SEO for Small Businesses: Where to Start When You Are Up Against Bigger Names

What SEO actually means for a small business

Search engine optimisation is the work of making your website the most useful, trustworthy answer to the searches your customers make. For a small business, that rarely means ranking for one huge term. It means appearing for dozens of specific searches that each bring a handful of ready-to-buy visitors: a service plus a town, a problem plus a solution, a question you answer on the phone every week.

Those searches are also increasingly answered by AI features in Google and other search tools. The good news is that the same things help in both places: clear, specific pages written by someone who obviously knows the subject.

Step 1: make sure Google can find and read your site

Set up Google Search Console and submit your sitemap. Then check the Pages report for anything marked as not indexed. I regularly find small business sites where important pages are hidden by a leftover noindex setting, a password-protected page, or duplicate versions of the same content. On Squarespace, check that site visibility is public and that pages are not hidden from search engines in their SEO settings.

Step 2: give every core service its own page

One "Services" page listing everything you do cannot rank well for any one of them. Each service that brings in real money deserves its own page with its own headline, detail, pricing guidance, photos and reviews. If you genuinely serve several towns, location pages can help too, but only when each one says something real about working there. Swapping the town name on identical copy does more harm than good.

Step 3: get the on-page basics right

• Title tag: the service and, where relevant, the location, written for a human. Keep it to around 60 characters.
• One H1 per page that tells the visitor exactly what the page is about.
• Meta description that earns the click with a clear benefit and next step.
• Clean URLs such as /boiler-servicing rather than /page-2.
• Internal links from related pages, so Google understands how your site fits together.
• Descriptive alt text on images, and image files compressed before upload.

Step 4: write content that proves you know your stuff

Google looks for signs of experience, expertise and trust. A small business has plenty of all three; it just rarely writes them down. The best content ideas come from your inbox and phone: the questions customers ask before they buy, the mistakes you see people make, how long jobs really take and what affects the price. Answer those properly, in your own words, and you will build pages that rank and convince.

Step 5: earn links and mentions locally

Links from other reputable websites remain one of the strongest signals in SEO. For a small business, the easiest wins are close to home: suppliers and manufacturers you work with, trade bodies and accreditation schemes, local business groups, community sponsorships, and local press when you have a genuine story. A few relevant local links are worth far more than hundreds of cheap ones.

What to ignore

• Buying links in bulk. It is against Google's guidelines and can sink your rankings.
• Publishing dozens of thin, generic articles. Quality and relevance beat volume every time.
• Obsessing over keyword density. Write naturally and cover the topic properly.
• Chasing national terms you have no realistic chance of winning before the local ones are secured.

If you are on Squarespace, the platform handles the technical foundations well, and the rest of this list applies in full. I cover that in more detail on my Squarespace SEO page.

Frequently asked questions