Web Design · 7 min read
SEO Basics for SMEs: What You Can Do Yourself
SEO has a bad reputation, and it is not undeserved: few industries produce as many cold-outreach emails with vague promises. Yet for a small business, the core of it is unspectacular. Google wants to show searchers the page that best answers their question. Your job is to be that page for your customers’ questions. Much of this is diligent groundwork that nobody can do better than you, because nobody knows your business better.
First: your Google Business Profile
For a business with local customers, the Google Business Profile is often more effective than any change to the website, because it appears directly in search and on Google Maps. The profile is free, and setting it up properly takes an hour: correct opening hours, current photos, all service categories, phone number, and a link to the website.
The most important ongoing lever is reviews. Actively ask satisfied customers, ideally with a direct link, and reply to reviews — the unpleasant ones included. A profile with recent photos and answered reviews signals one thing: someone is reachable here.
One page per service, not one page for everything
The most common structural mistake on SME websites: a single ‘Services’ page that sums up everything in three paragraphs. But Google ranks individual pages for individual searches. Someone searching for ‘bathroom renovation Vienna’ should land on a page about exactly that, not on a catch-all.
Give each significant service its own subpage with a clear heading and honest, specific copy: what exactly do you do, for whom, in which area, how does it work, what does it roughly cost? The questions customers ask on the phone are the best editorial plan you will ever get.
Page titles and descriptions: the underrated two lines
The page title is the blue line in the search result and one of the strongest signals to Google. On many websites it reads ‘Home’ or just the company name. Better: service plus city plus company, something like ‘Bathroom Renovation in Vienna | Mustermann Plumbing’. The meta description below it barely affects rankings, but it helps decide whether someone clicks. Two lines that say what you do and why you are worth choosing.
How steeply clicks fall off with position is something Sistrix (2020) measured across more than 80 million keywords: in mobile search, position one takes 28.5% of clicks on average, position two 15.7%, position ten a mere 2.5%.
These texts can be edited in any mainstream system. Work through your ten most important pages — that is one afternoon of work with a lasting effect.
Source: Sistrix, 2020
Search Console: a free look at what is happening
Google Search Console is free and shows you which search terms your website appears for, which pages get clicks, and whether technical problems exist. Setup takes half an hour; whoever maintains your website can help.
Checking in once a month is enough. The most interesting rows are queries with many impressions but few clicks: you are visible there, but not yet convincing in the search result. Often the page behind it is thin, or the page title says nothing.
What to leave alone
A few things do more harm than good, or simply burn money:
- Keyword lists in the copy: pages that chant ‘web design Vienna cheap web design agency Vienna’ convince no reader, and Google penalizes the intent
- Bought links: they cost money and, in the worst case, risk removal from the index
- Cold-call offers of ‘we’ll get you to position one’: nobody can guarantee rankings, no reputable agency either
- Mass-generated text pages with no substance of their own: they achieve little short-term and are increasingly filtered out by Google
Patience is part of the honest calculation
SEO works slowly. A new service page usually takes months to rank, not days, depending on competition and search term. If you need enquiries tomorrow, Google Ads is the better tool, with organic visibility built up in parallel. Neither replaces the other: ads stop working the moment the budget stops, good content keeps working.
So what do you still need professionals for?
For the technical base: clean page structure, fast load times, correct indexing, a mobile layout that works. Those are construction decisions made when the website is built, and they are hard to correct yourself afterwards. Our division of labour with clients usually looks like this: we deliver the technical foundation and the structure, the client delivers the expertise for the content. Neither side can replace the other’s part.