AldoMedia
Marketing

SEO Services for a Small Business

SEO is the work of making your website easy to find when somebody searches for what you sell. It is not a switch, not a subscription, and not something that happens in thirty days. This page explains what the work actually is, and how to tell whether you are ready to pay anybody for it.

Talk to AldoMedia About SEO Read the guides first

What SEO actually means

Take away the jargon and a search engine is asking three questions about your website. Can I reach this page and read it. Does it answer the thing the person typed. Does anybody else on the internet treat this business as real. SEO is the work of making all three answers yes.

Everything ever sold under the name fits into one of those three. Technical work belongs to the first, content to the second, links and listings to the third. If somebody quotes you for SEO and you cannot tell which of the three your money buys, ask before you sign.

The three parts, in plain terms

  • Can it be reached. A page that is blocked, broken, painfully slow or unusable on a phone will not rank however well it is written. The classic version is a site launched with the "discourage search engines" setting still switched on from the build. It costs nothing to fix and it is commoner than you would think.
  • Does it answer the question. Search engines match pages to what somebody typed. A page called Services that lists nine trades in one paragraph is not a strong match for any of them. A page about one job, written for a person deciding whether to call you, is.
  • Does anybody vouch for you. Other sites linking to yours, your business listed consistently where local searches look, real reviews under your real name and address. The slowest part, and the part no software does on your behalf.

For a business that serves a city, most of what gets called SEO is really local search: your business profile, your name, address and phone written identically everywhere, and pages that make it obvious where you work. A different job from ranking a national store, and usually a smaller one.

What an automated SEO tool is genuinely good at

Almost every hosting company sells one, and they have a worse reputation than they deserve. A decent tool does real work, and it beats doing nothing at all.

The trouble is what gets implied around it. A subscription that suggests phrases and keeps a checklist is sold as though it were the whole job. Here is the honest split.

Where a tool helps, and where the job stays with a person
The job An automated tool A person
Finding phrases people search for Good. Real search data, quickly The same data, plus which ones bring paying work
Checking the technical basics Very good. Missing titles, broken links, blocked pages The same list, plus doing the fixing
Writing the pages Prompts, outlines, sometimes a draft Somebody who knows what you actually do
Earning links and listings Cannot Slow, manual, and the part that moves
Deciding what to ignore No. Every item is a red item Yes, and this is most of the value

Worth having a tool for

  • Keyword suggestions. Seeing the words customers use instead of the words your trade uses is genuinely useful, and hard to get any other way.
  • A checklist. Titles, descriptions, headings, broken links, pages that return errors. Dull, mechanical, exactly what software is for.
  • Reminders and reporting. A monthly nudge that makes somebody look at the site at all is worth more than the report attached to it.

None of that is fake. A tool that makes you write a proper page title and fix a dead link has earned its keep.

What no tool can do, whatever the sales page says

Four things, and between them they are most of the outcome.

  • Earn a link. A link is another business deciding you are worth pointing at. A supplier's dealer page, a trade association, the team you sponsor, a local reporter who quotes you. Every one starts with a person sending an email. Anything sold as automated link building is either worthless or harmful.
  • Write something worth reading. Software can produce text with your keyword in it. It cannot know the question customers actually ask you on the phone, and that question is usually the page that ends up ranking. Volume without substance now counts against a site.
  • Fix a site nobody can crawl. Tools report; they do not have your theme, your server settings or your redirects. The report says twelve pages return an error. Somebody still has to decide where each one should point instead.
  • Know your market. Whether people around here say blacktop or asphalt. Which of your services actually pays. Which phrase a competitor has owned for a decade and is not worth the fight.

There is a fifth, worth saying out loud: nothing, tool or person, can promise you a position. Search engines do not sell rankings and take no instruction from anybody about them.

What working with a person looks like

Less mysterious than the industry likes it to be. On a small business site the work runs roughly in this order, and the order matters, because every later step is wasted if an earlier one is wrong.

  1. Find out what is currently broken

    Crawl the site, look at what search engines have actually indexed, check what the pages are called and whether any are being blocked. Dull work, and much of it fixable in an afternoon. Skipping it is how a business spends a year writing for a site that cannot be read properly.

  2. Agree what the site is there to sell

    Which services make money, which ones you would quietly like to stop doing, how far you are willing to travel. This is a conversation rather than a report, and it decides every page written afterwards.

  3. Decide which pages should exist

    One real page for each thing somebody searches for, written for a human being. Not a services page with nine links off it, and not a stack of near identical town pages.

  4. Write them, or have them written

    From what you know, in your words, with the detail a customer would ask for. The slow part, and the part everybody tries to skip.

  5. Put the listings in order

    Business profile completed, hours correct, categories chosen with some thought, name and address written the same way everywhere. For a local business this is often the highest return item on the list.

  6. Then measure, monthly, and keep going

    Search Console and your analytics, once a month rather than daily. Positions move slowly and unevenly. The numbers that matter are calls, forms and quotes, not where you sit on a Tuesday.

None of this is a secret method. With time and patience you can do most of it yourself, and the guides on this site will get you further than you expect.

Who should not hire anyone yet

Including us. This is the section that saves people the most money, so read it before the rest.

Wait, and keep the money, if

  • The site is new and nearly empty. There is nothing to optimise yet. Get the pages written, publish them, let a few months pass. Paying for SEO on an empty site is paying somebody to wait.
  • You have not settled what you sell. If the service list is still moving, every page written now gets rewritten at your expense.
  • Somebody promised you page one in thirty days. Nobody can promise that, and the promise tells you what the rest of the relationship will be like. Be more suspicious still if they will not say plainly what they intend to do each month.
  • You are about to rebuild or move the site. Do that first, with the redirects planned before launch. A rebuild published without them can throw away rankings that took years, which is covered on website migration.
  • The phone already rings more than you can answer. Visibility you cannot service is an expense with extra steps.

Worth starting when

  • The site has real pages about real services and has been up long enough to be indexed.
  • You know which jobs you want more of, and which you would rather not take.
  • You can supply answers, photos and detail when they are asked for. The work stalls without them.
  • You can live with a horizon measured in months, and judge it on enquiries rather than positions.

Talk to AldoMedia About SEO Read the guides first

Why there is no buy button on this page

Every other product page on this site ends at a checkout. This one ends at a conversation, on purpose.

We could sell an automated SEO subscription. We do not, because the part that would make it work is the part it does not contain, and a monthly charge for a checklist nobody opens is the sort of quiet upsell this site exists to argue against.

AldoMedia is one company with one office in Buffalo, New York, building and looking after small business websites since 1999. The design and SEO side of it is aldomedia.com. SEO here is done by a person who will look at your site, tell you what is wrong with it, and say so plainly if you do not need us yet. Often the honest advice is to fix three technical things, claim your business listing, and call back in six months.

Call 716-771-2536 or tell us what you sell and where. If the site is slow, unreachable or missing a certificate, those are hosting faults with search consequences, and we can look at the hosting and the search side in the same visit.

Common questions

SEO questions we get asked

How long does SEO take to work?

Months rather than weeks, and the honest range depends on how old the site is, how contested the phrase is, and how much of the basic work has never been done. Technical fixes can show up quickly. A new page competing for a busy term is much slower. Anybody who gives you a date is guessing.

Are automated SEO tools a waste of money?

No, but they are often mis-sold. A tool finds phrases, checks the technical basics and reminds you to do things, and all of that is real work. What it cannot do is earn a link, write something worth reading, or decide which of its red items actually matter. Judged as a checklist it is useful. Judged as a substitute for the work, it is not.

Can anyone guarantee me the first page of Google?

No. Google does not sell positions and takes no instruction from anybody about them, so a guarantee is either a misunderstanding or a sales line. What can reasonably be promised is the work itself: what gets fixed, what gets written, what gets claimed, and what gets reported back to you each month.

Does my web hosting affect my search rankings?

Indirectly, and mostly when it is bad. A site that is slow on a phone, goes down repeatedly, or has a certificate warning is a worse result to send somebody to, and that eventually shows. Hosting that simply works is a floor rather than an advantage. Nobody has ever outranked a competitor by paying more for a server.

Do I need a blog to rank?

No. Plenty of local businesses do well with a clear set of service pages and no blog at all. A blog helps when you genuinely have something to say that customers search for. Publishing thin posts on a schedule because a tool told you to is worse than publishing nothing, because it dilutes the pages that were working.

Should I have a separate page for every town I serve?

Usually not. Five near identical pages with the town name swapped is a pattern search engines have been discounting for years, and it can hold back the rest of the site. One good page about where you work, with real detail, does more. If one town genuinely deserves its own page, it has to read like somebody wrote it for that town.

Related guides and services

Website Migration

Rebuilding or moving a site without throwing away the rankings you already have.

How a migration works

When a Slow Website Is Not Your Host's Fault

Why pages load slowly, and which of the causes changing hosts would not fix.

Read about site speed

How to Choose a Domain Name

What a domain does and does not do for search, before you buy the wrong one.

Choosing a domain name

Also useful: SSL certificates if the site still shows a warning, web hosting if it is slow or unreliable, or all of the guides.

Find out whether SEO is worth paying for yet

Tell us what you sell, where you sell it and what the site is doing now. If the honest answer is three technical fixes and a business listing rather than a monthly bill, that is what we will say.

Talk to AldoMedia About SEO Read the guides first