SEO for small businesses: what matters

Most SEO advice is written for big sites with content teams. A small business needs something else: the five actions with the biggest effect, done in the right order, and permission to skip the rest. Here is that list.

The five things, in order

1. Claim your Google Business Profile. For anyone searching locally it is more visible than your website, it is free, and a complete profile with correct categories and services often does more than months of tinkering with the site.
2. One page per service, named the way people search. A single "Services" page cannot rank for ten different needs. A page per offering, with a title that uses the words a customer would type, can. Not "Solutions", but "Drain cleaning in Uppsala".
3. Answer the questions people actually type. Type your service into Google and note what autocomplete suggests: those are real questions from real people. A page that answers "what does a bathroom renovation cost" with an actual range will beat a page that talks about quality and experience.
4. Fix the technical basics once. Mobile friendly, loads fast, has a sitemap, is verified in Google Search Console. This is a one-time job, not a monthly subscription. If someone charges you monthly for "technical SEO" on a five-page site, ask what exactly they do.
5. Keep your most important pages alive. Pages age: prices go stale, years in titles pass, competitors publish fresher answers, and a page that ranked quietly slips. Checking your handful of money pages a few times a year protects everything the first four steps built. Here is how that slippage works.

What you can safely skip

• Daily blogging. Ten thin posts do less than one page that genuinely answers a costly question.
• Buying links. The risk lands on your domain, not on the seller.
• Chasing SEO scores. A tool's 100/100 is not a Google ranking. Scores measure checklists, customers search with questions.
• Social media as an SEO strategy. Keep the profiles alive for trust, but posting does not move rankings.

How you know it is working

Google Search Console is free and shows the only numbers that matter: which searches you appear for, where, and whether people click. Give changes a couple of months before judging them, positions move slowly. If pages that used to bring visitors start losing them, that is the signal to act on first. And if you don't show up at all, start here.