How to Get Found on Google Without Hiring an Agency

Search engine optimisation has a marketing problem of its own. It is sold as a dark art — dashboards full of metrics with names like “domain authority,” monthly retainers, and reports that show a lot of movement without ever showing a customer. That reputation puts a lot of small business owners off entirely, which is a shame, because the fundamentals are genuinely simple and you can do most of them yourself.

Here is the honest version: for a small local or specialist business, being findable on Google comes down to four things. Your site needs to work properly, your pages need to answer questions people actually ask, other places on the internet need to mention you, and you need to give it time. Everything else is refinement.

Before you write a single word of new content, check that the site you already have is not quietly undermining itself. A search engine has to be able to reach your pages, load them quickly, and understand what they are about. If any of that fails, nothing else you do will matter much.

The three checks worth doing today:

This is the whole of content strategy, stripped of jargon: figure out what your customers type into a search box, and have a page that answers it properly. Not a page that mentions the topic — a page that answers it.

The good news is you already know these questions, because customers ask you them constantly. “How much does it cost?” “Do you come out to my area?” “How long does it take?” “Can you do it on a Saturday?” “What’s the difference between X and Y?” Every one of those is a page, and every one of those pages can rank, because most of your competitors have not written them.

Two practical rules. First, one question per page — a single page trying to cover eight topics ranks for none of them. Second, use the words your customers use, not the words your industry uses. If your customers say “blocked drain” and your website says “drainage remediation services,” you are invisible to the people looking for you.

Local businesses have a specific version of this: be explicit about where you work. A page that says “we serve Bristol and the surrounding area” is findable by people in Bristol. A page that says “we serve the local area” is findable by nobody.

Search engines treat a link from another website as a vote of confidence. You do not need hundreds of them, and you certainly should not buy any. For a small business, a modest number of genuine, relevant mentions goes a long way — and most of them come from places you already have a relationship with.

Places worth ten minutes each: your local chamber of commerce or trade association, suppliers who list their stockists or partners, the local news site that covers business openings, any professional body you belong to, sponsorship of a local team or event, and the directories specific to your trade. Ask suppliers and partners directly — “would you add a link to our site on your stockists page?” is a question people say yes to far more often than owners expect.

You will be able to see which of these actually send you people. Check your referrers a month later and you may find that one directory you had forgotten about sends more visitors than your entire social media effort.

Something genuinely new is happening to how people find businesses. A growing share of people now ask an AI assistant — rather than a search box — for a recommendation, a comparison, or an answer, and act on what it tells them. If that assistant cannot find a clear answer on your site, it will confidently recommend somebody else’s.

The reassuring part is that the work is the same work. Assistants are good at reading pages that state facts plainly: what you do, where you do it, what it costs, how quickly, and what makes you different. Clear, factual, well-structured pages serve both audiences at once. The vague, adjective-heavy “passionate about excellence” copy serves neither.

You can also see whether it is happening. AI traffic tracking separates visits that came from AI assistants out from ordinary search traffic, so “are people finding us that way” becomes a number rather than a hunch.

Search work is slow. A new page might take weeks to be indexed and months to settle into a position. That gap between effort and result is exactly why so many owners give up — and why measuring the wrong thing makes it worse.

The metric to watch is not your ranking position for a particular phrase. Positions move constantly, differ by location and by person, and tell you nothing about your business. Watch instead which of your top pages are picking up visitors over time, and whether search is growing as a share of your referrers. Those are the numbers that reflect real progress.

One more habit worth building: when you publish a new page or make a significant change, note it. Six weeks later, when a page starts getting traffic, you will want to know exactly what you did and when.

If you can find two hours a week, this is a genuinely achievable schedule that will put you ahead of most of your local competition:

To be fair to the profession: there are situations where hiring help makes sense. A large site with a genuine technical problem, a competitive market where everyone has already done the basics, or a business where a single customer is worth thousands and the maths obviously works. If that is you, hire someone — but hire them after you have done the basics, so you can tell whether they are adding anything.

For everyone else, the honest advice is that the first 80% of the benefit comes from work you can do yourself in an afternoon a month. Start with the free website report card to see where your site actually stands on speed, SEO basics, security, and availability — graded A to F, with plain-English fixes and no jargon in sight.