7 SEO mistakes small businesses make, and how to fix each one

I have audited a lot of small business websites since 2016, and the surprising thing is how little variation there is. The same handful of problems come up again and again, across completely unrelated industries.

That is good news. It means the fixes are known, most of them are free, and none of them require you to become an expert.

1. The site is built around what you want to say

Most small business websites describe the business the way the owner talks about it. Customers do not search using those words.

A firm calling itself a “chartered building consultancy” has a homepage full of that phrase. Nobody searches it. They search building survey cost and damp survey near me. The page is well written, accurate, and invisible.

The fix. Open Google Search Console and look at the queries you already appear for — that is the cheapest list of real words you will ever get. Then do proper keyword research before writing or rewriting anything. Build pages around the phrases people type, not the phrases you would use in a meeting.

2. Nobody has looked at what Google actually indexed

You cannot rank for a page Google has not stored. It is astonishing how often key pages are simply missing from the index — usually because of a stray noindex left over from a rebuild, a canonical tag pointing somewhere else, or a page nothing links to.

The fix. Search Console → Pages. It splits every URL into indexed and not indexed, and gives Google’s own reason for each exclusion. Five minutes, free, and it regularly finds things a paid audit would bury on page forty.

3. The same page exists at four addresses

http, https, www, non-www, with and without a trailing slash. If more than one resolves, you have several copies of every page competing with each other, splitting whatever authority they have between them.

The fix. Pick one format. Redirect every other version to it with a 301, and add a canonical tag stating the chosen URL. Then check it: type your domain all four ways and confirm they all land on the same address.

4. It is slow, and you have only ever tested the homepage

Page speed is a modest ranking factor and a huge factor in whether anyone stays. Six seconds and most visitors are gone before your content renders.

The trap is testing the wrong page. Homepages are usually the fastest and least representative page on any site.

The fix. Run PageSpeed Insights on three real pages — a service page and a blog post as well as the homepage. The usual culprits, in order: enormous uncompressed images, too many plugins, and cheap shared hosting.

5. Titles and descriptions are missing, duplicated, or written for robots

Your title tag and meta description are the advert. They decide whether someone picks you out of ten results, all of which answer their question.

6. Pages do not link to each other

Internal links tell Google what you think matters, and pass authority from pages that have it to pages that need it. Most small business sites have a navigation menu and nothing else.

The fix. Every blog post should link to the relevant service page. Every service page should link to related work and related posts. Not a “related articles” widget — links inside sentences, where a reader would actually follow them.

7. Nothing is being measured

A surprising number of businesses either have no analytics at all, or have them and never open them. Without that, every decision is a guess and no one can tell you whether anything worked.

The fix. Search Console and Google Analytics, both free, then look at them monthly. You need three answers: which pages bring people in, which searches bring them, and whether either is going up.

Work through it

Nothing here needs a budget or a developer. Roughly in the order I would tackle them:

The bigger picture

None of this is advanced. It is the basics, done properly — and doing the basics properly puts you ahead of most of your competition, because they have not.

If you would rather someone worked out which of these apply to your site specifically, that is what the free audit is. You get a straight read on what is worth fixing and what is not, whether or not you hire me afterwards.