Search engine optimisation means appearing in Google's results without paying per click. For a small or medium-sized business it is never an isolated project. It touches the platform your site runs on, the way you describe what you sell, your business listing, and sometimes how your sales team works. It is slow to establish, and its cost does not rise mechanically with the number of visits it brings.
What follows is the set of decisions to take, in order, with the criteria that let you settle each one. I have worked with small firms on this channel since 2012. I have kept the points that actually separate a site collecting enquiries from a site nobody finds, and flagged what has changed recently at Google's end.
Most of the difference is made before a single word of content is written.
The gap that costs the most: not measuring
Before anything technical, there is a management problem. In the Afnic study Réussir avec le web (2025 edition, close to 2,500 French micro, small and medium businesses surveyed between September 2024 and August 2025, self-reported answers), reported by France Num in March 2026, 26% of owners believed the web generated more than 30% of their turnover, while 61% said they did not really track the performance of their acquisition work. In the same study, 61% had a website, down from 70% a year earlier.
Those are French figures about French businesses, and nothing should be read across to another market from them. The pattern is worth testing in your own: money spent on visibility without anyone knowing what it produces. That is the first gap to close, and it costs nothing but attention.
The foundation: a platform you control
Your content management system decides what you can change yourself. WordPress remains the most common choice. In its reading of 11 September 2026, W3Techs detected it on 40.3% of all the sites it analyses, or 58.8% of the CMS market — an automated measurement across the sample of sites that service tracks, not a survey. What that popularity buys you is availability of people who know it, and plenty of documentation.
PrestaShop, Drupal and Joomla remain valid depending on the project. Subscription platforms such as Shopify or Wix start faster and take hosting off your hands, but the subscription weighs over time and you do not control everything. The question is not ideological, it is contractual.
Four questions settle the choice, whichever tool you land on.
- Can you edit title tags, meta descriptions, URLs and robots.txt yourself?
- Can you create 301 redirects when you rebuild?
- Can you export all of your content and customer data if you change supplier?
- What is the total cost over three years, subscription, extensions and maintenance included?
If you are starting from nothing, these trade-offs belong to the website build itself, not to a conversation two years later.
From keywords to search intent
The useful question is not "which keywords should we target" but "what do people type when they have the problem we solve". Four checks are enough to sort a list. Does the phrase signal an intention to buy, or only curiosity? Is it already held by players far larger than you? Does it appear in the important tags of the page meant to answer it? And does a page genuinely answering it exist, or does it need writing?
A short phrase such as "mobile phone" is vague and puts you against the large marketplaces. Longer phrases, the so-called long tail, each bring little volume but accumulate and convert better. On an English-language project about anxiety treatment, the generic queries were held by media and medical sites; the real openings came from long formulations, close to how a person describes their own situation.
So set the content plan before writing. One page per intent, a title that echoes the visitor's own wording, a usable answer in the opening lines, and visible tags that say the same thing as the body copy.
<title>Emergency boiler repair in Leeds | Firm name</title>
<meta name="description"
content="Same-day boiler repair across Leeds. Gas Safe engineers,
call-out hours and pricing set out in full.">
<h1>Emergency boiler repair in Leeds</h1>Nothing clever there, and that is the point. Our notes on SEO content go further into deciding whether a page has anything to say before you commission it.
Do you look trustworthy?
The criteria once known as EAT have moved on. Since the December 2022 update to Google's quality rater guidelines, the term is E-E-A-T, the first E standing for Experience — first-hand experience of the subject being covered. The guidelines are not a direct ranking factor, but they describe what Google is trying to reward, and its public documentation on helpful content asks the same questions.
Translate that into things a reader can verify: current legal information, an about page that says who does what, named authors with real credentials, concrete evidence such as case studies, genuine photographs, certifications you actually hold, customer reviews, and links from recognised sites in your sector. An anonymous site making large claims starts with a handicap it rarely shakes off.
Local search is often the first contact
For a shop, a trade or a practice, the first thing Google shows is not your website. It is your business listing. The service is now called Google Business Profile, formerly Google My Business, and is managed directly from Search and Maps since the dedicated mobile app was withdrawn. Fill in the activity, opening hours, service area and photographs precisely, then ask for reviews steadily rather than in bursts.
Where your customers are geographic, local SEO usually shows movement sooner than the rest of the work, because the inputs are under your control and the competing set is small.
Speed and stability: Core Web Vitals
Once the content and the local presence hold up, the browsing experience becomes the next job. Google publishes three indicators, the Core Web Vitals, measured on field data from Chrome visitors at the 75th percentile of page loads.
| Metric | What it measures | Target |
|---|---|---|
| LCP | Time to render the largest visible element | 2.5 seconds or less |
| INP | Responsiveness to interactions; replaced FID in March 2024 | 200 milliseconds or less |
| CLS | Visual stability, unexpected layout shifts | 0.1 or less |
PageSpeed Insights tests a page and lists the fixes; the definitions are documented on web.dev. Keep expectations proportionate. These metrics count for little against the relevance of the content, and a fast site with no useful answer will not rank. They matter mainly because a slow page loses visitors before ranking enters into it. Where load times drift, page speed is worth settling before adding features on top.
Measure before you invest more
Three free tools are enough to steer by. Google Search Console shows queries, impressions, clicks and indexing status. Google Analytics 4 follows behaviour and conversions, provided you have defined what a conversion is for you: a quote requested, a call, an order. Looker Studio, formerly Data Studio, assembles those sources into a shareable dashboard, which earns its place when several people read the same numbers every month.
One addition is worth knowing about. On 3 June 2026 Google announced dedicated reporting for generative AI features in Search Console, rolled out to all sites from 31 August 2026. It shows impressions in AI Overviews, AI Mode and Discover by page, country, device and date, but not clicks at this stage. Read it as a visibility measure, not a traffic measure.
If a page produces nothing at all, check first that it is in the index rather than rewriting it. Our note on Google indexing covers the usual reasons a URL never makes it in.
AI answers: what changes, what does not
Generated summaries change click behaviour. A Pew Research Center study published on 22 July 2025, covering 900 volunteer adults in the United States and 68,879 Google searches made in March 2025, found that people clicked a conventional result on 8% of visits where an AI summary was shown, against 15% where none was. Small panel, United States browsing only: an order of magnitude for that market, not a general rule.
On method, Google is explicit in its guide to generative AI features: normal SEO practice still applies, because those features draw on the existing ranking systems. It also states that no llms.txt file and no special markup are needed. For a small business that is the reassuring part. There are not two programmes of work to run, only one, measured more carefully than before.
Common questions
How long does SEO take to produce results?
Usually several months before durable positions appear, depending on the age of the domain, how competitive the sector is and how much content you publish. Technical corrections can show an effect within weeks, but visibility on contested queries is measured in quarters. No serious supplier guarantees a position.
What budget should a small business plan for?
There is no going rate, and anyone quoting one without seeing your site is guessing. It depends on the state of the site, the sector and the number of pages to produce. The more useful principle is to fund a narrow scope over a sustained period rather than a one-off audit nobody acts on.
Do I have to use WordPress?
No. WordPress is simply the most widespread CMS, which makes it easier to find people who know it and extensions that already exist. The criteria that matter sit elsewhere: being able to edit tags and URLs, manage redirects, and export all of your content if you move tool.
Is SEO still worth it now that answers are AI-generated?
Yes. Google's own documentation states that the generative AI features in Search draw on the same ranking systems, and that normal SEO practice still applies. No specific file or markup is required. What does need to change is measurement, because a growing share of appearances produce no click at all.
Should I choose between SEO and Google Ads?
They are complementary. Advertising buys immediate visibility that stops when the budget stops; search work builds slower visibility that is not charged per click. A common approach is to test phrases in a paid campaign to check their commercial value, then invest in content on the ones that convert.
How do I check that my pages are indexed?
Google Search Console, which is free, reports page by page whether a URL is indexed and why it is not. The URL inspection tool lets you test a specific address and request another crawl once you have fixed the cause. A page missing from the index cannot generate a single visit, whatever it says.