When WordPress is still the right choice (and when it isn't)
Most "SEO services" are selling things Google figured out how to ignore a decade ago. If you run a small business website and a stranger on LinkedIn just messaged you about your "search visibility score", this is what they should be telling you instead.
There are roughly eight things that actually move the needle on a small business site, and they're all things you can do yourself in a quiet afternoon.
1. Give every page a unique title and description.
The single biggest thing you can do. Open every page on your site, look at the <title> tag and the <meta name="description">. If two pages share a title, fix it. If a description is missing, write one. Keep titles around 55 characters; descriptions around 155.
Good title: "Property Management System for UK landlords — HCOMS". Bad title: "Home".
2. Use one H1 per page.
The page's main heading should be in an <h1> tag, and there should only be one of them. Sub-sections use <h2>, then <h3>, in order. Don't pick heading levels for how big they look — that's what CSS is for.
3. Submit a sitemap to Google Search Console.
Most static-site generators and CMSs will produce a sitemap.xml for you. Upload it once at search.google.com/search-console. From then on, Google knows about every page on your site within hours, not weeks.
4. Make the site fast.
Google measures real-user load times via Core Web Vitals. The cheap wins are: serve images in WebP, lazy-load anything below the fold, gzip everything, cache aggressively. The expensive win is to stop loading 12 fonts and 8 tracking scripts.
5. Internal links are free authority.
If you mention a topic that has its own page on your site, link to it. Don't just link from the navigation — link from inside paragraphs. Google reads anchor text and uses it as a signal of what the linked page is about.
6. Write for one specific question.
Each page on your site should be the best answer to a specific search someone might type. "What does HCOMS do?" is not a good search. "Diocese management software UK" is. Pick a question per page, answer it directly in the first paragraph, then go deeper.
7. Don't buy backlinks.
Google's spam team is genuinely good at spotting paid link networks now, and being caught means you get penalised harder than if you'd done nothing at all. Earn links instead by writing things people want to share — case studies, original research, opinionated takes.
8. Be a real business with real contact details.
A real address, a real phone number, a real Companies House registration. For local searches especially, Google rewards businesses it can verify exist. Set up a Google Business Profile. Get listed in your industry's directories.
What you can ignore
Almost everything else. Meta keywords (deprecated since 2009). H1/H2 keyword stuffing (penalised). Exact-match domain names (no longer help). Submitting to "200 search engines" (only three matter — Google, Bing, DuckDuckGo, and the latter two read Bing's index). Schema markup helps in some niches but is not magic.
If you do the eight things above, on a clean modern website, you will outrank 80% of your competitors who are paying someone £400/month for nothing in particular. The rest is patience.
If you want a hand auditing your existing site, drop us a line. We've been doing this since the original Google search box had a beta tag on it.