Reframing SEO For Business Websites
Ayup! Following my post on Search Engine (Un)Optimisation for my personal site, I've also made a few significant changes to my business site. The only difference this time is that I do actually need it to rank well. That said, I've completely switched up my approach.
For a little bit of context, the website is one year and nine months into its SEO journey. It's been extremely slow (and often stagnant) progress. What's more, many of my competitors who literally put zero effort in were outranking me. Yikes!
Something had to change. My goal of reaching the top spot in all of our key areas was fluttering around 25% complete. So yeah, during the last major update to the site, I implemented everything below. I've waited four weeks to write this, giving enough time to see how it all panned out.
Trying too hard at SEO is bad for SEO
Ultimately, this is the conclusion I landed at when it comes to SEO. Previous efforts did OK. Nothing special. The issue, it seems, was that none of it was overly natural. The entire site was optimised for the sake of being optimised, rather than designed and built purely for the user.
I'm a big fan of the Yoast SEO plugin for WordPress. It's served me extremely well over the years. However, I can't help but thinking it's contributing an unhealthy level of over-optimised sites to the web.
SEO over-optimisation sacrifices clarity and usability in the pursuit of perfection, often leading to frustration instead of results.
Keyword stuffing, excessive internal linking, and irrelevant content targeting might seem like good optimisation strategies, but they can actually harm your search rankings and, more importantly, your credibility with visitors.
First, there's the user experience nightmare. When design elements, marketing CTAs, and SEO-driven content are all competing for attention, your website becomes chaotic.
Swapping out Yoast
First up, as with this site, I swapped Yoast over to SureRank. Similar deal, but bundled up as a frankly refreshing modern alternative. I love it.
Instead of the traffic light system, you've got a handy list of suggestions that may improve your rankings. The best bit, any that aren't applicable to your particular page can be dismissed. This keeps it all looking lovely and clean. No horrendous red warning lights greeting you every time you log in.
Overall, using SureRank instead of Yoast resulted in much more natural wording and copy. Not only has this been an improvement for our visitors, but Google seemed to prefer it, too. Possible proof that they really do want to rank content that aimed at users, not search engines.
A clean, fast, intuitive interface that feels at home in 2025 — not like something built in 2010. Simple enough for beginners. Streamlined for pros.
Consolidating area pages
Secondly, two separate pages that were targeting different areas were consolidated as one. The homepage is now the only place a potential client needs to visit to find all the info they need.
While duplicated area pages seem to work for some of my competitors, I wonder how much longer they'll continue ranking. Just in case (and also to improve the user experience), I've knocked that one on the head.
A redirect from the second page to the homepage improved rankings in all the areas that the other service area page covered.
Making an effort to avoid duplicate content helps me deliver the best UX possible, which is what we’re all aiming for as marketers, right?
Completely removing the blog
Lastly, probably the boldest move of them all, I removed the entire blog. Why? It was bringing in tonnes of pointless traffic. Lovely for vanity metrics, not so lovely for conversions.
We're all told to build up content clusters and drive E-E-A-T, yet none of our potential clients or customers were interested in any of the blog posts. Instead, they visit three key pages.
Home
About
Contact
This had me questioning the entire relevance of the blog. I'm trying not to think about how many hours I devoted to it, haha! To try and save some of the possible E-E-A-T that it may have helped with, I added an FAQ section to the homepage.
Using the Kadence Accordion block, you can a) set the title to an H3 and b) include FAQ schema. Bonus! I redirected any popular blog posts to the home page and answered that particular question in the FAQ section. Any bits and bobs that were showing up in Google FAQ's remain present, but now link straight to the homepage rather than a blog post.
The Kadence Accordion block with FAQ schema supports a limited set of HTML tags within FAQ answers to enable basic text formatting. Google recognizes the following tags: <h1> through <h6>, <br>, <ol>, <ul>, <li>, <a>, <p>, <div>, <b>, <strong>, <i>, and <em>. All other tags are ignored.
Google’s structured data guidelines permit these tags in the Answers as they improve readability and user experience without altering the content’s meaning. Including basic formatting helps make FAQ answers clearer and easier to scan.
The results
Four weeks later, having carefully studied the rankings, the changes have been positively positive. Wohooo! Mostly green upwards arrows in the Semrush position tacking tool. All of our areas received a significant boost and continue to improve week on week.
Overall visitor numbers have dropped, and the domain authority score lost eight points. This was to be expected. However, traffic to the pages that matter is up, as are enquiries and bookings.
Moral of the story, don't over-optimise. Business blogs aren't as useful as they used to be. Fix duplicate content and focus all of your attention on the pages that your potential clients or customers actually use.
As a result, the user experience improves, the whole site becomes more natural and ultimately, this is what search engines want. Happy days!
