Small business SEO: what to do first when you've got about an hour a week

Nearly every guide to small business SEO is a list of about twenty things, and the twenty things are usually correct. Site speed, titles, headings, content, links, schema, reviews, local citations. Nobody argues with the list. The trouble is that a list has no order in it, and if you're running the business and doing the work and doing the invoicing on Sunday night, order is the only part that matters.

Give the same list to a company with a marketing person and they'll work through it. Give it to a two-van operator and one of two things happens. Either they do the item that sounds most like SEO, which is usually the blogging, or they hand the lot to someone who does all twenty in parallel and reports on all twenty, and the phone doesn't change.

So this is the order. Five things first, in this sequence, and a genuinely long tail of stuff that's useful later and is mostly a waste of your evening right now.

Count the enquiries before you touch anything

Start here, because it changes what you do next.

Rankings are a proxy. Enquiries are the thing. Those two come apart more often than people expect, especially for local businesses, where you can climb ten spots on a search nobody in your suburb is typing and drop nothing into your inbox.

I had a plumber ring us in March with an eleven-page monthly report in front of him, green arrows everywhere, keywords moving from position 34 to position 19. Fourteen months of paying for it. His question was fair: "Is this good? Because the phone's the same." Nobody had ripped him off, the work was real work, but not one line of that report told either of us whether his phone had rung more.

So before you spend a cent on anything, make the enquiries countable. Taps on the phone number. Form submissions. That's it, that's the whole dashboard for most businesses this size. We usually wire that up in an hour, and it tends to be the most uncomfortable hour of the engagement, because plenty of owners find out their form has been quietly failing for months. I've seen that three times now. Once it was a mail server change nobody told the web guy about.

Google's own advice on whether you even need an SEO makes roughly this point, in a more polite way. Know what you're buying and how you'll tell if it worked.

Then the free half

For a local business the fastest ground is almost never on the website. It's the Google Business Profile: categories, hours, service areas, photos that aren't from 2018, and reviews that arrived this year rather than back in 2019.

I know that's tedious advice. It's also the only thing on this list I've watched shift enquiry volume inside a month, repeatedly, without anyone touching a line of code. Do that before the website work, not after, because it costs nothing and it tells you whether search demand exists in your area at all.

The pages that do the selling

Once the profile is sorted, the website job is smaller than people fear.

Most small business sites have one page called Services with six things listed on it as dot points. That page can't rank for any of the six properly, and worse, it can't sell any of them properly either. Someone who wants bathroom waterproofing and lands on a list containing bathroom waterproofing does not feel like they've found a specialist.

One page per thing you genuinely want to be hired for. Written like you'd explain it standing in someone's hallway, with what's included, what it usually involves, and a couple of jobs you've actually done. Four solid pages beats twenty stubs, and this is the same constraint that makes location pages work or fail, which we went through in the local SEO piece.

The other half of that is whether the page converts once someone's on it. Tappable number, short form, proof you're real. We wrote that up for trades, though it applies to accountants and physios and dog groomers the same way.

What I'd leave alone for the first six months

Blogging on a schedule. I say this as someone writing a blog post. Publishing weekly is a fine thing to do when you already have a site that converts and a profile pulling calls in. Doing it instead of those is how you end up with forty posts and no enquiries.

Anyone selling you links. Just don't.

National keywords, if you're a local business. "Plumber" as a search term is a fight with franchises and directories that have been at it for a decade. "Plumber Figtree" is a fight you can win this quarter.

And the technical deep end, mostly. Yes, speed matters. But if your site loads in three seconds and has no service pages, the three seconds is not your problem.

The honest timeline

The profile work lands fast, sometimes in weeks. The website work is slower and less linear than anyone would like, and Google's starter guide is refreshingly blunt about that: expect months, not days, and be sceptical of anyone who isn't.

The bloke with the report cancelled it, sorted his profile out over a weekend, then wrote three service pages himself across about a fortnight. Not beautifully. He's a plumber, not a copywriter, and one of them still has a sentence I'd cut. His enquiries roughly doubled over the following winter.

If you want the money side of this before you commit to anything, we've set out what SEO actually costs in Australia without the usual vagueness. And if you'd rather just find out where your site stands, we'll go through it for free and tell you which of the five things above you've already got covered.