Basic SEO a Portsmouth business can do itself in a week: the day-by-day checklist

A Portsmouth business owner can do the basic SEO on a small website in a week of evenings without paying anyone: connect Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools, write down this month's figures, give every page its own title and description, make each page's heading and first paragraph say what you do and where, fix the photographs, and link the pages to each other. Nothing on the list needs code beyond pasting one record into your domain settings. The checklist below takes it a day at a time, with how to tell each job is done.

It leaves out the work away from your website on purpose, because each part has its own guide here: the Google Business Profile, the listings worth having and getting reviews. If your site gets no enquiries at all, start with why that happens instead, because a broken form matters more than anything on this list.

The week at a glance

Monday: Search Console, the Domain way

Search Console is Google's free report on how your site appears in search, and every other job this week gets checked there. Add your site as a Domain property. Google's help says a Domain property covers every subdomain and both http and https, with www and non-www included, and that it is verified with a DNS record: Search Console gives you a line of text and you paste it into your domain's settings at the registrar. It is the only fiddly step of the week, and most registrars have a help page for adding a TXT record.

If a designer once set up the older URL-prefix kind of property, keep it and use both, because they report some things separately: on a removals company's account on 1 October 2026, a fix validated on one property still showed as open on the other. Then open Sitemaps, enter the address of your sitemap (often /sitemap.xml) and submit it. The report should show Success, which Google describes as loaded and processed with no errors.

Tuesday: Bing, and the figures you will compare against

Bing Webmaster Tools can import a site straight from Search Console: Bing's own announcement, updated in June 2025, says imported sites are verified automatically and their sitemaps come with them. It takes a few minutes and gives you a second search engine's report for free.

Then write down where you are starting from, because next month's numbers mean nothing without this month's. From Search Console's Performance report, for the last three months: clicks, impressions, the ten queries with most impressions and the pages they land on. From the Page indexing report: how many pages are indexed and how many are not, with the reasons given. And from the generative AI performance report, which Google launched in June 2026 and says had reached all websites by 31 August, your impressions in AI Overviews and AI Mode. If the property is brand new and nearly empty, note the date and take the figures at the end of the month instead.

Wednesday: a title and a description for every page

Open a spreadsheet and list every page with its current title and description. Google's starter guide asks for a title that is unique to the page, clear and concise, and accurate about the contents, and its title documentation says there is no reason to repeat the same words and suggests putting the site name at the start or the end. For a Portsmouth business that means the service and the place first and the name last: "Boiler servicing in Cosham and Drayton" followed by your business name, rather than "Home" or the business name on its own.

Do not cut a title short to hit a character count. Google's documentation says there is no limit on how long a title element can be and that it shortens titles to fit the screen as needed, so a chopped keyword is lost for nothing. Descriptions should be short and specific to the page: who it is for, where, and what to do next. Google may still write its own title from the page's headings and text, and its snippet documentation says snippets come mainly from the page content, with your description used when it describes the page better. Both are reasons the page itself has to say what the title and description promise. If your editor has a box for meta keywords, leave it empty: Google's SEO starter guide says Google Search does not use the keywords meta tag.

Thursday: the heading and the first two sentences

Read each service page as a stranger on a phone in North End would. The main heading should name the service and the place, and the first two sentences should answer the question that brought them there: what you do, where you do it, and how to book or ask. A page that opens with the history of the business makes the reader, and any assistant summarising the page, dig for the answer.

Use the place names people actually type: Southsea, Fratton, Cosham, Drayton, Hayling Island, not "the Portsmouth area" or "the surrounding region". Name the districts you genuinely work in, once each where they fit, and stop there. A page with half of Hampshire listed in its footer reads like a list to Google and like a template to a customer.

Friday: the photographs

Rename image files before you upload them. Google's image guidance says file names give "very light clues" about what an image shows and prefers short, descriptive names, so boiler-install-copnor.jpg beats IMG_4471.jpg, a small gain for no cost. Give every photograph alt text that says what is in it and why it is on the page, without stuffing keywords, which the same guidance says can get a site seen as spam. Then shrink them: a photograph straight off a phone is far larger than a web page needs, and the customer on mobile data pays for the difference in waiting time.

Saturday: links between your own pages, and the sitemap's dates

Google's link guidance says every page you care about should have a link from at least one other page on your site, and that good anchor text is descriptive, reasonably concise and relevant to both pages. So each service page should link to the related services and to the enquiry page, with words such as "boiler servicing in Southsea" rather than "click here", and the home page should link to every service.

Then open your sitemap in a browser and look at the dates beside each address. Google's sitemap documentation says it uses the last-modified date only when it is consistently and verifiably accurate. When we checked our own sites on 4 September 2026, several stamped every address with the time of the last build, which tells Google nothing. If every date in yours is identical, ask whoever built the site to date each page from its real last change; if your platform cannot do it, note it for the next rebuild rather than starting one.

Sunday: check the work, and book next month

In Search Console, put each page you changed into the URL Inspection tool and request indexing for the ones that matter most. Then put a reminder in the calendar for the same day next month to repeat Tuesday's figures and compare. Google's starter guide says some changes take effect within hours and others take several months, and suggests waiting a few weeks before judging, so the first comparison tells you the direction, not the verdict.

If the week turns up something you cannot fix, such as a site that will not let you edit its titles or a Page indexing report full of reasons you do not recognise, that is the point where help is worth paying for. Our SEO work in Portsmouth starts from the same checks, and you can send us what you found through the quote form.