In today’s digital age, having a strong online presence is crucial for small businesses.
Whether you’re just starting out or have been in business for years, search engine optimization (SEO) can help your company get noticed by potential customers.
The good news? You don’t need to be an SEO expert to make a big impact.
Here’s a guide to simple SEO tasks you can tackle, categorized by the time they take and how often you should do them.
Quick Wins: 5-30 Minute SEO Tasks
Claim Your Google Business Profile (Once)
Head to Google Business Profile and claim your business.
Fill out all the details, including your address, phone number, website, and business hours.
This helps your business appear in local search results and Google Maps.
Optimize Your Page Titles and Meta Descriptions (Once or Periodically)
Review your website’s pages and ensure each has a unique, keyword-rich title and meta description. Tools like Yoast SEO (for WordPress) can help you craft these.
Add Alt Text to Images (Once or Periodically)
Go through your website and add descriptive alt text to images. This improves accessibility and helps search engines understand your content.
Submit Your Website to Search Engines (Once)
Use tools like Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools to submit your sitemap. This ensures search engines can crawl and index your site.
Check Your Website’s Mobile-Friendliness (Once)
Use Google’s Mobile-Friendly Test to ensure your site looks great on mobile devices. If it doesn’t, consider updating your design.
Moderate Effort: 1 to 2-Hour SEO Tasks
Perform Keyword Research (Once or Periodically)
Keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. It helps you understand what your potential customers are searching for and how you can tailor your content to meet their needs.
For most businesses, it’s wise to pick a specific, but high volume (and likely high competition) primary keyword for your home page, with more specific and long-tail keywords the deeper you get into your site.
Basic Keyword-to-Website Page Assignment Example
Let’s say we’re assigning keywords to pages of a plumber’s website, whose service area is the greater Atlanta area.
A plumber would have multiple services they offer, and likely want to market to specific neighborhoods.
In this example, as a local service business, here’s a basic setup for some of the plumber’s pages to give you an idea:
- Home Page (ex. plumberinatlanta.com):
- Primary Keyword: “Plumber in Atlanta”
- Drain Cleaning Page (ex. plumberinatlanta.com/services/drain-cleaning/):
- Primary Keyword: “Drain Cleaning Service in Atlanta”
- Clogged Toilets Page (ex. plumberinatlanta.com/services/clogged-toilets/):
- Primary Keyword: “Clogged Toilet Service in Atlanta”
Keyword Research Tools: Find the Right Keywords for Your Business
So, where do you begin? This is where the tools of the SEO trade start to come into your life.
Knowing how a few of these tools work is highly recommended, so that you can get what you need and learn which tool gets you what you want to see, faster, and more accurately. You can also use one tool to sort of validify the data you get from another.
Naturally, there are about a million tools, ranging from the most basic of the basic, to the confusingly complex.
Here are some of the best tools—both free and paid—that can help you uncover valuable keywords:
Free Keyword Research Tools
- Google Keyword Planner: Discover keywords with search volume and competition data. Super basic stuff, but it can even give you seasonality trends per month of the year. This one is a must-know. Try it here.
- Ubersuggest: Get keyword suggestions, SEO difficulty, and content ideas. Try it here.
- AnswerThePublic: Visualize search queries and generate content ideas. Try it here.
- Google Trends: Identify trending keywords and topics. This is generally a great place to look for hot topics to write blog posts or long-form content that’s often news-worthy, which can get you some links. Try it here.
Paid Keyword Research Tools
- SEMrush: My go-to, comprehensive SEO tool for keyword research and competitor analysis. There’s a lot more to SEMrush than that, but its keyword research and competitive analysis suites are some of the industry’s best – and at a lower cost than most of the other paid platforms.
- Ahrefs: An industry standard. Advanced tool for keyword and mostly known for their backlink analysis. Learn more.
- Moz Keyword Explorer: Offers keyword suggestions and a priority score. Moz used to be the top dog in the early days, but they’ve since declined and not kept up in a lot of ways – particularly the design and functionality of their platform. Learn more.
Quick Wins: 5-30 Minute SEO Tasks
Tips for Effective Keyword Research
- Focus a lot of your effort on finding on long-tail keywords for your sub-pages (e.g., “best coffee shop in Denver”) for easier rankings early on. Once you’ve gained some traction and authority in the space for these lower competition words and phrases, you’ll have an easier time ranking for the big, lofty, broad keyword on your homepage.
- Analyze competitors’ keywords using tools like SEMrush or Ahrefs. You can also use your eyeballs to see what’s in the headings in each of their pages, or the words in their website’s main navigation are usually a good indication of what they’re targeting and prioritizing.
- Prioritize search intent (informational, transactional, etc.) when selecting keywords. You want to answer the right question (or solve the right problem) for the right person, at the right time in their journey.
- Use local keywords (e.g., “plumber in Atlanta”) to attract nearby customers, if appropriate.
Create or Update Your "About Us" Page (Once / As Needed)
Write a compelling “About Us” page that includes your target keywords and tells your story. This builds trust and improves your SEO.
Some reasons you might update this more than once, outside of a website redesign, would be to add key staff photos and bios if desired, or to share some community event your company recently took part in, possibly to post awards, etc.
Claim and Optimize Local Listings (Once)
Beyond Google, claim your business on platforms like Yelp, Bing Places, and Apple Maps. Ensure your information (Business Name, Address, and Phone Number) is consistent across all platforms.
In the SEO world, we call that “NAP info.”
You want to be ultra consistent – even consider using a cheap add-on to SEMrush, which automatically submits and corrects your NAP information across dozens of directories, including the core directories mentioned above.
If you’re a local service business, like a plumber or restaurant, you have GOT to get these right, and this is a cheap (right now about $40/mo) way to do it once and then check to be sure nobody has changed it (Google or other users can suggest “corrections”, annoyingly).
Set Up Analytics Tools (Once)
Install Google Analytics and Google Search Console to track your website’s performance. These tools provide valuable insights into your traffic and user behavior, like if they’re clicking on the nice buttons that say BUY NOW on your website, or not!
You can also hook these up to platforms like SEMrush so you can keep an eye on the important details all in one place, which is really a value-add in my book. Then, you only have to dig into the actual analytics data if you need to do a quarterly or longer-out review of data, or to find a very specific behavior or data set.
Deep Dives: Half-Day SEO Tasks
Write a Blog Post (At Least Monthly)
Create a blog post that answers common questions your customers have. Use your keyword research to guide the topic. Aim for 800-1,500 words and include a couple internal links to other pages on your site, and try to cite at least one reputable source with an external link (to another website, authoritative on the subject your post is about).
Regular additions to your website, like blog posts, inform Google and users that you’re an active site and help build your topical authority.
Audit Your Website (Periodically)
As time goes on, and especially if you’re not the only person posting content to your site, links get broken internally and externally. You might have linked to some .edu site or a news site, but that content was removed, and now a link on your site points to a 404 error.
Use a tool like SEMrush or Screaming Frog to find and fix critical SEO errors like broken links and more to keep your site healthy and easily indexable by search engines and enjoyable for users.
Build Backlinks (Monthly)
Links, links, links. You might be able to rank for some things without them, but you can sure bet those ranking for competitive keywords, like the one your homepage is now targeting, have been and will continue to build backlinks.
To this day, backlinks make up roughly 30% of all ranking factors. That’s HUGE. You don’t want to skip this and either fall behind or never stand a chance to rank at the top of the SERPs.
You can build backlinks in a number of ways, including:
- Participate in community meetups and sponsorship opportunities, which will often list your site.
- Join in on podcasts and radio programs where you can contribute your expertise in exchange for some visibility, not only on their show, but with a link in their podcast description or website.
- Doing outreach in a number of ways – though this takes time, consistency, and is vastly more effective the longer you’ve done it.
- ABC link exchanges – suggest to Site B that they link to Site C, and Site C links to Site A (you), etc. That way you’re getting around the “link exchange” scheme that was banished years ago.
Paying the right people to do outreach and for media placements, AKA “Digital PR”, can be a really good way to boost your authority and ranking power.
However, be careful not to go too hard, too fast, if you get excited about link building. You don’t want to do anything that would cause a search engine to think you’re doing anything unnatural, which can have very negative effects on your SEO.
When in doubt, it can be worth the time and money to consult with a professional (like me, hint hint!) for a few hours, to get feedback on your strategy and what your site needs the most.
All-In: Full-Day SEO Tasks
If you have a full day to dedicate to increasing your long-term visibility with SEO, here are a few tasks you can do to move the needle.
Revamp Your Website's Content (Every 6 Months)
Review your site’s content for any time-sensitive errors or missed opportunities, and check analytics data to see if there are any pages that are performing much worse than others, or worse than you’d expect.
If it’s been 3+ months since you’ve made meaningful updates to that page’s content, it’s time to consider rewriting or adding meaningful content to that page. Google especially loves the freshness of content, and will notice when a site is busy making improvements or busy doing nothing!
I’ve personally had multiple clients’ rankings and traffic improve drastically once we did a content audit and found lots of stagnant pages that hadn’t been touched in months or years. We updated those pages, or even GOT RID of some of them and redirected them to their closest topical relative, and boom!
Create a Content Calendar (Once)
Creating a content calendar can be a great way to stay organized and remind yourself to keep on top of all these little things that add up in a big way over time.
Keep your content organized and scheduled properly, including blog posts, page revamps, social media posts, and anything else.
Look to keep tabs on this for about 6 months in advance, with some wiggle room if something more pressing comes up.
Optimize Your Website's Speed (Once)
Use tools like SEMrush and Google PageSpeed Insights to identify issues slowing down your site. Compress images, enable browser caching, and consider upgrading your hosting plan.
There are reputable plugins out there for WordPress (what most sites are built on these days), but don’t go too heavy-handed on adding plugins, as the sheer amount of code required to include a bunch of plugins may soon slow down your site more than all of them combined can help.
BONUS: Daily or Weekly SEO Habits to Get Into
Monitor Reviews and Respond (Daily or Weekly)
Asking for reviews, especially as a local service business, is a critical part of the game, no matter which way you slice it.
Equally important, however, is responding to these reviews in a timely manner, whether they’re positive or negative reviews.
Get into the habit of checking for reviews, or set yourself up with alerts from a Google or a service like TrustIndex.
Share Content on Social Media (Daily or Weekly)
Staying active on social media has never been more critical to the overall online presence of businesses, both local and national or global.
Don’t pass up this opportunity to pop into someone’s mind for free, by sharing your latest blog post (or even tease one blog post in multiple social media posts, one section of the blog post at a time), sharing a funny meme you made relating to your work/industry, or anything else.
Just be sure you’re active. This can take as little as 10-15 minutes per day, and the thing is, just like everything else, you’ll get better at it and understand what works faster, the more often you actually post. Don’t let the fear of not knowing what will work stop you from trying things out!
Track Your Rankings and Traffic (Weekly)
Whether you’re using a handy tool like SEMrush or digging into Google Analytics 4 and manually searching your keywords in incognito browser windows, taking a look at the results from time to time is key to knowing if you’re heading in the right direction.
Just be sure you don’t panic over any one day of rankings fluctuations, though. You want to focus on trends over time, not what Google’s latest daily algorithm update does to your rankings for an hour.
Final Thoughts on SEO Fundamentals for Small Business Owners
SEO doesn’t have to be overwhelming. By breaking it down into manageable tasks, you can steadily improve your online visibility and attract more customers.
Start with the quick wins, and as you gain confidence, tackle the more time-intensive tasks. Remember, SEO is a marathon, not a sprint—consistency and effort will pay off over time.
What SEO task will you start with today?
