Free fixes
Ten ways to improve your SEO by changing what your website says
Table of Contents
show
No budget, no tools, no developer. Ten changes to your own wording that you can make this afternoon, and the reason each one works.
Numbers one to three
Say what you do, where, and in their words
- 1. Put it in the first line of your homepageNot “Welcome to our website”. Try “Domestic cleaning in Nottingham and the surrounding villages”. Somebody landing cold should know what you do and where inside ten seconds, and most homepages fail that.
- 2. Use the words a customer would type“Emergency plumber in Lincoln”, not “reactive maintenance solutions”. If nobody searches for your job title, nobody finds your job title. This is the single most common self-inflicted wound on small business sites.
- 3. Say where more than onceIn the heading, in the body copy, in your contact details. Not hidden in a map embed, which Google reads as an image rather than an address.
Numbers four to six
Fix what shows up in the search results
Two lines of text decide whether anybody clicks: the blue title and the grey description under it. Both are yours to write and both are frequently left on whatever the site builder generated.
- 4. Check what Google is currently showingSearch
site:yourwebsite.co.ukand read the titles. Anything saying “Home”, “Page 1” or just your business name is wasted space. - 5. Give each page a specific title“Kitchen Design in Manchester | Smith & Co Joinery” tells a searcher what they will get. Roughly 50 to 60 characters before Google truncates it. Our meta checker shows you exactly how yours reads.
- 6. Write the description tooThe grey text underneath, 120 to 160 characters. It does not affect rankings directly, but it decides whether somebody clicks you or the result below you — which is the whole point of ranking in the first place.
Numbers seven and eight
Make it worth reading
- 7. Answer the question in the first paragraphMost business writing clears its throat for three paragraphs before saying anything. Put the answer first and the context after. If somebody has searched a question, give them the answer before you give them your history.
- 8. Break it up and write like you speakShort paragraphs, real subheadings, no waffle. A wall of text on a homepage gets skipped by people and adds nothing for Google either. Our readability checker will score a page in a few seconds.
Numbers nine and ten
Answer the real questions, and say what happens next
- 9. Turn the questions you actually get into an FAQDo you work weekends. Do you cover my village. How fast can you quote. Whatever you find yourself answering on the phone every week belongs on the site, in the customer’s words. Not “Why are we the best?” — nobody has ever searched for that.
- 10. Tell people what to do next“Call for a free quote” or “message us to check availability”, somewhere visible, on every page. A phone number buried in the footer of one page is a phone number nobody rings.
A harder one worth considering: put your prices up. Or a range, or a starting figure. Most small businesses will not, which is exactly why doing it works — you get fewer enquiries and far better ones, and people searching for a price find a page that has one. We publish ours on the pricing page for the same reason.
Being straight
What this list will not do
These ten are all about wording, and wording is only part of it. Three things this will not touch.
- Your Google Business ProfileFor a local service business that matters more than anything on this page, and it is also free. Five local SEO fixes you can do in an hour covers it.
- Anything technicalIf Google cannot reach your pages or the site breaks on a phone, better copy reaches nobody. The technical checks come first if you suspect that.
- TimeWeeks before changes register, three to six months before it shows in enquiries. Nothing here is instant.
Want a second opinion on your wording?
The free audit covers your titles, descriptions, homepage copy and whether any of it matches what people search for. Written by one of us. It is lead generation and we are not pretending otherwise, but you get it without a call first.
More articles · Meta checker · Readability checker · Local SEO in an hour · All free tools