SEO for Small Business: What to Do When You're the Whole Practice

H1: SEO for Small Business: What to Do When You're the Whole Practice

If you have one hour a week for SEO, spend it on plain answers about what you sell, and put them on your website. Who it's for. How someone starts. Nobody else can write those. The tools and the reports are a job with no end. They belong to whoever has the tools open anyway.

Someone told you SEO is how new clients find you. So you looked it up.

Within an hour, a site checker had covered your homepage in red warnings. Three tools wanted you on a free trial. One article said to post on your Google Business Profile every week.

Then the emails start. "I noticed a few issues with your website." A free SEO check from someone who's never heard of your practice. Apparently your site has critical errors. Every week, a new stranger is worried about your homepage.

Yep. I get those too.

That's good advice for a company with a marketing person on staff. You've got a full client list, your own bookkeeping, and an hour a week for marketing. If nothing else comes up.

The advice you've been reading was written for a company with someone on SEO all day. You're one person with an hour a week, deciding whether to learn it or pay someone.

Most SEO work runs on software and routine. Someone checks where your pages show up in Google. Then checks again next week. Someone else fixes the site checker's warnings, mostly in settings you've never opened.

Other websites get asked to link to you. Then somebody reads the monthly report, decides what to change, and it all starts again.

That work matters. But your training in anxiety, career changes or pensions won't help you read that report.

Learn the tools yourself and that hour is gone. Every week. For as long as you run the practice.

At My Ads Team, the tool side is our work. How much does SEO cost? The SEO page answers that in plain numbers.

Whether to do it yourself or pay someone is its own question. I've answered it in doing your own marketing or paying someone.

Google reads each page and works out what it's about. Then it matches the page to what the person is looking for, and not to the exact words they typed.

Someone types "therapist for anxiety online Ontario" or "financial advisor for teachers." Google looks for a page that's clearly about that.

If your homepage only says "Supporting you through life's changes," Google has nothing to match.

The answers Google needs are ones only you have. Who you help. What the first session looks like. Who you send somewhere else.

No tool can write those, and nobody you hire can make them up.

Taking someone on, or sending them to a colleague, is your call. A page that says it plainly lets the right person book. The wrong person moves on, before either of you sends an email.

A therapist's homepage says "Compassionate care for whatever you're facing." Her plain answer is "I see adults with anxiety and panic attacks, online, anywhere in Ontario. I don't see couples, but I can tell you who does."

A financial advisor's site promises to help you "build the future you deserve." Her plain answer is "I work with teachers and nurses who have a pension and want to know when they can retire. I don't sell insurance."

Yours are in the questions people ask before they book. Do you see teenagers? Do you work evenings? What happens if I need to stop partway through?

Write down three. Answer each one the way you'd say it to someone sitting across the desk from you. Each answer can be a paragraph on your site.

Then go to the harder ones, like whether you'd keep working with someone who moves to another province. You answer those out loud all the time.

Google reads what you say about yourself in more than one place. Your website, your Google Business Profile and what other sites say about you.

If your website says financial planner and your profile says wealth advisor, Google has to pick one. It might pick wrong.

Reviews are the one place your clients write your answers for you. "She helped me work out when I could retire" tells Google who you help. "Great service!" tells it very little.

When you ask a client for a review, ask them to say what you helped with.

Start with the question you're asked most. If you'd like us to look after the tool side while you write, book a call.

I have one hour a week for SEO. What should I spend it on?

Write one plain answer on your website. Pick a question new clients ask before they book, and answer it the way you would out loud. Next week, do the next one.

What should my website say when I am the only person in the practice?

Who you help, and who you don't. How a first appointment works and how to book one. Your name, and where you see people.

How do I write about my practice without sounding like every other one?

Read each line and ask if a practice down the street could say it too. If it could, swap it for something only you would say, like the hours you keep or the town you work from.

How often do I need to touch my website once it says the right things?

Not every week. Add a page when the same question keeps coming up on first calls. Twice a year, read the site as a new client would and take out what isn't true anymore.