The SEO basics that actually matter

The phone call comes eventually. Someone has "reviewed your website", noticed you're nowhere on Google, and for a monthly fee they can sort it out. Before you say yes to anything, it's worth knowing how short the real list is. If you run a bakery, a two-van plumbing business or a small physio clinic, there are four things worth your attention. They cost nothing, you can do them yourself, and once they're done they mostly stay done.

Start with your Google listing, not your website

For local searches, map results often sit above everything else — and those entries don't come from your website at all. They come from your business listing. So when the choice is between making the site prettier and filling the listing in properly, fill in the listing. It costs nothing and it usually moves faster than anything you do to the site itself.

Properly means the right category. An address and phone number written exactly the way they appear on your site. Real opening hours, including the awkward ones. Photos that look like your actual business rather than a stock library. It's an evening's work at most, and it's the closest thing to a free lunch in any of this. We walk through it in getting found on Google in your own town.

Then fix the first sentence on your homepage

Search is matching. Someone types "emergency plumber near me" or "gluten free birthday cake". If your homepage opens with "bespoke culinary solutions for life's moments", there is nothing to match — not because the technology is stupid, but because you're speaking a different language from the people who need you.

The fix is free. Think about your last ten phone calls and how people described what they wanted. "My boiler's making a noise." "Are you open Saturdays?" "Do you do old houses?" Those are your words. Put them on the page the way they come out of people's mouths, and delete anything you'd never say out loud to a customer. Then read the page aloud. If the first sentence doesn't tell a stranger what you do and where you do it, that's the sentence to rewrite tonight. There's more on this in our piece on website copy that actually convinces people.

Give each real service its own page

A lot of small sites are one homepage carrying everything: twelve services in a bullet list, a phone number, a photo of the team. To a search engine that's a page about nothing in particular. To a customer who wants one specific job done, it's the same.

Take the two or three services you actually earn from and give each one its own page — what you do, who it's for, the area you cover, what a typical job looks like. You don't need to cover everything you're capable of. Three real pages beat twelve bullet points.

Each page also wants its own title: the text sitting in the browser tab, which Google draws on for the headline in a search result. It won't always use what you wrote, since titles get rewritten, but it's your best offer and it costs you a minute. "Boiler repair in Leeds — Smith Heating" is a title. "Services" is not. Click through your own site and watch the tabs go past; if they all say the same thing, you've just found half an hour of useful work.

Make it survive a phone

The technical side is shorter than you've been told. Readable on a phone without pinching. Fast enough that nobody waits. One clear heading per page that matches what's actually on it. That's most of it, and why speed matters as much as it does is a subject of its own.

The rest, and why it can wait

• Anyone guaranteeing you the top spot. Nobody can promise that, and the people selling it know.
• Meta keywords, and any advice about hitting a percentage of keywords in your text. One is a relic; the other gives you copy with a phrase jammed into it, which reads badly and sells nothing.
• Bought links.
• Posting a blog article every week so that something is happening. If you've nothing to say, don't. One good service page beats twenty forgettable ones.
• Audit reports listing hundreds of "errors". Most of them, no customer will ever notice.

Give it half an hour this week, and start by being a customer rather than the owner. Open a private browser window and search the way one of them would — "electrician Bristol", "breakfast cafe Chester" — then look at whoever is sitting at the top and work out what they're doing that you aren't. It's rarely anything clever. They filled the listing in, their homepage says what they do, and somebody wrote a sentence a human would recognise.

You don't have to buy anything for any of this. If you get into it and find your site simply can't do the basics — no per-page titles, nowhere to put a separate service page — that's a tooling problem rather than an SEO one, and Foliovo will build you a plain, clean site that starts out right. But don't reach for that first. The biggest lever you have is the listing you already own, sitting half empty.