SEO for small business
Quasi tutte le guide partono dalle tecniche. È l'ordine sbagliato: la maggior parte dei siti che non compaiono non ha un problema di tecniche, ha un problema di base, spesso uno solo, che vale più di tutte le tecniche messe insieme.
Qui sotto ci sono i controlli che faccio io su ogni sito, in ordine di quanto pesano davvero. Poi puoi farmeli eseguire sul tuo.
Prima di leggere: fai controllare il tuo sito
Venti secondi, nessuna registrazione. Poi torna qui e saprai già quali paragrafi ti riguardano.
I nove controlli, in ordine di peso
The site tells Google not to show it
FatalA noindex instruction left switched on from when the site was being built. It is the worst problem there is and the most invisible: the site works, it looks good, and it will simply never appear. We find it on more sites than you would imagine.
The robots file blocks the search engines
FatalSame family, different cause. One warning though: blocking AI crawlers is not the same thing, and almost everyone does that now. You have to read which rule applies to which robot, otherwise you scare people for nothing.
The site was not built for a phone
SeriousMost searches come from a phone, and Google judges the site as it sees it from there. If the page arrives shrunk down and has to be pinched to read, no optimisation technique closes that gap.
The title or the description is missing
SeriousThey are the blue line and the paragraph that appear in the results. Without them Google helps itself to a random piece of the page, often the menu. You can sit in third place and get no clicks because of two lines.
Nothing is measuring anything
SeriousWith no analytics you do not know which searches bring people in, which pages work, or what changed after any of the work. Optimising without measuring means changing things at random and hoping.
There is no sitemap
Worth fixingIt is the list of pages you hand to Google. Without it, indexing is left to chance and new pages take weeks to be noticed.
No structured data
Worth fixingThis is what lets Google show hours, address, prices and star ratings inside the result itself. Without it yours looks poorer than your competitor's at the same position, and takes fewer clicks.
The page has almost no words on it
Worth fixingIt is not about length for its own sake. It is that a page which answers no precise question has no reason to appear when that question gets typed.
The same site indexed twice
Worth fixingWith and without www, or on http and https. Google treats them as different pages and the signals split in half instead of adding up. A redirect fixes it, and it is half an hour of work.
And then, the techniques
Once the nine points above are in order, the job becomes a different one and it stops being technical. It becomes working out which questions the people who might buy from you actually ask, and building a page for each one.
Not the questions you imagine: the ones that can be measured, one by one, with real search volume behind them. A local business often finds that the search bringing the calls is not the name of its trade, but the problem it solves, and that it is also the one with the least competition on it.
Want to know where you stand?
Put in your address and I will tell you which of these nine problems you have, what they are costing you, and the order I would fix them in. Free, no email, and nobody calls you back.
Analizza il mio sitoDomande frequenti
How long does SEO take for a small business?
To show up for your own name, days. To show up for a search that brings customers, months, and it depends on how much competition sits on that search. Anyone promising first place by a given date is guessing, because they do not decide it.
Why is my website not getting any traffic?
In order: because it is too new and Google has not seen all of it yet, because an instruction is stopping it, or because it answers no question anybody types. The first two show up in twenty seconds in an analysis. The third one means looking at what people actually search for.
Do I have to pay to be first on Google?
No, and they are two different things. Ads put you at the top for as long as you pay. Normal ranking stays when you stop, but it takes months. People in a hurry use both. People on a tight budget start with the second.
Should I optimise the site I have or rebuild it?
It depends how many of the problems above it has. If it is two or three, they get fixed and it costs a fraction. If the site is old, slow and structureless, rebuilding costs less than patching it forever. An analysis tells you which, the naked eye does not.
Do SEO techniques still work?
They work afterwards. Most sites that do not show up do not have a technique problem: they have one basic problem, often a single one, worth more than every technique put together. Which is why you measure before you optimise.
These nine checks are the ones the free GetCalls analysis actually runs, with the same weights. It is not a list written to fill a page: it is how the tool works, written out in plain words.