Small Business SEO Checklist

Audit tools, including this one, are good at finding problems and bad at telling you what to do first. A checklist imposes order. The sequence matters because the items build on each other: there is no point optimising a title tag on a page Google is not allowed to index, and no point building links to a site that takes four seconds to load on a phone.

The order we recommend is fixed. Make the site crawlable and indexable. Make it fast enough to be usable. Give every page one clear job and one clear title. Then, and only then, spend money or time on content volume and outreach.

Give yourself two hours a week for six weeks rather than one heroic weekend. Week one: robots.txt, sitemap, Search Console verification, and confirming your key pages are actually indexed. Week two: titles and meta descriptions for your top ten pages by importance, not by traffic — the pages you would show a customer. Week three: speed, starting with image sizes and any third-party scripts you no longer use.

Week four: headings and internal links, making sure every important page is reachable in two or three clicks from the homepage. Week five: local signals if you serve a geographic area — a consistent name, address and phone number, and a complete Google Business Profile. Week six: content, filling the obvious gaps you found while doing the rest. Re-run the site check at the end of each week and keep the scores in a note. Seeing the number move is what keeps people going after week two, which is where most SEO efforts quietly die.