Focus on These 3 Things to Get the Most from Your SEO Strategy

Last Updated: 10/08/2026

If you only have time for three things, focus on this: get your technical foundations right, build content around what people are genuinely searching for, and earn trust signals like backlinks and a properly completed Google Business Profile.

Do those three well and rankings tend to follow. Everything else, from schema markup to how often you blog, is refinement rather than foundation. It is a similar conclusion to the one we reached in our piece on the advantages and disadvantages of search engine optimisation, and it still holds up.

SEO has a habit of feeling more complicated than it needs to be. Every year brings a new acronym, a new algorithm update, a new tool promising to crack the code. Underneath all of that, the businesses that consistently rank well tend to be doing a small number of things properly rather than a long list of things badly. Below is what we would prioritise if we were starting from scratch today, based on the SEO campaigns we run day to day for London and UK businesses.

Start With The Technical Basics

Before you write a single word of content, check that Google can actually crawl, render and load your site quickly. Page speed is not a nice to have. Google has used it as a ranking signal since the 2018 Speed Update, and the standard has only got stricter since. If you want the full breakdown of what to fix and in what order, our guide on how to optimise your website speed for better SEO covers it in more depth than we can here.

The three metrics that matter most sit under Core Web Vitals. Largest Contentful Paint measures how fast your main content loads. Cumulative Layout Shift measures whether things jump around while the page settles. Interaction to Next Paint, which replaced First Input Delay as the official responsiveness metric in March 2024, measures how quickly the page reacts once someone actually clicks or taps something. You can check all three for free using Google PageSpeed Insights.

Mobile matters just as much as speed, arguably more. Most searches in the UK now happen on a phone, and Google indexes your site based on the mobile version first. If your site still renders like an afterthought on a small screen, that is worth fixing before anything else. We have written a full guide on why mobile friendly websites boost SEO performance, along with the technical checks worth running. Beyond speed and mobile, there is a longer list of housekeeping tasks such as sitemaps, canonical tags and structured data that we cover in our technical SEO tips for website health, and it is worth working through that list once a quarter rather than once a decade.

Write For The Person, Not The Algorithm

Here is where we will be a bit blunt. A lot of the advice floating around about dwell time and bounce rate treats them as levers you can pull directly. You cannot. Google has never confirmed dwell time as a direct ranking factor, and bounce rate on its own is a fairly weak signal because a one page visit can mean someone got exactly what they needed and left happy, or it can mean they hated the page. What both metrics are genuinely useful for is telling you, honestly, whether your content is working. If people land on a page and leave within seconds, something is off, whether or not Google is watching. The fix is usually not clever. It is writing content that actually answers the question someone typed in, in plain language, without padding it out to hit a word count. When we audit client sites, the pages that consistently do well are the ones written for a specific person with a specific problem, not for a keyword density target. Our beginner’s guide to optimising web content is a decent starting point if you are building this habit from scratch.

Internal linking sits in the same category as engagement metrics. It is unglamorous, it rarely gets budget, and it consistently moves the needle when done properly. Linking from a high traffic page to a page you actually want to rank passes authority and keeps people reading. If you are publishing regularly but traffic still is not converting into readers who stick around, it is worth reading why most blog posts never get read and what to do differently. Track the metrics that actually correlate with SEO performance, such as organic sessions, click through rate and conversions, rather than the ones that just look impressive in a report. Our piece on which SEO metrics are worth tracking goes into which numbers deserve your attention.

Target What People Actually Type Or Say

Short, generic keywords are competitive and often vague about intent. Someone searching “shoes” could want anything from trainers to a shoe repair shop. Someone searching “waterproof walking boots for wide feet” knows exactly what they want, and there is a lot less competition for that phrase. Long tail keywords like this convert better precisely because the person typing them has already done some thinking. Voice search has pushed this further. When people speak a query rather than type it, they tend to phrase it as a full question, and the results that answer clearly and directly tend to win. We go into the mechanics of this in our piece on how voice search is changing SEO. In practice, this means structuring at least some of your content around genuine questions, using headings that match how people actually ask things, and giving a direct answer near the top rather than burying it under three paragraphs of preamble. If your goal is simply to understand what it takes to rank on the first page at all, our guide on how to get on page 1 of Google lays out the fundamentals in order.

If you need faster visibility while your organic content matures, running a parallel campaign through a PPC marketing agency can bridge the gap. SEO is a long game. Paid search is not a replacement for it, but it buys you time and data while your content builds authority.

Earn Authority Properly, Do Not Chase It

Backlinks still matter. Anyone telling you they do not is either selling something else or has not looked at a ranking correlation study recently. What has changed is how much scrutiny low quality links get. A handful of links from relevant, reputable sites in your industry will do more for you than hundreds from directories nobody has heard of. If you are still unsure whether the effort is worth it, our article on whether backlinks are important for SEO sets out the evidence plainly.

The practical route is usually some mix of genuinely useful content that people want to reference, a few well targeted outreach emails, and patience. We have put together a longer list of effective link building strategies that does not rely on anything spammy or short lived. If your business does B2B work, do not overlook LinkedIn as a source of both referral traffic and indirect authority. A well run campaign through a LinkedIn advertising agency can put your content in front of exactly the professionals who might link to or share it.

Do Not Ignore Local SEO And Your Google Business Profile

If your business serves a specific area, local SEO is arguably the highest return item on this whole list. A fully completed Google Business Profile gets roughly seven times more clicks than an incomplete one, and around 70 percent more requests for directions or visits, according to Google’s own performance data for Business Profiles. That is not a marginal gain. It is the difference between showing up in the local pack and being invisible next to competitors who bothered to fill in every field.

Start by claiming and completing your listing properly: accurate hours, the right categories, real photos, and a description that says something specific about what you do rather than generic filler. Then keep it active. Our guide to getting better rankings in Google Places walks through the setup in order, and our broader local SEO strategies guide covers citations, reviews and NAP consistency across directories, which sounds dull but genuinely affects whether Google trusts your listing.

If you run a business without a website, or you are not ready to build one, that is not the dead end it used to be. We wrote about whether SEO can be done without a website for exactly this situation, since a well optimised Google Business Profile can carry a surprising amount of local visibility on its own. Reviews play a large part in this too. Encourage them, respond to every one, and do not panic over the occasional bad review. A thoughtful, professional response to criticism often does more for trust than a wall of five star ratings with no replies. If you are weighing up handling this yourself, our honest take on whether you can do SEO on your own covers what is realistic to manage in house and what tends to need outside help. For online retailers specifically, our SEO tips for ecommerce websites covers the additional layer of product page and category optimisation that local service businesses do not need to worry about.

Social proof off the back of local visibility compounds well too. Businesses that pair strong local search presence with a modest budget through a Facebook ads agency in London tend to see reviews and enquiries build faster, since the paid reach brings in the volume of interactions that organic listings alone take longer to generate.

Keep An Eye On What Is Changing, Without Chasing Every Update

Google’s market share in the UK is still above 90 percent, though it has been drifting down slightly year on year as Bing and AI powered search tools pick up small pockets of share, particularly on desktop. That is worth knowing, but it is not a reason to panic or rebuild your strategy around a single competitor. AI overviews and generative answers are changing how some queries get answered, and the practical response is the same advice as ever: be the clearest, most credible source on the page so you get cited, whether that is by a human clicking a blue link or an AI summarising an answer. Our SEO trends worth watching gets updated as these shifts become clearer, rather than reacting to every headline.

None of this replaces the basics above. Businesses that get distracted chasing the latest trend while their page speed sits at eight seconds and their Google Business Profile has three photos from 2019 are optimising the wrong thing. Fix the foundations first.

Where To Put Your Effort First

Frequently Asked Questions

What are the three most important SEO factors?

Technical health such as page speed and mobile usability, content that matches what people are actually searching for, and trust signals such as backlinks and a complete Google Business Profile. Most other factors sit underneath these three.

How long does SEO take to show results?

Most UK businesses start seeing meaningful movement somewhere between three and six months, with stronger gains after six to twelve months. It depends heavily on how competitive your industry is and how much work your site needs at the start.

Is SEO still worth it in 2026?

Yes. Google still holds over 90 percent of UK search traffic, and organic visibility remains one of the few marketing channels that keeps paying back after the initial work is done, unlike paid ads which stop the moment you stop paying.

Do I need a website for local SEO to work?

Not strictly. A properly completed Google Business Profile can generate meaningful visibility on its own, though a website gives you more control and more places to demonstrate expertise and answer questions in depth.

Get Help If You Would Rather Not Do This Alone

SEO rewards patience and punishes shortcuts, which is exactly why so many businesses end up outsourcing it once they realise how much ongoing attention it needs.

If you want a second opinion on where your site currently stands, or you would rather hand the whole thing over, get in touch with our SEO services team and we will tell you honestly what is worth fixing first. And if you are running paid campaigns alongside your organic work, our Google Ads agency in London can make sure the two channels are pulling in the same direction instead of working against each other.

Shirish Agarwal

Shirish Agarwal leads Flow20 and has been featured as one of the Top 30 Digital Marketing Influencers of 2019 alongside Neil Patel and Rand Fishkin. His new book Gen Z to Gen Zero, which discusses the impact of AI on the job marketplace, is now out and available on Amazon.