Small business SEO: what to do with a few hours a month

Small business SEO comes down to five jobs you can do yourself in a few hours a month. Finish your Google Business Profile, give each service its own page, write titles that name the service and the town, ask every happy customer for a review, and fix the site problems that stop Google from reading your pages. Skip link buying, blog posts nobody searches for and monthly "SEO packages" that cannot say what they changed.

A plumber with a complete profile, 60 reviews and a page called "Boiler repair in Leeds" will beat a competitor with a prettier site and a vague homepage. Customers search for a service plus a place, and those searches reward clarity.

Finish your business profile on Google first

Your Google Business Profile does more for local searches than anything on your website. Google's own guide to local ranking says results depend on relevance, distance and how well known the business is, that complete and accurate profiles are more likely to show, and that you cannot pay for a better local position.

Spend your first hour here:

1. Pick the most specific primary category. "Emergency plumber" says more than "Plumber" if that is the work you want.
2. Add every service you offer, with the same names you use on your website.
3. Set real opening hours, including holiday hours. A customer who drives over and finds you closed leaves the kind of review you do not want.
4. Use the same business name, address and phone number everywhere. Your site footer, the profile and directory listings should match character for character.
5. Add photos of real jobs and your shop front, not stock images.

The full list of local tasks lives in the local SEO checklist.

Give every service its own page

One page per service is the cheapest ranking gain most small business sites leave on the table. A single "Services" page that lists ten things in bullet points cannot rank for any of them, because it is not really about any of them.

Each service page should answer what a customer actually wants to know before they call. What the job involves, roughly how long it takes, what affects the price, which areas you cover, and how to book. If you serve several towns, mention them where it is true, but do not clone the page twenty times with the town name swapped. Google treats those as near duplicates.

Add LocalBusiness markup to your contact or location page so your website states the same name, address and hours as your profile. It takes ten minutes, and the LocalBusiness schema guide has a copyable example.

Write titles that match what people search

Your title tag is the line Google shows in blue, and for a small business it should name the service, the place and your business. Something like this:

<title>Boiler Repair in Leeds | Same-Day Callouts | Hartley Heating</title>

Check your homepage first. A title of "Home" tells Google nothing. Then give every service page its own title and meta description. If two pages share a title, Google has to guess which one to show. Our title tag guide covers length and wording.

Reviews help you rank and help you get chosen

Reviews feed the "well known" part of Google's local ranking, and the same Google page says more reviews and positive ratings can help. They also decide the click. A searcher comparing three businesses in the map results reads the star rating before anything else.

Make asking a habit, not a campaign. Send the review link in the invoice email or a text the day you finish the job. Reply to every review, good and bad, in a sentence or two. A calm reply to a one-star review often does more for the next reader than the review itself.

Do not buy reviews or offer discounts for them. Google's review policy bans both.

Basic site health and showing up in AI answers

Once a quarter, check that Google can actually read your site. Most small business sites break in the same few places. A page set to noindex after a redesign, a robots.txt that blocks everything, broken links to pages that moved, or a phone layout where the "Call" button sits below three screens of images.

The same work now covers AI answers. When someone asks ChatGPT or Google's AI Mode for "a good electrician near Bristol", the answer draws on business profiles, review sites and websites that state plainly what they do and where. Google's guidance on AI search says optimizing for its generative AI features is still SEO, with no special files or markup needed. What helps is a services page that a model can quote in one sentence, and a robots.txt that does not block AI crawlers by accident. The guide to getting mentioned by AI goes further if your customers already ask assistants for recommendations.

Check your small business website in one pass

Our website check runs the site health part of this list for you. Enter your website and up to two more pages, such as your two busiest service pages. The default run covers crawling and indexing, on-page SEO (titles, descriptions, headings), structured data and content, for 67 credits on one page plus 47 per extra page. You see the price before it runs.

You get one fix list sorted by high, medium and low priority, with 0 to 100 scores for SEO readiness, AEO readiness and AI access. It does not read your Google Business Profile or Search Console, and it does not track rankings or backlinks, so keep doing those parts by hand. A quick check of your home page takes about 20 seconds and costs no credits.