There is no secret to this, which is inconvenient for anybody selling one. Google is trying to answer a question, and it picks the page that most obviously answers it on a site it can read, load and trust. Everything below is a way of being more obviously that page.

What follows is the order we work in for a small business starting from a standing start. It is not the only order, but it is the one where each step makes the next step cheaper.

1. Fix what stops Google reading the site at all

This is the unglamorous part, and it is where the first jump nearly always comes from. If a page takes six seconds to load on a phone with one bar, or the site has three versions of the same page competing with each other, or half of it is not in Google's index, then no amount of writing is going to help.

The things worth checking first, in the order they tend to be broken:

  • Whether every page you care about is actually indexed. Search site:yourcompany.co.uk in Google and count. If the number is much lower than your page count, that is the whole problem.
  • How heavy the pages are. Most business sites we are asked to fix are carrying two to four megabytes of template, sliders and fonts nobody chose.
  • Whether the site works properly on a phone, which is where most of your customers are.
  • Whether internal links exist at all. A page nothing links to is a page Google treats as unimportant, because you have told it so.

None of this makes you rank on its own. It removes the reasons you cannot.

2. Decide what you are actually trying to rank for

This is the step most often skipped, and skipping it is why so much SEO money gets spent on nothing. The question is not "what do we do", it is "what do people type when they have the problem we solve and money to spend on it".

Those are rarely the same words. A firm that describes itself as offering "integrated fluid management solutions" is competing for a phrase nobody searches, while "emergency drain unblocking Exeter" goes to somebody else.

The best term to rank for is usually not the biggest one. It is the one where the person searching has already decided to buy.

For most small businesses the useful list is short: what you do, plus where you do it, plus the handful of specific problems people describe in their own words. Twenty terms is a realistic target. Two hundred is a spreadsheet nobody will ever act on.

3. Give each of those terms one honest page

One page, one job. A page that tries to cover six services will lose to six pages that each cover one, because Google cannot tell what the first page is for and neither can the reader.

What a page that ranks tends to have:

  • A title that reads like the question somebody asked, not like a slogan.
  • The answer near the top, before the company history.
  • Enough detail that somebody could act on it without ringing you, which sounds like it would cost you the call and reliably does the opposite.
  • Prices, or at least ranges, wherever you can bear to publish them.

If you serve several towns, that means a real page per town, written for that town. Not the same paragraph with the name swapped; Google has been able to spot that for years, and so can anybody reading it.

4. Set up the local listing properly, then keep it alive

For anybody with a van, a shop or a service area, the map results are a separate competition to the ten blue links underneath, judged on different rules. You can rank perfectly well in one and be invisible in the other.

The listing itself is free and takes an afternoon. What separates the ones that work is dull maintenance: the right primary category, every service listed rather than the three you got round to, real photographs, correct hours including bank holidays, and a steady trickle of reviews rather than eleven in one week eighteen months ago.

It is the single biggest lever in local search and it costs nothing but the doing, which is exactly why so few people do it.

5. Earn links, and only then

Links are Google's way of asking other websites whether you exist and whether you are any good. They matter, and they are also where most of the money in this industry gets wasted.

The ones that count come from places with a genuine reason to mention you: trade bodies you belong to, suppliers who list their stockists, the local paper when you do something worth reporting, a supplier case study, a charity you sponsored. The ones that do not count come in a spreadsheet from an agency for a monthly fee.

On buying links. It is against Google's guidelines, it is detectable, and the downside is your rankings rather than the seller's. We do not do it, and if a competitor of yours is, we will tell you rather than match them.

How long any of this takes

Impressions move first, usually inside two months, because appearing at position 40 is a much smaller ask than appearing at position 4. Clicks follow later, and they follow unevenly. Anybody offering you a date is guessing.

What we can tell you honestly is the shape of it: the technical work pays off fastest, the local listing pays off next, and the content and links compound slowly and then all at once. Month twelve is worth considerably more than month one, which is also why stopping at month four is the most expensive thing you can do with an SEO budget.

What to do this week

If you do nothing else, do these three, in this order. They are free and they are the ones we would start with anyway.

  1. Search site:yourcompany.co.uk and see how much of your site Google actually has.
  2. Open your own site on your phone, on mobile data, and time it.
  3. Open your Google Business Profile and fill in every field you have left empty.

If what you find is discouraging, that is normal, and it is also the good news: almost everything on this list is fixable, and most of your competitors have not fixed it either.