Will SEO work for your business?

It’s very easy to get SEO wrong

Effective SEO and digital marketing for your business is made up of lots of small, seemingly insignificant things that come together to form it.

This means that if some elements of SEO are not done correctly, the whole thing can fail, which is the main reason many small businesses feel their SEO does not work.

SEO needs to be done at a forensic level – there are a finite number of places to rank in Google to win new business (it’s more than just the top-ten positions).

The bottom line with SEO is that it will work if you let your SEO expert do what needs to be done to get your page ranked.

It’s your website, but if you make decisions that hinder your SEO rather than improve it, who’s responsible for that?

#1 used to be the target, but there are more places to rank than you may think.

Now we have AI search, there are even more, but to focus initially on page one of the results in Google:

For a typical commercial search, your business could realistically appear in these places:

• Paid Search Ads – usually above and/or below the organic results.
• Google Shopping Ads – particularly for ecommerce searches.
• Free Shopping listings – products from Merchant Centre can appear organically in Shopping surfaces and Search.
• AI Overview citations – your site can be one of the sources linked from Google’s AI-generated answer. Google treats all links within an AI Overview as occupying the same Search Console position.
• Traditional organic listings: the familiar blue-link results.
• Local Pack / Map Pack: normally, several businesses are displayed with the map for searches with local intent. Google Business Profiles feed these results.
• Google Business Profile / Knowledge Panel: particularly for branded searches.
• Image results: either an image block embedded in the main SERP or image thumbnails attached to results.
• Video results: individual video results or video carousels.
• Short Videos: increasingly treated as a distinct search type by Google.
• News / Top Stories: available where Google considers the query newsworthy.
• Rich results: enhanced organic results generated from structured data, where eligible.

If you include the 10 organic listings, that’s around 20 places your business can rank, but it all depends on what your business does and the content you produce.

For most small B2B businesses that don’t sell products online or publish (what Google would consider as) news, the more realistic positions are:

1. A Google Ad
2. The Local Pack
3. An AI Overview citation
4. A normal organic result
5. An image result
6. A video result (if you have videos)

That’s 15 in total (10 organic lists + 5 others) that your site can rank.

There are 1.4 billion websites on the internet; there are 15 meaningful positions for any given search.

For a UK small B2B business, though, a useful way to think about it is this: there are about 5.64 million small businesses in the UK, and the great majority of businesses now have some form of web presence. Government data found 68% of UK businesses had a website in 2024, with the proportion much higher among established small employers.

In practical SEO terms, a B2B small business might have:

• 10-30 serious direct competitors in its immediate local market
• 50-200 businesses competing across a wider county or regional search footprint
• Hundreds or thousands of competing for broader non-local commercial keywords
• Potentially tens of thousands of webpages are competing for individual informational searches

And crucially, your business is not just competing against other businesses. You are also competing against directories, marketplaces, review sites, publishers, Reddit, YouTube, Google features and increasingly AI-generated search results.

This is why you need to do SEO properly.

Yes, because many small businesses do not invest in SEO or don’t do it properly

A reasonable current UK figure is around 60% of businesses having some form of SEO strategy, based on LOCALiQ’s 2025 UK State of Digital Marketing survey of more than 500 UK businesses. It found 60% had an SEO strategy and 40% did not.

Of these businesses, around 80% of them do their own SEO.

It’s obviously impossible to say how effective your competitors’ in-house SEO is based on this data. Posting blogs on a website would be considered SEO, but you get the point.

Most small business owners are experts in what they do, and if that isn’t SEO, then their approach is often:

• Read a few blogs to find out how to do it
• Post a few articles
• Buy a few backlinks
• Forget about it for six months
• Potentially do more harm than good, but it’s still ‘doing SEO’

Your competitors are ‘doing SEO’, but there’s a very good chance that they are ‘not doing it very well’, which means your business only has to do it better than your competitors to outrank them.

If you invest in one thing related to SEO, make sure it’s optimising your website

This has nothing to do with what you spend on your website; it’s about making sure your website is designed, built, and optimised to rank.

This is the mistake that many small businesses make: they have a website, of sorts, but it’s simply not built correctly for SEO.

This means that any money they spend on SEO goes down the drain, and the site isn’t fit for purpose. You simply can’t build a house on sand.

This is why we suggest that all small businesses we speak with start with a proper website audit. I appreciate that everyone offers a website audit, but this isn’t just an automated thing. This is a deep dive into your website structure, content, on-page copy, image alt tags, URLs, internal linking, and all descriptions. Every single little thing that, together, affects where you rank.

No website is a complete disaster.

There are always things that can be improved quickly and cost-effectively.

This is one of the first things that any SEO agency worth its salt should focus on. We want to improve your website as quickly and as affordably as we possibly can, and we will demonstrate the difference we can make by identifying these quick wins and showing the results.

However, it is important to note that everything we suggest will be designed to get you ranked. Occasionally, this can jar with internal marketing direction and personal preferences.

These really do have to be set aside if you want to rank; it’s about doing what needs to be done, not skipping it because ‘Bob in accounts’ doesn’t like the way the new page looks. 

I’m going to be completely honest about something that happens in the SEO game

Many large SEO agencies have more people doing sales than they have actually delivered SEO.

This is mainly because they overpromise and underdeliver. Often charging high monthly prices right from the get-go, before they demonstrate any deliverable returns.

If you’ve worked with an SEO agency in the past, you might have heard them use terms such as:

• Average position increased
• Increase in organic impressions
• Increases in keyword visibility
• Top 100 keyword rankings increased.
• Increased session Increased session
• Increased users
• Higher engagement
• Reduced bounce rate
• Increase dwell time.
• More pages per session
• Higher domain authority
• And so on. And so on.

The above may well all be true, but if it doesn’t result in any meaningful new business, then what are you paying for?

At Searchworthy, we work incrementally with our clients. We start with the quick wins and the small fixes, usually as a fixed-cost, end-to-end piece of work. Once this is done, we allow things to settle for a couple of weeks, then review the data again to see what improvements have been achieved.

This manner of working ensures your investment is capped until we can demonstrate that what we’ve done is working.

It’s important to note, though, that this doesn’t necessarily mean you’ll start winning more new business from the get-go. These initial stages of SEO work on your website are about getting everything right; it may take time for this work to be reflected in search engines.

This is especially true if you’ve been doing poor SEO for some time. 6 months of bad SEO on your website can take 12 to 18 months to unpick. You’ve led Google down the wrong path, so now we have to backtrack and fix everything. It’s just the reality; it takes time

Easy to say, but if you’ve had your fingers burned previously, I appreciate that it can be difficult.

Reviews can be faked, data can be manipulated, and people can claim pretty much whatever they want on their website. This is an unregulated industry; anyone can set up as an SEO expert tomorrow.

This causes significant problems for small B2B businesses when they’re trying to find an agency to work with. Even referrals don’t really work because, unless you’re getting a referral from a business that does exactly what you do (i.e., a direct competitor), it’s impossible to compare apples with apples.

An SEO agency that’s good won’t simply agree with everything you want to do. In fact, to be honest, they’ll probably disagree with 90% of it.

This is the typical area where search engine optimisation and marketing clash

• Marketing wants a shiny new website with a hundred words of text and lots of things moving around
• Your SEO expert wants 2,500 words, several bullet point lists, block quotes, an author box, unique diagrams and images that aren’t sourced from royalty-free stock, and an opinion

There is always a compromise to be reached, but anything you compromise on in terms of design over optimisation makes a rod for your own back.

If you want to win new business via your website, SEO has to come first.

There’s obviously a place for ‘look and feel’, and your website should look professional and appropriate, but 100% of the traffic that hits your site looking for an answer to their problem or a solution that you provide makes up their mind about your design. In 300 ms, it is simply not what converts visitors into new clients.

This means that a good SEO agency may well suggest things that you would rather not implement on your website. That’s absolutely fine. It’s your website, but there are often consequences of not following professional advice.

Searchworthy is a small team.

To this end, we take on only a limited number of SEO clients each year. Once the seats are full, that’s it until a new seat becomes available.

Our business and sister business, Toast, generate all our new business enquiries via the SEO we deliver – that’s 1000s of leads and six-figures of converted and won new business every year generated from our own websites.

• We don’t have account managers; you talk to the experts delivering the work.
• We specialise in B2B businesses because that’s what we are.
• We do more than SEO – we have a wider in-house team that delivers design, development and copy – we can look after it all

Every project starts with a conversation – book a call today to see if we’ll be a good fit for your SEO business.