Imagine a joiner in Cardiff who has a five-page website, built a year ago, that nobody finds unless they type his name. He has been told to buy links, add more keywords and publish a blog post every day. None of that is where Google’s own guidance starts.
Google publishes an SEO Starter Guide, and it is short on tricks and long on housekeeping. The steps below follow its logic, ordered by how often each one is the real problem on a small site. Work down the list and stop when you find the fault.
Step one: confirm Google can see the site at all
Type site:yourdomain.com into Google. If pages appear, they are in the index. If nothing does, the guide lists the usual reasons: no other site links to yours yet, the site is brand new, the content is only inside images or video, or access is blocked by a login or a setting that tells search engines to stay away.
Search Console’s URL Inspection tool goes further and shows how Google sees a single page. Check that the page is not set to noindex, that robots.txt is not blocking it and that the stylesheet and scripts are reachable, because Google wants to see the page roughly as a visitor does. The guide also points out that being crawlable does not promise a place in the results, so treat indexing as the starting line, not the prize.
Step two: give every page a title and snippet worth clicking
Google builds the title link in a result mainly from the page’s title element and other headings. Good titles are unique to the page, clear, brief and accurate, and your business name or town can appear in them when it genuinely helps. A site where every title reads “Home” or repeats the company name is leaving the cheapest improvement untouched.
The snippet underneath is usually taken from the page content, with the meta description used only some of the time. So write the description for people: short, specific to that page and covering its main points. And write the opening lines of the page well, since they are the likeliest source of the snippet.
Step three: describe your work in the words customers use
Google’s guide puts helpful, reliable, original content ahead of every other factor it covers. For a small business that means one page per main service, written the way you would explain it across the counter: what you do, who it suits, how it works and how to get in touch. It also means keeping facts such as opening hours and prices up to date.
People describe the same need differently. One customer searches for a “boiler service”, another for “annual gas check”. Cover both honestly in the text, and Google’s language matching can connect the page to related wording. Repeating one phrase in every sentence does the opposite, because keyword stuffing is listed in Google’s spam policies.
If you are weighing up what the site itself should include, our overview of a small business website goes through the pages most local firms need.
Step four: links, addresses and images
- Internal links: link between your own pages with descriptive anchor text such as “boiler servicing”, not “click here”. Google uses links to discover pages and to understand them.
- URLs: readable words (/services/boiler-servicing/) beat random strings. Make each page reachable at one address and redirect duplicates, or declare the preferred version with rel=“canonical”.
- Images: use sharp pictures near the text they illustrate and add short, descriptive alt text.
- Sitemap: optional, but many website systems create one automatically and it helps Google find your URLs.
What you can stop worrying about
The starter guide has a section on myths, and it frees up a surprising amount of time. According to Google:
- The meta keywords tag is not used by Google Search.
- Keywords in a domain name or URL have hardly any ranking effect beyond how breadcrumbs appear. Pick a name that suits the business.
- There is no ideal word count. A page needs enough words to be useful, and no more.
- Duplicate content is not a spam violation by itself, though it wastes crawling and can confuse visitors. Choose one address per page.
- A country-code domain matters only if you are targeting that country, and even then the effect is usually small.
Be patient, then measure
Google says changes can take from a few hours to several months to show up in Search and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging whether an edit helped. Make a few changes at a time, note the date, and then look at Search Console’s performance report to see which queries and pages gain impressions. If you are redoing the whole site, the notes in our post on website redesign cover how to keep what already works.