Getting found when the business is just you

Why the usual small-business advice doesn't fit

Search "SEO for small business" and you get pages written for a dental practice with a marketing budget. Local citations, Google Business Profile, a blog someone else writes, an agency retainer. Sensible enough if you're a dental practice.

It's the wrong shape if the business is one person making something. You don't have a storefront to put on a map. You don't have a services page that could be about anyone. You have a thing you make, a small number of words that describe it honestly, and no time.

So this page is about that version. Some of it overlaps with the advice for artists and musicians on this site, because the craft underneath is the same. The details differ.

Start with the words your buyers use, not the ones you use

This is the single most common miss, and it costs nothing to fix.

You know your product precisely, so you name it precisely. Your buyer doesn't and can't. They search for the problem, or for a rough category, in ordinary language. "Ceramic mug" and "wheel-thrown stoneware tumbler" are the same object and only one of them gets typed.

The cheap way to find the real words: read how people describe your thing when they're not talking to you. Reviews of similar products. Questions in a relevant subreddit. What customers wrote in their order notes. Those are the phrases to put on the page. Your own vocabulary can stay, just not alone and not first.

One page per thing you sell

A single "Shop" page listing twelve products can only really rank for one idea. Twelve pages can rank for twelve, and each one can answer the specific question that brought someone there.

A product page that works isn't long. It needs: a title using the words from the section above, two or three sentences of plain description, the price, dimensions or specifics, a photo with real alt text, and how delivery works. The delivery answer matters more than people expect. A lot of abandoned carts are just an unanswered question about shipping.

If you make one-offs and the page will go out of date, don't delete it when the item sells. Mark it sold, keep it up, and point at what's available now. That page has value the day it stops selling anything.

The searches that already have your name in them

Someone was given your card at a market. Someone saw your work in a friend's kitchen and asked what it was. Someone read a local piece about you.

All of those people go and type your name, and that search is the most valuable one you'll ever get, because they're already interested. It's also the one you can most reliably win, since usually nobody else is competing for it.

So: search your own business name in a private window and look at what a stranger sees. Is your own site first? Is the address right? Is there an opening-hours box with last year's hours in it? Fifteen minutes here beats a month of anything else.

Marketplaces and your own site

Etsy, Bandcamp, Big Cartel, a Shopify store, a local marketplace. They bring their own traffic, which is the point, and they take a cut and set the rules, which is the trade.

Two things are worth knowing. First, a marketplace's internal search is a different game from Google, with different signals, and being good at one doesn't make you good at the other. Second, the customer relationship usually belongs to the platform, not you. If you can get an email address and permission to use it, that's the most durable asset in this whole list.

The workable arrangement for most people: sell where the buyers already are, and keep a site of your own that the marketplace links can't replace. Then a platform's bad year is an inconvenience rather than an ending.

If you only do four things

1. Rewrite your product titles and descriptions using the words buyers actually type.
2. Give each thing you sell its own page, and keep sold ones up.
3. Answer the shipping question on the page, before anyone has to ask.
4. Search your own name and fix whatever a stranger sees first.

What this won't fix

Search doesn't create demand. If very few people are looking for what you make, being first for it changes little, and some perfectly good businesses live almost entirely on word of mouth and repeat buyers for exactly that reason. It's also slow. Months, not weeks.

And it can't make a bad offer work. If the price, the photos or the trust signals are the problem, more visitors just means more people deciding no.

An honest note about this page

This site tries to only claim things it can back up, so: the obvious search term here, "SEO for small business", is one we deliberately aren't chasing. It's dominated by very large sites, the advertising around it costs a fortune, and the audience behind it isn't really this one. A couple of neighbouring terms we measured turned out to be job listings rather than people wanting help.

That means this page exists because the advice is useful and people on this site keep asking for it, not because a keyword tool said so. If that changes, we'll say so here.

Common questions

Do I need a blog?
No. A blog is one way to cover the questions your buyers ask, and it is the most expensive way. Pages that answer a question and stay accurate beat posts that age.

How long does this take to work?
Longer than any tool implies. The realistic sequence is: your own name first, then the very specific things you sell, then — maybe — the broader terms. If someone promises a timeline for the broad ones, they are selling.

Should I pay someone to do it?
Eventually, perhaps. Not first. Almost everything on this page is writing about your own work, which is the part an agency does worst and charges most for. Pay for the technical parts you cannot do, not for the words.

Is a Google Business Profile worth it without a shopfront?
Often yes, if you serve a real area. It is free, it shows up beside the results for your name, and you fill it in yourself. It does not show up straight away, though: Google only lets customers find a profile once the business is verified.