Five SEO jobs you can do yourself before paying anyone

Most advice about getting started with SEO is written to make it sound like something you need to buy. A lot of it is, eventually. But there are five jobs sitting in front of nearly every local business that cost nothing, take an evening between them, and are the same five things any agency would do first anyway. Do these before you pay a monthly fee, and you'll at least know what you're paying for.

None of this is clever. That's the point. The clever part of SEO is worth paying for, but it only starts to matter once the unglamorous part is done, and the unglamorous part is almost always where a local business is losing.

1. Finish your Google Business Profile

For a business with a van, a shop or a postcode, this is the most useful hour on the list. It matters more than anything else here, and more than most of what you could pay for. It's also the thing most often left half done, because claiming it feels like finishing it.

Claimed isn't the same as complete. Go through each part:

• The primary category, which does more work than any other single field. "Electrician" and "Electrical installation service" are different categories and they rank for different searches
• Every service you offer, listed individually rather than lumped into the description
• Real photographs of real jobs, not the stock shot your web designer used
• Opening hours, including the bank holidays nobody updates
• The service area, if you travel to customers rather than them coming to you

The categories are the part worth slowing down for. Google matches searches to categories before it looks at anything you've written, so a business in the wrong one is invisible for the search that matters most to it, and can't fix that with any amount of website work. We wrote about how the local results are ordered in why a competitor shows above you, and the category mistake is the most common cause we see.

For every field in order, and the mistakes that get profiles suspended, see our full guide to optimising your Google Business Profile.

2. Put the place name where it does something

Most local businesses either never mention where they are, or mention it so often the page reads like it was written for a machine. Both lose.

The places it counts are few, and they're all above the fold or in the parts a search engine reads first:

• The page title, the blue link in search results. "Emergency Electrician in Norwich" rather than "Home" or "Welcome"
• The main heading on each service page
• The first paragraph, written as a sentence rather than a keyword
• The footer, alongside the address

That's roughly it. Repeating the town in every paragraph doesn't compound, and a page that reads oddly to a person tends to read oddly to Google as well, because Google is increasingly assessing it the way a person would.

The trap to avoid is building a page for every village you might travel to, each one the same text with the name swapped. That pattern has a name in Google's own guidance, doorway pages, and it's explicitly what they say not to do. Area pages work when each one says something true and different about that area. They fail when they're one page wearing eight hats.

3. Make the enquiry route obvious

This is the one nobody files under SEO, and it's the reason most of the others are wasted.

Being found and being chosen are separate problems. A business can climb into the map pack, get the clicks, and take no more calls than it did before, because the page people land on doesn't make the next step obvious. Every hour spent on rankings before that's fixed is an hour spent buying visits to a page that can't convert them.

What to check, on a phone, as a stranger:

• Is the phone number tappable, or is it an image, or typed as text that does nothing when you press it
• Can you reach a way to get in touch without scrolling, from any page rather than just the homepage
• Does the form work. send one. Then check it arrived, including the spam folder
• Is it clear what happens next, or does the page simply stop

The third one catches people more often than it should. A form that silently fails looks identical to a business nobody wants to contact. If enquiries have gone quiet rather than never existed, start there, and our guide on why a website gets no enquiries separates being found from being chosen.

4. Make your details identical everywhere

Your business name, address and phone number should match, character for character, everywhere they appear. The website, the Google profile, Facebook, the trade directories, the listing you forgot you made in 2019.

Not roughly the same. The same. "Street" and "St", an old mobile number, a unit number on one and not the other: each is a small reason for a search engine to be less certain that the business it found in three places is one business rather than three.

This is tedious and works, which is an unusual combination. An hour with a spreadsheet, searching your own business name and fixing what comes back, does more for a small local business than most of what gets sold as link building.

5. Ask for reviews, properly

Reviews feed the local results and, more immediately, they decide who gets the click once you're showing. Two businesses side by side in the map pack with the same star rating aren't equal if one has nine reviews and the other has ninety.

The mistakes are consistent and worth avoiding from the start. Don't offer anything in exchange, don't ask only the customers you expect to be happy, and don't buy any. Google's published policy on all three is that the reviews get removed and the profile can be suspended, and the businesses this happens to are rarely the ones who thought they were doing anything wrong.

Ask everyone, ask at the point the job is finished and they're pleased with it, and make it one tap. We covered the whole thing, including what to do about a bad one, in how to get more Google reviews.

What we wouldn't bother with yet

Since most lists of this kind only add, here's the other half.

• Buying links. Not at this stage, possibly not at any stage for a local business. The citations and listings in job four are the version of this that's free and safe
• Blogging weekly. Publishing on a schedule produces posts written to fill a schedule. One page that answers a question your customers ask beats twelve that answer nothing
• Chasing a keyword tool's numbers. Useful later. Early on, the searches that matter are the ones your customers already say out loud on the phone
• Rebuilding the site. Sometimes it's the right answer. It's rarely the first one, and it's an expensive way to find out the category was wrong

When it's worth paying someone

When the five above are done and you have stopped moving. When the competition is strong enough that the difference is time and attention you don't have. Or when the site itself is the constraint and no amount of profile work gets past it.

Until then, an agency's first month is mostly the list you've just read, which is a reasonable thing to pay for if you'd rather not do it, and a poor thing to pay for without knowing that's what it is. If you want to know which of these is costing you, that's what the free video review on our local SEO in Norwich page is for. What the work would cost is written up here rather than kept behind a call.

Not sure which of these your site needs most? Our free AI search audit runs 36 checks and gives you a score out of 100 and a list of fixes, in a couple of minutes.