small business seo
small business seo is the work of getting your business to show up when someone searches for what you sell, using the parts of it that are free or cheap enough for a business without a marketing budget.
that’s the whole thing. the rest of this page is which parts are worth your time, roughly what they cost if you pay someone, and when the honest answer is to spend the money elsewhere.
we’ve been doing this for eighteen years for businesses run by the person who answers the phone. no jargon, no scare tactics, and nothing here is gated behind an email address.
the honest bit, when seo isn't worth it
most guides on this subject assume you should be doing seo. some businesses shouldn’t, and it’s cheaper to find that out now than in nine months.
nobody searches for what you sell. if you’ve invented a category, or you sell something people don’t know exists, search can’t help you. people can only find you if they’re already looking. check the actual volumes before you spend a penny. if the number is single digits a month, put the money into a channel where you go to them.
you need customers this month. seo takes three to six months to show anything and twelve to be worth it. if cash is tight now, that’s what ads are for. do the ads, get through the quarter, start the seo when you can afford to wait.
your website can’t convert what it already gets. this is the common one. if a hundred people a month land on your site and none of them enquire, three hundred people won’t fix it. sending more traffic to a site that doesn’t convert just costs more to achieve the same nothing. fix the site first.
the maths doesn’t work. if your average customer is worth £40 and you’ll spend £400 a month, you need ten new customers every month just to break even, before you’ve made anything. some businesses genuinely can’t get there.
you sell one thing to twelve people in the country. you know who they are. ring them.
if none of those describe you, carry on. if it’s the money rather than the fit you’re weighing up, we’ve done the sums on whether seo pays for itself separately.
the seven things that actually move the needle
every guide on this subject lists the same eight things in the same order, starting with keyword research. that order is wrong for a small business. here’s the order by what actually returns something.
- your google business profile, if you’re local. free, and it’s the single biggest lever most local businesses have. for a lot of searches the map results sit above every ordinary result on the page, and you can’t appear there without a profile. fill in every field, pick the closest category to what people search for, list your services properly, and keep it active. this alone outperforms months of blogging for most local trades.
- one page for each thing you sell. the most common structural mistake we see. a single “services” page listing eight things will rank for none of them. eight pages each doing one job will rank for eight. the same applies to places: one page per town beats one page mentioning twelve towns, every time.
- answer the question in the first sentence. open the page by saying plainly what the thing is. not a paragraph of scene-setting, not your company history. google lifts these sentences into featured snippets and ai answers, and people read them and stay. burying the answer in paragraph eight is the most reliable way to lose both.
- get reviews, and mind what they say. ask for them properly and ask people to mention what you did and where. google reads review text and pulls topics out of it. a review saying “great service” tells google nothing. one saying “rewired our kitchen in carlisle, spotless job” tells it two useful things.
- make it load fast on a phone. most of your visitors are on a phone on 4g, not a desktop on fibre. compress the images, get rid of the plugins you’re not using, and check it on an actual phone rather than a fast laptop. slow pages lose people before the page has finished appearing.
- get mentioned by people who already rank. local directories, your trade body, the chamber of commerce, local news, suppliers’ partner pages. these are cheap or free, they’re often already ranking for the terms you want, and they tell google and the ai tools that you’re a real business other people acknowledge.
- publish something only you could write. not “five tips for choosing a plumber”, which exists ten thousand times. the thing you know because you’ve done the job for years. it’s slower than the other six and it’s the only one competitors can’t copy.
notice what isn’t on the list. buying links. submitting your site to five hundred directories. stuffing your town name into every sentence. paying for a monthly blog post nobody reads. all still sold, all still useless.
what it costs, honestly
uk monthly retainer ranges, taken from our own pricing breakdown, which is sourced from uk surveys rather than guesswork.
| tier | monthly | typical client |
|---|---|---|
| local seo starter | £300 to £500 | single-location small business |
| small business | £500 to £1,000 | established local business, modest competition |
| growth retainer | £1,000 to £2,500 | where you expect meaningful results |
| strategic | £2,500 to £5,000 | b2b, competitive, 30 to 50 hours a month |
| paying by the hour? uk freelancers sit at £40 to £100, agency consultants at £70 to £300. | ||
| below £300 a month, the maths stops working. nobody can spend more than an hour or two on you at that price, so what you get is an automated report and a few directory submissions. it isn't a cheap version of the work, it's a different thing wearing the same name. | ||
doing it yourself vs paying someone
you can do more of this yourself than most agencies will admit. here’s the honest split.
genuinely do it yourself, in an evening each. your google business profile. asking customers for reviews. compressing your images. writing plain first sentences on your main pages. splitting one services page into several. none of this needs a specialist and all of it works.
worth paying for. technical work where a mistake costs you rankings, so anything touching site structure, redirects or schema markup. proper keyword research with real data behind it, because guessing what people search is where most diy efforts go wrong. and writing at volume, if you’d genuinely never get round to it.
never outsource. the knowledge of your own trade. an agency can structure it, edit it and publish it, but if the ideas aren’t yours the content reads like everyone else’s and performs like it too.
a reasonable middle. pay someone for a one-off audit, do the easy fixes yourself, and come back for the technical work when you can afford it. any decent consultant will happily sell you that. if they won’t sell you anything except a twelve-month retainer, see the next section.
how to spot a bad seo agency
eighteen years of watching this happen, condensed.
they guarantee page one. nobody controls google’s results, so a guarantee is either meaningless or it’s for a term nobody searches. “we got you to number one for [your own business name]” is the classic. you were already there.
they won’t tell you the price. “it depends on scope” is fair. refusing to give any figure until you’ve sat through a call is a negotiating tactic, not a pricing model.
the report is just full of impressions. impressions measure how often google showed you, not whether anyone came. a report leading with impressions, “keyword rankings tracked” or “tasks completed” is measuring effort rather than results. ask for clicks, enquiries and where they came from.
they want twelve months up front with no exit. confident people don’t need to lock you in. a notice period is reasonable. a contract you can’t leave when it isn’t working is a transfer of risk from them to you.
they emailed you first, and it mentioned errors on your site. you know the one. “i was browsing your website and noticed several critical errors.” they weren’t. it’s a template sent to thousands of addresses, generated from an automated scan that flags things on every site on the internet.
they can’t name a client. confidentiality is real in some sectors. but if nobody in three years will put their name to the work, that tells you something.
they talk about submitting you to hundreds of directories. this stopped working around 2012 and can now actively hurt you.
they can’t explain what they did in plain english. if you can’t follow the explanation, either they don’t understand it or they’d rather you didn’t. both are reasons to leave.
those are the behavioural tells. there’s a separate set you can spot from the price alone, and we’ve written those up with the numbers.
what's changed, and what hasn't
more people now get answers without clicking anything. google puts an ai summary above the results, and a growing number of people ask chatgpt, gemini or perplexity for a recommendation instead of searching at all.
for a small business that cuts both ways. you lose some clicks you used to get from people who now read the answer and move on. but those tools pick from a much shorter list than a page of ten results, and the list is nothing like as settled as google’s rankings. in most local markets nobody has claimed it yet.
what gets you into that list is not new or exotic. clean structure, plain answers near the top of the page, consistent details about who and where you are across the web, and other credible sites mentioning you. the same seven things above, done properly.
what hasn’t changed: the businesses that win are still the ones that genuinely answer the question better than anyone else on the page.
what this looks like when it works
a cumbrian fireplace retailer had been collecting customer testimonials for years, town by town, without realising what they had.
rather than one testimonials page with everything piled together, the reviews were split into fifty-two pages, one for each town and village in the area they served. each one opened with a short genuine introduction to that place, then the reviews from customers who actually live there.
that’s it. no tricks, no thin pages built to catch a keyword. real proof, sorted by place.
the result was top three rankings across all fifty-two locations. the last proper article went up in august 2023, the business changed hands, and nobody has touched the site since. it is still generating leads.
the technique is copyable and it costs nothing but the sorting. if you have reviews, testimonials or completed jobs with a place attached to them, you have the raw material.
questions people ask
how long does small business seo take to work? three to six months for meaningful movement, twelve before it’s paying for itself properly. less competitive local terms move faster than national ones. anyone promising results in four weeks is selling something else.
can i do seo myself? yes, more of it than most agencies admit. your google business profile, reviews, image sizes and writing plain first sentences on your main pages are all evening jobs that work. technical structure, keyword research with real data and content at volume are where paying someone earns its keep.
how much should a small business spend on seo? £300 to £500 a month covers local seo for a single-location business, £500 to £1,000 for an established local business, and £1,000 to £2,500 where you want meaningful growth. below £300 a month the maths stops working for whoever is doing it, and you feel that in the output.
is seo still worth it with ai answers everywhere? yes, and the reason has changed. you’re no longer only competing for a click, you’re competing to be the business the answer names. the work that gets you there is the same work, done more clearly.
do i need to blog every week? no. weekly posts nobody reads do nothing. one genuinely useful page that only you could have written beats fifty generic ones, and it keeps working for years.
closing
if you’ve read this far you’ve got enough to start. do the google business profile this week, split your services page next week, and ask three customers for a review while you’re at it. that’s most of the value on this page and it costs nothing.
if you’d rather not do any of it yourself, get in touch and we’ll tell you honestly whether it’s worth it for your business.