Website SEO for Service-Based Businesses Checklist

If you’re a B2B service provider, your website needs to do more than look good. It needs to show up when your ideal clients are searching for the thing you can help solve. But between running your business and serving your clients, on-page SEO often becomes the thing you know you should be doing but never quite get to.

That’s exactly why I use a website SEO checklist for service-based businesses every time I complete an SEO copywriting or blog writing project for clients and for my own site. It keeps the process consistent, makes sure nothing gets missed, and saves me real time during editing.

Today, I’m sharing it with you. Work through it page by page, and you’ll have a stronger foundation for getting found on search and booked by your ideal clients. 

Title Tags: Website Title and Description

A title tag is the website title as it appears in search results and at the top of your browser tab. It tells the search engine and your readers what the page is about.

For example, let’s say you have a dog grooming service. You can use the title tag ‘Dog Grooming Services – Affordable & Professional Care’. 

When you craft your title tag, keep in mind some best practices:

• Keep it short: Aim for under 60 characters to avoid being cut off in the search results. 
• Include SEO keyword: Maintain a balance between the keyword and what the page is about – Ex. Dog Grooming Services
• Make it unique: Each website page should have its own title tag that reflects the content within it.
• Include your brand name, if applicable. You can do so at the end of the title. Ex. Happy Paws
• Pro Tip: Incorporate local SEO by adding your service area or city. 

Meta Descriptions: Describe the Page

A meta description is a brief description or summary of the website page. Often, it’s a missing checkmark on your website SEO for service-based businesses checklist.

The meta description will appear directly beneath your title tag in search results. Its main job? Tell your readers what the page is about, and helps boost your click-through rates.

However, meta descriptions don’t affect search rankings directly, so if you don’t include one, that’s ok. Search engines will fill it up with content from within the page; however, it’s often a sentence that doesn’t really describe the page.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when creating your meta description:

• It’s a short snippet, so keep it between 150 to 160 characters in length.
• Use action-oriented language.
• Entice readers by highlighting the value or services offered.
• Pro Tip: Include a strong call-to-action (CTA) in meta descriptions to increase clicks.

Headings: Structure Matters

Headings and subheadings provide structure for your website page and blog post. It serves two purposes – (1) it makes it easy for your visitors to read, and (2) it helps search engines understand the main topics of the content.

Here are the best practices for your headings:

• Use proper heading hierarchy: Start with one (and only one) H1 heading for the main title of your page. Followed it with H2 for main sections and H3 or lower for subsections.

The best way to visualize it is as a table of contents. It helps both your readers and search engines navigate the content of your web page. And in all honesty, many readers scan a web page or blog post. If this structure is missing, they’ll probably leave your website rather than read or use the ‘find’ command to search for what they’re looking for.

When working on the structure, keep the following in mind:

• Include SEO keywords: Whenever possible, it’s a good idea to incorporate your keywords into your headings if they fit naturally. 
• Be clear and informative: The content within that section should correlate with your heading. 
• Keep it concise: No need to be too wordy – a quick preview is all you need.
• Pro Tip: Use headings to break up content. Long blocks of text are not fun to read (remember, readers like to scan the content). More on this below.

Let’s put it to practice with our dog grooming service for a website homepage:

• H1: Dog Grooming Services in Miami – Affordable and Professional Care
• H2: Why Choose Our Grooming Services?
• H2: Our Grooming Packages
• H3: Basic Grooming Package
• H3: Deluxe Grooming Package
• H2: Schedule Your Appointment Today

URL and Slugs

A URL (Uniform Resource Locator) is the full web address for a specific website, and the slug is the path to a specific section of it and comes after its main name. Let’s break it down a bit more:

• https:// is your protocol
• www [dot] example [dot]com is the domain name
• /page1 is the slug 

Let’s bring these together with our dog grooming example: 

https://www [dot] example [dot] com/dog-grooming-service-miami, the slug is dog-grooming-service-miami

Best practices for URLs and slugs:

• Keep it simple and relevant: Your slug should reflect the content of the page. In the case above, dog-grooming-service-miami is short and descriptive, plus it incorporates…
• Relevant keywords: It’s a great opportunity to continue to improve your SEO, which will help ranking for searches related to it.
• Use hyphens to separate words: do this dog-grooming-service-miami, NOT this dog_grooming_service_miami.
• Avoid unnecessary words, prepositions, numbers, or years. Short and descriptive is the way to go, and avoid special characters as it can cause issues with indexing and readability. 

Alt Text: Describe Your Images

Alt text (or alternative text) is different from the title name or filename of your image. It’s an underlying description of what’s in the image. It serves a few purposes:

1. If the image fails to upload, instead of showing IMG_5731.CR2, it’ll show the context of the image.
2. This is also convenient for screen readers used by visually impaired visitors. 
3. Search engines can’t ‘see’ an image, but they can ‘read’ it.

Here’s how to write an alt text for your images:

• Be descriptive and specific: Describe what’s on the image in detail. For example, let’s say the main image is that of a Golden Retriever. Instead of writing ‘dog’ as your alt text, you might say: dog being groomed with scissors.
• Incorporate keywords: But only if relevant, and no keyword stuffing. It’s weird, not accessible, and hurts your SEO.
• Keep it short: Aim for around 125 characters when describing the image. 
• Pro Tip: If the image is functional, meaning it works like a button or has a link, describe this function rather than what’s on the image.

Internal Linking: Boost Engagement and SEO

An internal link is a link that takes you from one page of your website to another, making it easier for your reader to explore and engage with your website. However, it not only helps your readers navigate your website but also allows search engines to understand the structure of your website content.

Best practices for internal linking:

• Use a descriptive anchor text: Many website templates use anchor text like ‘learn more’ or ‘click here’. But that doesn’t tell your readers much. Instead, describe it.
• Link to relevant pages: Don’t overdo it with internal links – focus on relevant content that correlates with the anchor text. This is especially important for blog posts.
• Keep a clear structure: Organize your links in a way that makes sense. For example, link from general topics to more detailed ones (think topic clusters). It helps readers and search engines see which pages are most important and how they are related to each other.  

Internal linking is one of those things that sounds simple until you’re actually doing it across an entire website. If you’re finding that the technical side of SEO is taking more time than you have or you want someone to handle it consistently so you don’t have to think about it, that’s exactly what my SEO retainer is designed for. We keep your website and blog optimized on an ongoing basis, so you stay visible while you stay focused on your clients.

Keyword Placement: Be Naturally Strategic 

You’ve done your SEO keyword research, but keyword placement is just as important, and there are certain sections you shouldn’t miss. Normally, you would have a primary keyword and secondary keywords and phrases to tackle on your website copy or blog post. 

However, it’s not only a matter of strategically placing the keywords but making sure they fit naturally because human beings will be reading. 

Here’s a breakdown of where to place them:

• Within the content: Place keywords in important spots, including the title, headings, the first paragraph, and sporadically within the content.
• Don’t overdo it: Also known as keyword stuffing. It’ll make the information sound unnatural, and it may hurt your SEO.
• Meta tags: That’s your title tags and meta descriptions.
• Alt Text: See the Alt Text section for more information.
• URL and slugs: See the section for more information.
• Pro Tip: Focus on long-tail keywords for local and service-specific searches.

Make It Easy to Read

In the SEO industry, this is known as readability and sometimes, it’s overlooked. Making your content easy to read means organizing and presenting it in a way that’s simple for your readers to understand and engage with. It’s a website SEO for service-based businesses checklist item you can’t miss.

This is also where the information we went over in the headings section comes into play as well. Let’s go over other areas to improve to make it easy to read:

• Use short paragraphs: Break up your content – use 2-3 sentence paragraphs and different sentence lengths.
• Use bullet points or lists: Especially if you want to highlight key points, it makes it easy to quickly scan the content.
• Add subheadings: Divide into sections to help readers go from place to place.
• Choose a good font and colors: Not all fonts are easy to read, so avoid decorative styles. Ensure that the font size, color, and background colors are accessible.
• Include white space: Leave space between paragraphs, images, and any other elements on your website page or blog post. It helps reduce clutter and makes it easy on the eyes.
• Use simple language: Be straightforward, and avoid jargon or complex sentences.
• Pro Tip: Free tools like Hemingway or Grammarly can help you when editing your content for readability.

Call to Action: Tell Your Readers the Next Step

A call to action (CTA) is a message that tells your readers what you want them to do next. It helps guide them to take a specific action, like booking a service.

From an SEO point of view, a good CTA helps keep visitors on your site longer, gets more people to take action, and improves the user experience since they easily find what they need.

When crafting your CTAs, use the following as a guide:

• Use clear and actionable words: Make sure your CTA clearly says what you want visitors to do.
• Make it stand out: an eye-catching CTA might look like a big, colorful button.
• Put it in the right place: Place your CTA strategically.
• Don’t overdo it: Don’t write extensive CTA – focus on a clear action.
• Pro Tip: Show the benefit. Example: ‘Get 10% Off Your First Appointment’. 

Put It All Together

You’ve got the checklist and now the question is whether you have the time and bandwidth to work through it consistently. Because the truth is, one round of on-page SEO updates is a great start. But staying visible on search is an ongoing process.

If you’d rather hand that process to someone who does this every day, I’d love to talk. Explore my SEO services and let’s figure out the right next step for your website.