Search engine optimisation is not one task. It is roughly five, and only two of them matter much in the first year for a small service business.
Start with the search terms customers actually use
Write down the ten questions you get asked on the phone most often. Those are your keywords. "Emergency plumber Saturday", "cost to rewire a house", "end of tenancy clean price" — concrete phrases with intent behind them.
Broad single words like "plumber" or "cleaning" are effectively unavailable. National chains and directories own them and have done for years.
The twelve changes worth making
1. One page per service. A single "Services" page cannot rank for five different things. Split it.
2. Put the town in the title. "Bathroom fitting in Leeds" beats "Bathroom fitting" every time for a local business.
3. Write titles under 60 characters with the service first and the brand last.
4. Write your own meta descriptions. Two lines with a reason to click: price range, response time, guarantee.
5. Answer the price question in writing. Pages that give a real number outrank pages that say "prices vary". They also get quoted by AI assistants.
6. Add an FAQ section to every service page using the exact wording customers use.
7. Compress your images. Photos straight off a phone are the single biggest cause of slow pages.
8. Check the mobile score in PageSpeed Insights. Under 50 means something is broken.
9. Claim and fill in your business profile on Google and Apple Maps. For local trades this often outperforms the website.
10. Ask for reviews after every finished job. A short text message with a direct link converts far better than hoping.
11. Get five relevant links. Trade association, suppliers, a local club you sponsor, the chamber of commerce, a supplier case study.
12. Add one new page a month. A guide, a project write-up, an answer to a question. Consistency beats a one-off push.
What to ignore
Keyword density, meta keywords tags, buying link packages, and any agency promising position one in thirty days. None of it works and the link buying can get you penalised.
How long before it shows
New pages are usually indexed in 3 to 14 days. Meaningful rankings for local terms take two to three months. Broad terms take a year or more, if ever.
When you would rather not do it yourself
SEO rewards consistency, and consistency is exactly what is missing when the business is busy. A profile on a marketplace like Marketit gets you visible for search terms you would not rank for alone, and the requests arrive in your inbox rather than depending on where you sit in the results.