Small business SEO: five fixes that actually did something

I do occasional site work for small businesses. Mostly WordPress, mostly owners who were sold something expensive that never worked. Same handful of problems every time.

Here is what I fix first, roughly in order of how much it usually matters.

1. Page speed on mobile, not desktop

Owners test on their laptop on office wifi and think the site is fast. Their customers are on a phone on patchy data. Run PageSpeed Insights on mobile only and ignore the desktop score entirely.

Nine times out of ten the culprit is uncompressed hero images. A 4MB JPEG in a slider is very common. Convert to WebP, resize to the size it actually displays at, done. That one change often halves load time.

1. One page per thing you sell

A single services page listing eight offerings will rank for none of them. Split it. Each service gets its own page, its own title tag, its own set of questions answered.

This feels like busywork and it is the single highest return thing on the list.

1. Title tags written for humans

Most small sites have a homepage titled "Home" and an about page titled "About Us". That is thirty characters of prime search real estate spent on nothing.

Put what the business does and where it does it in the title. It is not clever, it just works.

1. Google Business Profile before anything else

If the business serves a physical area, the profile matters more than the website for a while. Photos, hours, categories, and a steady trickle of reviews. Free, and most owners have never claimed theirs.

1. Actually check what Search Console says

Not what a plugin says. Not what an audit tool says. Search Console tells you which queries the site already shows up for, and there are usually two or three you had no idea about. Build pages around those first, because you already have traction there.

What I stopped bothering with

Keyword density, meta keywords, and buying links. None of it moved anything and the last one is a good way to get penalised.

A recent example of the above applied to a real site: Hooked on Africa Fishing Charters in Cape Town. Seasonal business, split service pages, heavy image compression. Straightforward stuff, but the boring version is the version that works.

Curious what other people put at the top of this list. I suspect I underrate internal linking.