Does Your Website Have Any Hope of Ranking?
I often see this with small businesses like a dental practice in Cambridge. They are completely puzzled over why their website failed to show up on a Google search for one of their core services. They'd had the website for three years, it was a good design, it was responsive and it was all good and clean but it had not been touched in terms of SEO, not in a formal way anyway.
The thing is, this is probably where most small business websites currently sit. The website is built, done and dusted, and the website owner moves on, but the website sits, as their competitors are working away to try and improve their website’s SEO.
If this is where you’re at, start by getting your technical SEO sorted. Technical SEO isn’t pretty but it is the bedrock on which everything sits. A slow, faulty, or badly built website will not rank well, regardless of your content.
- Page speed: Core Web Vitals are part of Google’s page experience signals and are worth improving, but they are one factor among many. Use Google’s own free tool PageSpeed Insights, and aim for a rating of over 70 on mobile. Most small business sites are miles away from this and fail the test on mobile.
- Mobile usability: A majority of searches happen on mobile in many markets. If you’re not easy to navigate on mobile, you’re going to lose traffic and rank lower.
- HTTPS: If your website says Not Secure on your URL bar, fix it. It’s a trust and a ranking signal.
- Crawlability: Make sure Google is finding and able to index your website pages. Use Google’s free tool Google Search Console to test your URL, and check the results for crawl errors and issues which will hold you back from ranking.
- Broken links: A website that features broken links sends a signal to both users and the search engine that your site is not being maintained. Use a crawling tool like Screaming Frog to run your website and fix any issues you discover.
Then, work on your local SEO.
Local SEO is probably where your business has the greatest potential to succeed, especially if you are a local business like a Cambridge-based business. If you’ve been in Cambridge for a long time or you are just starting up, you want to appear when someone searches for a relevant service, for example “web designer Cambridge” or “accountants near me”. You can start to do this by focusing on Google Business Profile.
Get a profile, make sure it’s claimed, make sure it’s complete. Add photos, working hours, your service area and other relevant information, keep your profile up to date and businesses who have an updated, complete profile are much more likely to be rated more favourably (BrightLocal 2024) than those without.
The next thing is to check how consistent your business name, address, and telephone number are across all online directories your business is on. You might think that it’s pedantic, but Google will pick up the discrepancy between “St” and “Street,” for example, which means that you will not rank as well for your local business search terms.
Your On-Page SEO Checklist
On-page SEO involves making each page as unambiguous as possible, to users and to search engines, as to what it's about.
- Title tags: Every page needs a unique, descriptive title tag of under 60 characters. Use your main keyword naturally. "Web Design Cambridge | Design Monkey" is good. "Home" isn't.
- Meta descriptions: Meta descriptions don't affect rankings directly, but they affect clickthroughs. Craft something that accurately describes the page and offers a reason to click. Keep the length under 155 characters.
- Headings: Include a single H1 on each page, followed by sensible H2s, H3s, etc. Don't use headings just to separate blocks of text. They should be telling the story of the page.
- Keywords: Use your target keyword in your H1, within the first paragraph, and naturally throughout. Don't keyword stuff. Google knows better now.
- Image alt text: Every image should have a descriptive alt tag. That helps people using screen readers, and helps search engines understand your page even better.
- Internal linking: Link to your other pages within your site content when it makes sense. It helps readers navigate, and it helps Google understand how your site is structured.
Content Is Still The Long Game
The businesses doing well with search over time are those who are consistently publishing useful, relevant content. A blog. A FAQ section. A resources page. Some sort of vehicle for addressing customers' real questions.
A real world example: An accountancy firm in Cambridge that writes a clear, helpful article about "how to register as self-employed in 2026" will continue to receive free search traffic for many months, if not years, with no additional spend. That's what good content can do.
Try to publish at least one piece of content each month. It doesn't have to be 3,000 words. It has to be useful, and it has to be written for a human, not a bot.
Build Up Some Authority Over Time
Backlinks, links from other websites onto yours, are still amongst the very strongest signals used in Google's ranking algorithm. You don't need thousands. A few genuinely relevant, high-quality links are likely to outperform hundreds of spammy directory listings.
Local press, industry associations, guest posts on relevant sites, collaborations with businesses that are complementary to your own. These are the kinds of links worth working towards. But they take time. By definition, they do.
Keep Checking Up On It
SEO isn't something you do once. Rankings change. Search engines change their algorithms. Competitors evolve their SEO efforts. Set some time aside each quarter to work through this list again, review your data in Google Search Console, see what's changed.
The businesses I've watched perform well with SEO over the long haul aren't those that did everything perfectly from the off. They're the ones who kept coming back...
If you'd like a hand working through any of this, we're based in Cambridge and happy to take a look.
