The Top 29 Simple SEO Fixes Any UK Small Business Can Do

SEO Changes You Can Make Today

If you are a webmaster or business owner and have had your fill of watching endless ‘how to SEO your website’ YouTube videos and Podcasts, then perhaps this blog can help.

Google tells you exactly what to do and how to do it. SEO is about language and Google will help you let it know how to represent that information in a way it can understand and rank highly in its index.

You need data and a few tips to move forward onto page 1.

Ensure you are using Search Console; this is how Google can give you feedback on what you are doing right or wrong. Several tools include everything from 404 errors to incorrect mobile optimisation, Sitemaps, JavaScript errors, etc. Every technical error that affects your business’s SEO is listed here. Learn all of SC’s features and how to validate changes.
If you are using WordPress, look at adding structured data or rich snippets to your website and test it here. Schema.org is your friend.
If you can’t find your website in Google, you probably have Crawling errors; use Search Console to help or read Moz. Indexing is simple; look at the code of your page and search for noindex; if it is there, get rid of it.
Want to reach out to the rest of the world? Google makes it easy to add multilingual elements to your website.
To make redirects or 404 errors, don’t worry. If you no longer sell a product or want to include a page on your website and don’t have a similar webpage, leave it as 404. It is OK to have pages that say a webpage has been deleted!
Heard that metadata is not important. Think again. Meta keywords may have been discontinued, but Meta titles and meta descriptions are all about click-throughs. Improve your meta tags, and you will gain more traffic! People click on Google search results that make sense and answer a question, not just who ranks #1.
robots.txt files are important; add one to your site! Favicons are also a must. HTTPS is the norm now, so get a free SSL certificate.
AMP is dead; you can eliminate those old amp templates and WP plugins. More.
Core Vitals has replaced AMP. Speed up your site and move up 10 places. We have tested Pagespeed on 122 websites. The other metrics are less important.
Encourage Googlebot to come to your website more often. This is a big topic, but you can simply ask Google to recrawl your entire website; here is how.
Try not to cheat and follow Google’s SEO guidelines. If a page is boring and written to rank higher in search, then delete it. In the long run, these will hurt your website and are not future-proof. They are spam!
Mobile is everything; whenever you create a new page, look at how it appears on your mobile and use device views like Blisk to help you. If you take this one piece of advice, then do this! Mobile-Friendly is money in the bank. (See mobile-first web design). Desktop searches account for only 50% of searches now and will soon get less. Learn the basics of HTML. This will help you optimise your webpage more effectively.
Canonicalization means finding the original page and adding that canonical link to every other version of the same page with a different URL.
Read SEO forums; Google’s are probably the best; here, you can ask Google questions and receive answers from Google technicians/employees.
Set up a form on your website asking for feedback. You will be amazed at how helpful some customers or visitors can be.
Be mindful about creating categories and adding endless tags to your blogs. To determine which blog categories you need, find and copy the sites that rank #1 for your keywords. Read.
Read about APIs; they are above your pay grade, and you don’t need that much data for your website. Pay for a site like Ahrefs that will give you the data you need.
Check your website regularly for hacks and malware; there are SO many plugins, so try any!
View your website in browsers other than Chrome; they do not all display the same way and may show errors that do not show your business site well.
Spend more money on hosting. Siteground is currently our fav. Read their recent policies first, as they are not for everyone.
Subscribe to SEO newsletters or follow them on Twitter. There is so much bad advice, but occasionally, some good ideas and insights emerge from it.
Buy SEO books and read them for 30 minutes a day. Your skills will skyrocket in under three weeks.
Stop relying solely on software to see if your website is Google-friendly or SEO-friendly to the hilt. Try buying something on it yourself or sending an enquiry; what is missing? What would be more helpful for users?
Add reviews to your website manually; do not use plugins. You are after the names of the people and their locations!
See your ranking fall off a cliff. Time to check your backlinks and disavow anything that looks spammy. You may get a penalty and have to ask Google to reconsider.
Duplicate content is not the end of the world, but be mindful of how much duplicate content you are showing on every page.
Site architecture: Plan the levels of your website, such as organising folders.
DNS, Cloud hosting, SafeSearch Apache, dynamic, debugging, and engineering do not apply to you, so forget the terms if you are trying to figure out what they mean.