SEO for your small business: where should you start?

My career has included content strategy for Concordia Shanghai and technical SEO work for ToursByLocals. Those are different settings, but they inform the question I start with here: what is stopping the right person from finding and understanding your offer?

You have a website, a business to run and a growing list of marketing advice. Someone says you need more blogs. Someone else says you need to change every page. Where do you begin?

Start with one service, one type of customer and one clear next step. SEO means making your business easier to discover through unpaid search results. A useful starting project is to make your most important offer easier to find and understand.

Choose the work you actually want more of

Imagine a Vancouver cleaning business that offers weekly cleaning, move-out cleaning and office cleaning. If move-out jobs are its priority, that gives the owner a specific place to start. “Get more website traffic” becomes “help people looking for a move-out cleaner understand our service and request a quote.”

Write down your priority service, who needs it and where you can deliver it. Be honest about your capacity. There is little value in attracting enquiries for work you cannot take on.

Look at your website as a new customer

Open the relevant page on your phone. Can you quickly answer these questions?

• What does the service include?
• Is it available in my area?
• What should I know about the price or quotation process?
• How do I book or ask a question?

For our example cleaner, that could mean explaining whether appliances are included, whether the home must be empty and what details are needed for an estimate. Those answers make a page more useful than a long paragraph about “exceptional solutions.”

Connect the places customers find you

For an eligible local business, check that your Google Business Profile has current hours, contact details and the correct website link. Google says local results depend mainly on relevance, distance and prominence; you cannot simply pay for a better local ranking. Google’s local visibility guidance explains these factors.

Then check your website navigation. A visitor should be able to reach your priority service page without guessing which menu item to choose.

Choose a first step you can finish

Spend your first session improving that one page. Next, test its contact form and check your public business details. Keep a dated note of what you changed so you can review progress later.

These are useful foundations, not a promise of a particular ranking. If your pages cannot be found at all, ask an SEO specialist to check whether search engines can access them before investing in more content.