5 SEO Fixes You Can Make on Your Website This Week

Most small-business websites aren’t broken. They’re just leaking – slowly losing visitors, rankings and enquiries to small, fixable problems that nobody’s had time to look at.

The good news: you don’t need a big agency retainer or a technical background to plug the biggest leaks. The five fixes below are the ones we check first on almost every site we audit, and most of them take less than an hour each. Block out a morning this week and work through them in order.

1. Speed up your slowest pages

Page speed is one of the few SEO factors that affects both your Google ranking and whether a real human sticks around. More than half of mobile visitors leave a page that takes longer than three seconds to load – so a slow site is costing you twice.

Run your homepage and one key service page (i.e. Our Search Engine Optimisation page would be one we check) through Google’s free PageSpeed Insights. You’re looking for anything in the red. The usual culprits are easy wins:

• Oversized images. A photo straight off a phone can be 4–5MB. It should be under 200KB. Resize and compress before uploading (TinyPNG is free).
• Too many plugins or scripts. Every add-on you’re not using is dead weight. Deactivate the ones you don’t need.
• No caching. A caching plugin (or your host’s built-in caching) serves pages faster to repeat visitors.

Fix the images first – it’s usually the single biggest gain for the least effort.

2. Write a proper title tag and meta description for every key page

Your title tag is the clickable blue headline that shows up in Google. Your meta description is the grey summary underneath. Together they’re your shop window in the search results – and far too many businesses leave them blank, duplicated, or auto-filled with junk.

For each of your important pages (homepage, top services, contact), write:

• A title tag under ~60 characters that includes what you do and where, e.g. “Bathroom Renovations in Tauranga | [Business Name]”.
• A meta description under ~155 characters that gives someone a reason to click – a benefit and a light nudge, not just a list of keywords.

You’re not writing for a robot. Write the line that would make you click if you were searching for your own service.

3. Fix your broken links

Broken links – pages that lead to a dead “404 not found” – frustrate visitors and tell Google your site isn’t being looked after. They build up quietly over time as you delete pages, change URLs, or link to other sites that disappear.

Run your site through a free broken-link checker (Google Search Console flags them, or use a free online crawler). Then either:

• Repoint the link to the correct live page, or
• Redirect the old URL to the most relevant current page so nobody – and no search engine – hits a dead end.

It’s tidy-up work, but it’s the kind of housekeeping that quietly protects your rankings.

4. Make sure every page has one clear H1 – with a keyword in it

Your H1 is the main on-page heading – the title a visitor sees at the top of the content. Google uses it as a strong signal of what the page is about, so each page should have exactly one, and it should describe the page in plain language using the words your customers actually search for.

Two common mistakes to check for:

• No H1 at all, because the heading was styled to look big but isn’t tagged as a heading.
• The same generic H1 everywhere (“Welcome” or just your business name) on every page.

A services page about hot water repairs should have an H1 like “Hot Water Cylinder Repairs in [Town]” – not “Welcome to our website.” Small change, clear signal.

5. Claim and tidy up your Google Business Profile

If you serve customers in a specific area, your Google Business Profile is arguably more important than your website for getting found locally. It’s what powers the map pack – those top three local results with the little map – and it’s completely free.

This week, make sure your profile:

• Is claimed and verified in your name.
• Has the correct name, address, phone and opening hours (matching your website exactly).
• Lists the right category and a full description of what you do.
• Has a few recent photos and a steady trickle of reviews (ask three happy customers this week).

Local search rewards profiles that look active and accurate. Fifteen minutes here can move you up the map pack faster than almost anything else on this list.

Where to start

If you only do one thing this week, start with your Google Business Profile if you’re a local business, or your page speed if you sell online. Both give you a visible return quickly, which makes it easier to keep the momentum going on the rest.

None of these fixes are glamorous, but together they’re the difference between a website that sits there and one that quietly brings in enquiries while you get on with running the business.