The SEO mistakes small businesses make and why they are so easy to fix.

When I do a digital audit for a business and look at their website through an SEO lens, the same mistakes come up over and over again. Not sophisticated technical problems. Basic things that were either never set up correctly or have been overlooked because nobody was looking.

Here are the most common ones and what to do about each.

Missing or generic page titles

Every page on your website has a title tag. It is the text that appears in the browser tab and in Google search results as the blue clickable link. It is also one of the most important signals Google uses to understand what a page is about.

Most small business websites either leave the title tag as the default their website builder set it to, which is often just the business name, or use the same title for every page. Both are missed opportunities.

Your home page title should describe your business clearly: what you do and where. Your service pages should describe that specific service. Your about page should say something useful rather than just About Us. These are small changes that take minutes to make and directly improve how Google understands and ranks your pages.

No meta descriptions

The meta description is the short paragraph of text that appears under your page title in Google search results. It does not directly affect your ranking but it significantly affects whether people click on your result.

Most small business websites have either no meta descriptions, in which case Google picks a random snippet of text from the page, or duplicate meta descriptions copied across multiple pages. Neither is ideal.

Write a specific, useful meta description for each important page on your site. Tell people what they will find on that page and give them a reason to click. Keep it under one hundred and sixty characters. This is thirty minutes of work that improves your click through rate from search results permanently.

No internal links

Internal links are links from one page on your website to another. They help Google understand the structure of your site and distribute ranking authority between pages. They also help visitors navigate naturally from one piece of content to related content.

Most small business websites have almost no internal links beyond the navigation menu. Every time you mention something on your website that you have written about elsewhere, link to it. When you write a new article, link to other related articles. This takes seconds to do and builds a stronger site structure over time.

Images without alt text

Alt text is the description you attach to an image that tells Google and screen readers what the image shows. Google cannot see images. It reads the alt text to understand what the image contains and uses that to understand the context of the page.

Most small business websites have images with no alt text at all. This is both an accessibility issue and an SEO issue. Go through your key pages and add descriptive alt text to your main images. Describe what is actually in the image using natural language. A photo of a ceramic mug on a timber cafe counter is better alt text than image1.jpg.

Slow mobile performance

We covered this in the website mistakes article but it is worth repeating here because it is both the most common and the most impactful SEO issue for most small business websites. If your site loads slowly on mobile, Google will rank it lower than a faster competitor with equivalent content. Full stop.

Check your score at Google PageSpeed Insights. If your mobile score is below fifty, fixing your page speed is the single highest priority SEO task you have right now, ahead of any content creation or other optimisation work.