SEO for businesses is dead. So you hear all the time on places like LinkedIn. Talking heads, experts they say, pronouncing the end of search engine marketing. But user behaviour would tell you different. Around 8.5 BILLION searches are made every day on Google. Another 900 million are made on Bing. Not to mention the
SEO for businesses is dead. So you hear all the time on places like LinkedIn. Talking heads, experts they say, pronouncing the end of search engine marketing.
But user behaviour would tell you different. Around 8.5 BILLION searches are made every day on Google. Another 900 million are made on Bing. Not to mention the other localised search engines used by people all over the world.
So the death of SEO may have been called a little early.
We wouldn’t say SEO is dead. We’d say it’s thriving.
Sure, there are loads of other digital marketing channels you can use.
But with billions of searches being made every day, that’s billions of opportunities for businesses (of all sizes, in all industries) to get in front of engaged customers.
These are customers actively looking for products or services. Or customers earlier in the buyer journey, looking for information or answers to questions.
Every search a person makes is an opportunity for a business to get in front of them and, potentially, turn them into a paying customer.
As an SEO agency, we know there’s a lot of smoke and mirrors around search engine optimisation.
You’ve probably heard a few horror stories yourself.
So, in this guide, we want to simplify SEO as much as possible. We want you to have a fully transparent understanding of what SEO is, how it works, the potential dangers of getting things wrong, and how to choose an agency to work with.
You may never work with us. But if you read this guide and come away feeling more confident that you understand SEO and less scared of being taken for a ride by a shady agency, then we’ve done our job.
Table of Contents
What is SEO?
Imagine you’ve decided to go on holiday.
You go to Google and type something like: “Where are the best places for a summer holiday in 2025?”
Or maybe you already have a destination in mind, and you search something like: “What’s the best adult only hotel in Gran Canaria?”
You’re presented with a list of websites telling you the best places to go or the best hotels to stay at.
That’s SEO.
The role of SEO is to make sure a website is technically sound, easily findable and indexed by a search engine, using content that closely matches a customer’s search to appear high in search results.
There are other elements that play a role, like links, but we’ll get into that later.
But SEO is more than just keywords and search engines. It’s a commercial tool to grow brand awareness, build trust and loyalty with customers and grow your business without relying on paid advertising budgets.
In the rest of the guide, we’re going to show you how on-page SEO, off-page SEO and technical SEO work together to make your business more visible online so you can win more customers.
How do search engines work?
This is the question SEOs and digital marketers have pondered since SEO became a thing back in the 90s.
But while there can be a lot of mystique around search engines and never ending musings about the all knowing algorithm, it’s not that complicated.
Crawling a webpage: Website crawlers download text, images and videos from website pages it can find on the internet. This is done automatically, all the time, but you can manually submit a page to Google for crawling.
Indexing a webpage: Once the page has been found, Google will review the text, images and video and store the information on its database, also known as the Google Index (imagine the big warehouse at the end of Indiana Jones: Raiders of the Lost Ark but more tech and less dust)
Pages served on search: When a user performs a search on Google, Google will scour its database and present the information/ website page it believes is most relevant to the query, and fulfills your search intent.
It used to be you’d get 10 “organic results” to a page. But nowadays, with Google Shopping listings and AI overviews, you sometimes only get 6-7 organic search results on the first page.
So SEO has become even more important.
You’ll also see some sponsored posts (PPC)
And some local map results (Local SEO)
Along with other information like People Also Asked or People also search for.
But for the purposes of this guide, we’re looking at organic, “blue link” results shown on a SERP (search engine results page).
The game in SEO is to get your page to the top of page 1 for the searches relevant to your website.
Why is that so important?
Because the top organic search results get around 28% of all the clicks. And the top three results get nearly 70% of the organic clicks. A huge portion of the pie!
Where’s the best place to hide a dead body? Page 2 of Google… because no one ever goes there
Keyword research: The starting point for search visibility
Of all the things that have changed in SEO over the years, one thing that’s stayed reassuringly important is keyword research.
Detailed keyword research is the foundation of a great SEO strategy (although it’s not so much about targeting individual keywords anymore as it’s about collecting keywords into themes or topics).
There can be a lot to get your head around with keyword research, especially when you start to get into short vs long tail keywords, or understanding the search intent behind certain keywords.
Every SEO agency will have a slightly different approach to keyword research, but this is ours, and it’s worked for plenty of our clients (and ourselves).
1 – Who are we targeting?
2 – Identify “commercial” keywords
3 – Identify informational keywords
4 – Use keyword research tools to expand your initial keyword list
5 – Confirm search intent of your keywords
6 – Evaluate keyword metrics like search volume or difficulty
7 – Batch keywords into themes or topics
8 – Prioritise your keywords
You can read a more detailed approach to how we do keyword research in our keyword research guide
On page SEO
As the name suggests, on page SEO refers to all the elements of an individual webpage that can impact how well it ranks. It doesn’t matter what niche you’re in, these elements are going to be important.
Title tags
Title tags are the clickable headline that show up in search results. When we’re talking where to put keywords, title tags are a must for your main keyword. Think of it like the title of a book, you always need the main title upfront.
These should be kept around 60 characters, and your main keyword should be near the beginning. Just be aware that Google does have a tendency to generate its own meta data if it sees it as more relevant (but it’s still worth writing your own):
Meta Descriptions
Meta descriptions are the summary under the main title. These aren’t necessarily going to help you rank better. Instead, think of them as a quick sales pitch for your business. They should be short, snappy and written to encourage clicks to your website.
Headings (H1 – H6)
Headings help to give your page structure (think about the chapters of a book)
Your H1 = the main title of the page (and you should only ever have one H1)
Then H2 – H6 = the subheadings and should follow the same structure (H2 main subheading then H3 → H4 → H5 → H6)
Adding headers to your webpage is important for two reasons.
One, it improves the user experience and makes your page easier to read.
Two, it makes it easier for search engines to figure out the hierarchy and structure of your page (which can help the page to rank higher in search)
URL structure
This is the address of your page that appears in the search bar:
Your URLs should be short and include your main keyword or a close variation of it. Sometimes it’s easier to just have the keyword in the URL rather than a long title (like if you’ve got a long blog title).
As an example, the title of this guide is Complete guide to SEO for businesses.
But if you look at the URL, it’s simply /blog/seo-for-businesses.
That’s because the keyword we’re targeting is “seo for businesses” and writing the URL this way makes it cleaner.
And hey, if you found this guide by searching some variation of that keyword, then it’s proof that it works.
Keyword placement
Ok, this is where things get a little dicey in the world of SEO and keywords.
The old rule of thumb was that to rank at the top of Google, you just had to write a page and smash as many keywords into it as you could. And it worked for a time.
Google is way too smart for that now. Today, this is known as “keyword stuffing” and is more likely to damage your website than improve your rankings.
Rightly so (we think), Google views keyword stuffing as trying to manipulate search results rather than provide users with useful content.
Plus, keyword stuffing turns your content into a gibbering mess of random words that makes no more sense than writing your business’ name 50 times on the back of your van.
Instead, you should focus more on strategic placements for keywords where they’ll make the most difference:
Title
Headings
Intro (or first few paragraphs)
A few times through your copy (where it makes sense and sounds natural)
Optimising images
Images can be easily overlooked as an on page element of your SEO, but they actually provide an easy win.
Writing file name and alt text that are descriptive and match your keywords are another signal to Google of what your page is about.
Plus, proper alt text improves the user experience for users.
You should also compress image file sizes. Massive file sizes can slow down your website’s load speed, which can impact your rankings.
We’d recommend keeping file sizes below 100KB (some even recommend going below 70KB to be safe).
Internal links
Imagine building a house in the middle of nowhere. It’s isolated. Not easy to find. And it’s unlikely anyone is going to be able to get to it.
What that house needs is a road that connects it to the outside world.
In SEO, internal links are the roads that connect web pages like lines on a map.
Internal links have a few purposes:
1 – It makes it easier for users to navigate your website and makes it more likely they’ll read your content
2 – It makes it easier for search engines to find, crawl and index pages (which helps with rankings)
3 – It helps you pass authority between pages on your site, again, improving search results
Content quality
Has there ever been a time when quality content has been more important? It’s hard to think of one.
With everyone and their dog leaning into generative content and chatbots, the internet is becoming a stagnant pool of unoriginal thoughts and AI generated drivel.
Which is good for you if you’re committed to creating, authentic, original and genuinely helpful content for your audience. Google prioritises content that’s helpful and provides a good user experience.
Our advice is to focus on content that solves customer problems and answers questions they’re asking.
We also don’t recommend just creating content for the sake of it. Before you write or create anything new, think, does this actually serve a purpose?
If you want to know a bit more about content quality, you can read our blog on how to write SEO content.
Mobile friendliness
Can anyone even remember when searching online meant sitting down at a desktop and listening to the noise of dial-up broadband?
Which means if you have a website for your business, it’s important that it’s built with mobile in mind. We’d recommend you think mobile first when it comes to your website design.
A faster site isn’t just a user experience issue though. A slow website can impact how well your website ranks in search (or doesn’t).
Cleaning up code, optimising images and file sizes and even the servers your website is hosted on can all impact site speed.
A quick look at more advanced on page elements
This is a long chapter, so we’re not going to go into too much more detail.
But, what we’ve spoken about is just the most common on page SEO elements we’d look at when performingan audit.
There’s also a few more advanced tactics we look at to improve your site even more:
Schema markup
Content cannibalisation
Topical authority
Core Web Vitals
Canonical Tags
Hreflang Tags
Pagination Tags
Javascipt
Log file analysis
Anchor text optimisation
UX signals & behaviour analysis
Technical SEO
If content is the fancy decorations and decor that make your website look nice, technical SEO is the foundation that everything is built on.
Without technical SEO there’s a good chance no-one is ever going to read or see all your great content, so you’ve got to pay attention to it.
We’ve done technical audits on thousands of website over the years, and it’s usually a few common things we find that cause problems:
Crawlability issues
Pages blocked by robots.txt
Pages with noindex tags
Broken internal links (404 errors)
Indexing problems
Duplicate content that confuses search engines about which page it’s supposed to rank
Missing or incorrect canonical tags that mean duplicate content is indexed
Pages that provide little or no value to readers (usually called “thin content pages)
Site speed & Core Web Vitals
Slow page load times that mean users abandon a page before it loads
Poor Core Web Vital scores
Mobile usability
Website that aren’t built as mobile friendly
Poor UX or layout shifts on mobile
Structured data issues
Missing schema markup
Invalid data structure
HTTPS & security
No SSL certificate means your website can be flagged as insecure
Poor URLs & site architecture
URLS that are too long or complicated
Site hierarchy that doesn’t make sense
Pages with no internal links (called orphan pages)
Redirect issues
302 redirects being used instead of 301s
Rediret chains and loops
XML sitemap problems
Out of date or broken sitemap
Sitemap pages blocked by robots.txt
Server & hosting issues
Downtime or server errors
Slow server response times
How we audit your website for technical SEO issues
Are technical SEO experts the unsung heroes of digital marketing? Who knows. We couldn’t possibly say.
But they do have a hell of a job auditing websites to make sure everything is running as it should be.
Technical audits can be different depending on the size of your site, but tend to have a lot of the same processes.
We crawl your website
Lifting up the bonnet. This is where we get a picture of your site structure and start to find the problems we need to fix. Using SEO tools like Screaming Frog and Ahrefs we’ll identify:
Broken links
Redirect chains
Duplicate content
Canonical issues
Internal linking
Is your site indexable?
Let’s see if your pages are actually being indexed by Google. And if not, why not? We’ll:
Review robots.txt
Find crawled and indexed pages in Google Seaarch Console
Find pages that are being accidentally blocked (hey, it happens)
Look at the architecture
Let’s see if you’re site structure and hierarchy makes sense (this can be a problem for bigger sites)
How fast is your website? (and do pass Core Web Vitals?)
Let’s see if you pass the three second loading rule.
We’ll also check your Core Web Vital score and review layout shifts, input delays and review images to make sure everything is as it should be.
Does your website work on mobile?
Remember what we said about mobile first searches? We’ll see if you’re website has been designed with this in mind.
Is your website secure?
Do you have a valid SSL certificate?
Do all your pages go to a HTTPS version of your site (we’ll find out)
Are you mixing secure and unsecure elements on the same page?
What’s your schema look like?
Are you marking up pages properly to make the most of schema? For example, adding product, local business, FAQ and breadcrumbs to pages?
Let’s check your XML sitemap
As your site grows is your sitemap keeping up?
We’ll make sure your sitemap is up to date and only has indexable URLs within it.
We’ll also submit your new, fresh sitemap to Google Search Console.
Are canonical tags in place?
Canonical tags tell search engines which pages to prioritise if multiple pages are talking about the same things. But you might be pointing multiple pages to a single canonical without needing to.
Is Javascript rendering?
Javascript is great for adding dynamic content to your website. And it can make your site more user-friendly (which search engines love).
We’ll make sure your Javascript is running as it should and isn’t causing any SEO problems.
Are you using up your crawl budget?
Sounds expensive. But crawl budget is just how many pages Google will crawl on a website within a certain timeframe (and can be an issue on excessively big websites)
Does your content need fattening up?
If your content is looking a bit thin, we’ll put a plan in place to bulk it up to make it more relevant, authoritative and useful for users.
We’ll also check for duplicate content and create a plan to merge or remove low quality pages.
Are your technical tags looking good?
Remember those title tags, meta descriptions and headers we talked about earlier?
Our SEO audit services make sure you’re making the most of keyword placements and encouraging more clicks.
Let’s check out your logs
Getting a bit more advanced now. Checking server logs can show us how bots are interacting with your site (we’re talking how often they’re crawling it) so we can see what codes are being returned (any 404 broken links etc) and also identify any crawl anomalies that could be causing any problems.
Let’s prioritise our fixes
Phew, that’s a lot of things to check isn’t it?
As a result of all that we’ll have a list of actions that we can sort out based on priority to get your technical SEO up to scratch and create a platform for your content to perform at its best.
Off page SEO
Time was, building backlinks to websites (the main element of off page SEO) was viewed as the most important thing you could do to get your website to rank.
So we’re talking about the same thing, “building backlinks” means getting another website like a relevant industry blog, local publisher or news outlets to add a link from their website, pointing towards yours.
And it’s still highly important.
Here’s why.
Imagine you’re in a room walking around telling people how smart you are.
That’s essentially what your website does in search engines. It’s moving from visitor to visitor exclaiming that its content, products and services are the best thing on the internet and that’s why it should rank at the top of search engines.
But you (and your website) would say that wouldn’t you.
Now imagine you’re in a room and three other people are walking around telling everyone on your behalf that yes, you are as smart as you say.
Their opinion carries a lot more weight because they wouldn’t say it if it wasn’t true. Their reputation depends on it.
This is the equivalent of building links to your website in the SEO world.
Those relevant, authoritative backlinks are going around the internet telling Google and other seaarch engines that you’re an authority, and deserve to be ranked highly in search.
Building these relevant links can:
Improve trust and authority
Improve website rankings
Send more traffic to our website
But while they’re still incredibly important (we invest a lot of time and effort building backlinks for ourselves and our clients), according to Google they’re perhaps becoming less important.
Google’s own Gary Illyes has gone on record saying “We need very few links to rank. Over the years we’ve made links less important.”
We take these words with some healthy scepticism. It wouldn’t be the first time Google has said one thing when it’s search engine tells a different story.
What are the best ways to build relevant, authoritative links?
Here are a few proven strategies that work:
Digital PR
Digital PR has effectively taken the elements of “traditional” PR (media relations and storytelling) and adapted it for the digital age.
While the goal of PR is positive news coverage, Digital PR wants the positive coverage, but also earned links back to your website.
It typically does this through data led stories using surveys or infographics.
Or through company profiles and thought leadership articles in B2B media.
Guest posts
Some SEOs see guest blogging as the poor cousin of Digital PR. But we don’t agree.
Writing engaging, informative articles for relevant blogs is a great way of demonstrating your expertise while building those trust signaling backlinks to your website.
Partnerships
This is particularly good for Local SEO.
Creating partnerships with local groups and organisations (like charities or the chamber of commerce) give you the chance to build links through their websites.
Follow links vs no follow links
We’re getting into the weeds a little bit now, but it’s worth knowing the difference between follow and no-follow links.
Follow links, once upon a time, were the gold standard of link building. A follow link from a reputable DA90+ website was enough to earn an SEO a good ol’ pat on the back and a hearty handshake.
Follow link essentially came with a seal of approval from the website adding the link that your website was worth following and added a little extra spice to your earned link.
No follow links, as you can probably guess, didn’t have the follow signal and where seen for a long time as not worth tracking.
This isn’t the case so much anymore.
In fact, Google itself has come out as saying nofollow links are now viewed as a “hint” that your website is authoritative, and while they might not carry the same link authority as a follow link, they can still build your website’s authority overall.
Local SEO
We’re nearly at the end now. Just hang in a little longer.
If you’re a local business, especially service businesses or those with offices in multiple locations, then you can’t underestimate how important local SEO is.
You’ve probably seen the benefits of local SEO in your own life (if not for your business).
You’re planning a day out in Liverpool (yes, people do that) and you’re looking for somewhere to eat.
You go to Google (other search engines are available) and you type something like: Chinese restaurants in Liverpool.
Or that tree that’s looking worryingly more like the leaning Tower of Pisa is giving you heart burn, you might search “tree removal in Southport”.
And you’re presented with a list of websites with the services you want.
But you’re also seeing a local map with pins showing local businesses in your area (or the area you’ve search for).
You might even see a rather large profile (a Google Business profile) of a few businesses.
This is all created by Local SEO.
And it’s important because according to Google nearly half of all online searches have local intent.
There’s a few things you can do to improve your chances of being found with Local SEO.
A well optimised, and updated, Google Business Profile
Area landing pages for the parts of country you’re based or offer your services in
Create relevant, localised content highlighting you’re expertise of the local area.
There’s loads more you can do to succeed in Local SEO. Way more than we could add to this guide (it’s already more than 4,000 words at this point).
Which is why we’ve written a whole other guide and content series on how to do Local SEO.
How to build your seo strategy
Now let’s put it all together.
All the tactics we’ve talked about have led us to this point, creating your SEO strategy that will improve your visibility in search, help you outrank the competition, and win more customers through organic search.
A well structures SEO strategy should look something like:
Customer focused
You understand exactly who your ideal customer is. You know what they want, what questions they ask, and what they search for.
Focused on keywords and content topics
You have a good mix of short tail and long tail keywords. You’ve covered the commercial keywords on your money pages, and have a strong content strategy targeting informational keywords in enganging blog content.
You have a strong handle on the search intent behind each keyword and have created content to match it.
You’ve got a technically strong website
You’ve been through your site map and internal linking strategy. You’ve been through Core Web Vitals and your website is loading faster than a McLaren F1. You’ve even transformed your schema.
There’s no test your website could go through that it couldn’t pass.
You’re building authority
You’re guest blogging and earning highly relevant links from websites, earning those trust signals in the eyes of search engines.
You’re dominating Local SEO
Your Google Business Profile is singing with positive reviews, updated photos and new content. You’re viewable in Maps, Local Packs and owning those top organic spots for your area and service pages.
You’ve just built an SEO strategy
And that’s it. That really is how you build a solid SEO strategy to increase visibility and be found on organic search.
It sounds easy. It’s not. It sounds simple. In a way, it is.
SEO strategies are a combination of taking technical SEO, on page SEO and off page SEO and doing the right things consistently over a long period of time.
There’s no easy win with SEO. At least not if you want long term results.
But following these steps – or bringing in some professional SEO services like ours – will give you the best chance of raising your visibility and winning more customers from Google.
Let’s measure your success
Second to last chapter. But you’ll enjoy this. We’re going to talk about how to see the results from your SEO strategy.
When it comes to SEO metrics, we think these are the main things you should look out for:
Increased traffic: Some would say this is a vanity metric. We say it’s an indicator you’re attracting visitors to your website.
Increased search visibility: Again, some say vanity metric. We say an indicator you’re creating the right content.
Clicks: This tells you how many people are seeing your website in search and clicking through to view your pages.
Time on screen: This can give you a hint as to how engaging your content is and how long people are reading it
Page per session: Shows how many pages a user views during a single session. Can be a sign that you need more internal links to other content to keep them on site.
Bounce rate: A high bounce rate could be a sign you’re not meeting a user’s expectations with your page content
Conversions: The gold standard. This is the one you want. How many visitors are converting on your site? Whether it’s making a purchase or sending an enquiry or booking a call. This is the ultimate goal for your website’s SEO strategy.
Using SEO tools to make your keyword research easier
The good news about keyword research is that there are loads of tools available – both free and paid – that you can use to make your life easier.
Each tool is better at certain things and which you use will usually depend on what you’re trying to do.
But these are a few of our favourite tools that we use daily:
There’s too much to write about each of these tools individually for this guide. But we have created a more comprehensive article on our favourite SEO tools.
You now understand more about SEO for businesses
Congratulations.
You’ve made it to the end of our complete guide to SEO for businesses and should now be in a better position to understand whether you or your current SEO agency is doing the right things by your website.
If you want us to take a look at your search performance, we’d be happy to book you in for an SEO audit.
We can show you the areas to improve and ultimately rank higher in search for your commercial keywords.
If you’re not ready for that and still want to know more about SEO for businesses and how it can help you, we’ve got plenty more blogs and case studies showing real life examples of how we’ve helped businesses be successful with SEO.
30+ years in web. 20+ years in SEO. Much older than he looks (from a distance). Paul has worked on both sides of the divide, working his way up to Technical Director for 2 SME’s, each with multiple successful websites across various B2B and B2C sectors, before jumping at the chance to join Paramount Digital as Head of SEO. Paul often has a more commercial view on projects, in terms of understanding what’s important to the client, and has a wealth of knowledge about SEO and beyond.
Book a 30 minute consultation call with one of our team so we can understand your goals for digital marketing and what services you need within your budget.
2. Let’s get strategic
Once we know where you want to get to, we’ll put a plan in place to get you there. You’ll get a clear outline explaining all the costs and what results you can expect.
3. Let’s start growing your business
Once we’re all pointing in the right direction our expert team will get to work delivering what we’ve promised and getting you the best ROI possible.
