industry.

Let’s go.

Before we get started

First things first—we need to cover a few more basics.

Let’s begin by making sure that Google has your website indexed.

Being indexed simply means that Google is aware of your website. It doesn’t necessarily mean you rank for anything worthwhile, but it does mean there’s a chance of your site popping up when people search for relevant queries.

Not indexed = no chance of ever ranking for anything.

Luckily, there are two easy ways to check whether your site is indexed.

The first is with Google Search Console.

The valid number of pages should be roughly equal to the number of pages on your site.

Not a Search Console user? You should be. It’s free, so sign up.

The other, slightly less accurate way is to go to Google.com, then search for site:yourwebsite.com.

If Google returns at least one result, they know at least part of your site exists. If they return roughly the same number of results as pages on your site, then they likely have all pages on your site indexed—which is good.

If there are no results, then Google has no clue that your site exists.

NOTE. It looks like First Sight Videos has 2,800 pages indexed in Google. That’s worrying. I wouldn’t expect them to have more than 30–50 pages on their site. This is something we’ll tackle later.

You can also use the same query in Bing to check for indexation there.

Not indexed? Read our guide to submitting to search engines.

Before we move on to the “meat” of this guide, I also recommend starting a website crawl in Ahrefs Site Audit. It only takes a minute or two to set-up, and it’ll make life easier as we progress through this guide.

Now let’s get started with this SEO stuff!

  • 1. Create a logical website structure

    Here’s what Google says in their article listing steps to a Google-friendly site:

    Build your site with a logical link structure. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.

    In plain English, that means that your site should make sense to navigate. Your homepage should link to your other important pages (about, content, services). Your services page should list and link to pages describing individual services. And so on.

    This may sound obvious, but I’ve found that with small business websites especially, this often isn’t the case.

    Things usually start pretty logically, but as they add pages over time, things fall apart.

    How do you fix this? The trick is to try to look at your website with fresh eyes and make sure it has a logical structure. Start at your homepage and see if you can logically find—and navigate to—all your important pages quickly and easily.

  • 2. Keep your site free of broken pages and links

    Broken stuff on a website is never good. Not for visitors, and not for SEO.

    Think about it: what does a website with broken pages and links say to you? Most likely that it’s rarely updated, neglected, and that the site owner doesn’t care about keeping their website functioning properly.

  • 3. Make sure every page has an enticing meta title and description

    Every page on your website needs a unique meta description and title.

    Not only should every page on your website have a unique meta title and description, but they also need to:

    Not exceed the length at which Google begins to truncate them in the search results.

    Entice search engines users to click-through to your site.

    Contain your target keyword (optional—but recommended)

  • 4. Polish your written copy

    Most pages on your website will have some written copy—and this needs to be on point.

    Google looks at the content on a website to help understand whether that website or web page is a good result for a particular query. If there is little or no content on your web pages—or if that content isn’t well-optimized—then they’re going to have a difficult time doing that.

    That’s not to say that you have to write 2,000-word essays on every page.

  • 5. Get citations by listing your business in relevant places on the web

    Google doesn’t only look at the copy and structure of your website when determining where you should rank. They look at many off-page SEO factors too—one of which is citations.

    Here’s why you should care about citations from an SEO point of view:

    Citation signals are one of the top local ranking factors. Moz says that this is the case for Google’s “snack pack” and “regular” organic search results.

    Google isn’t the only search engine people use. Imagine that you’re looking for a local plumber. You might use a search engine like checkatrade.com, which specializes in helping users find trusted tradespeople in their local area.

    So where do you start?

    Perhaps the most important citation of all—at least from the perspective of ranking and appearing in Google for relevant terms—is Google My Business.

  • 6. Ask for links from the businesses with whom you’re affiliated

    Link building—it’s something we have to talk about.

    Links are the foundation of the original PageRank formula, which is the formula on which Google is based. Google has also admitted that links are one of the top three ranking factors (as of 2016).

    Furthermore, when we studied almost one billion web pages, we found a positive correlation between referring domains (links from unique websites) and traffic.

    The problem? Link building can be daunting, especially for small business owners.

    So, I’m not going to cover any elaborate strategies. I’m simply going to recommend one thing as a starting point: ask for links from businesses with whom you have existing relationships—e.g., suppliers, stockists, etc.

Going further…

Here are some other SEO tasks you might want to consider going forward:

Improve site speed: Google says that 53% of mobile website visitors will abandon the page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Many things can make your site slow—plugins, bloated HTML, etc. Check how fast your web pages load using Google’s PageSpeed Insights tool or GTMetrix. If those tools report a slow website, it may be worth hiring someone to improve your site speed. Here are some of the things you may want to work on.

Add schema markup: Schema markup can help Google to understand your website better. It can also change how your web pages appear in the search results. If you’ve ever Googled a recipe and seen review stars, cooking time, and other data in the search results, that is thanks to schema markup. For small businesses with a physical location, I would recommend looking into the LocalBusiness markup. If you have product or service pages on your site, look into Product and Service markup. Note. As implementing such markup correctly can be complicated, it’s best to hire a freelancer to do this for you. Give them a spreadsheet with all the details they need and they can implement the markup on-site.

Start a blog (or work on your existing blog): Blogging is one of our main sources of new business and leads at Ahrefs. That’s hardly surprising, as we now get more than 220,000 visits per month from Google alone—an increase of 1,134% in around three years. If you don’t already have a business blog, chances are you’re leaving money on the table. Got a blog already? Read our list of 7 ways to promote your blog.

As far as we’re concerned, all of these things—including tackling issues reported in Site Audit—fall outside the scope of small business SEO. That’s because they’re somewhat advanced and can be costly.

They are, however, very much worthwhile if you have the budget to spare.

Final thoughts

SEO isn’t that complicated.

For small businesses, taking care of these SEO basics is often enough to put you ahead of the competition.