The Small Business Website SEO Checklist
Most small business websites fail SEO on fundamentals, not sophistication. Before you spend a dollar on content or links, run your site through this checklist-it’s the same one I use on client audits.
The Basics Google Reads First
- Title tags: every page gets a unique title with the service and city-“Water Heater Repair in Tupelo, MS | YourCompany”-under 60 characters.
- One h1 per page that says what the page is about, with h2s structuring the sections beneath it.
- Meta descriptions that sell the click: what you do, where, and why you.
- Descriptive URLs: /services/water-heater-repair beats /page?id=17.
Speed and Mobile
Most local searches happen on phones. Compress your images (a 3MB photo can quietly triple your load time), skip the heavy sliders, and test your site on an actual phone on cellular-not your office wifi. Slow and clunky loses the visitor before the pitch starts.
Local Signals
- Name, address, phone identical everywhere-site, Google profile, directories.
- An embedded map and real photos of your team and location.
- City and service area named in the copy, not just the footer.
- LocalBusiness schema so Google can read the details with confidence.
Structure That Ranks
A page per service, a page per major city you serve, and articles answering real customer questions-the structure from the service business playbook. Internal links between related pages so visitors and crawlers both find their way.
The Quiet Killers
Placeholder pages (“coming soon”), duplicate title tags across every page, broken links, and pages only reachable from the sitemap. Every one of these is invisible to you and loud to Google.
Run the checklist, fix the reds, and re-test quarterly. Or send me your URL-an audit takes me an afternoon and usually pays for itself in the first fix.