When it comes to running a small business, having a well-optimised website is one of the most effective tools in your marketing arsenal. While Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) may be an ongoing and slow-burn effort when stacked up against other digital marketing and advertising methods, it is an essential strategy to being seen by more qualified prospects and leads.
Even now, in the rapidly changing online landscape brought on by the proliferation of consumer AI, SEO remains one of the most important investments for businesses of all sizes. If you have an online presence, SEO matters. Because the practices that have underpinned good search engine visibility for over the past decade also apply in the age of AI. Good SEO is the foundation of good AI search optimisation, as well.
Chances are, if you run a small business (whether it serves an international, national, or local audience) and want it to meaningfully grow over time, you can’t just rely on having a couple social media accounts. A port of call in the form of a website will allow you to consistently grow your SEO efforts, build authority, and reach more of the right people at the right time.
In this blog, I’ll be going over the following key areas for website optimisation and how they can positively influence your small business’s SEO:
- The role of User Experience (UX)
- Mobile responsiveness
- Site structure
The Role of User Experience (UX) in SEO
User experience, commonly referred to as UX, is all about how your website feels to navigate for an average user. The better you make that user experience, the more likely it’s going to result in positive SEO outcomes for you.
How UX Impacts Search Rankings
No doubt you’ve found yourself on websites from time to time that have been poorly optimised – and you feel those poor optimisations. Perhaps navigating the website was an absolute chore with confusing or disappearing menus, or every time a new page loaded you had to sit there for what felt like half a minute while every element of the page propagated. These points of friction may have even driven you to jump off the website entirely and never return.
This is why good UX is so essential to good SEO. The poorer the UX, the more people will bounce off the website or decide not to click through on any more pages. When Google and other search engines notice these behaviours (high bounce rates, long page loading times, unintuitive navigation, etc.), these all become marks against your website’s search rankings. Even if you have SEO-optimised content on your site, a poor UX is still going to have a significant impact on your rankings.
Design Elements That Enhance UX
So, what makes for good UX? There are plenty of things that can be done to address UX shortfalls, including:
- Setting up clear and consistent navigation across all pages – a logical menu structure with proper categories and subcategories, with the menu having the same structure across all pages. This should also be coupled with clickable breadcrumbs, which show a user where they are on a website and allows them to navigate back to a previous page with ease if needed.
- Similarly, you want your website to have an intuitive layout – this can include proper heading hierarchies, making sure the most important information is above-the-fold and loads first, and that more resource-heavy components (like larger images, videos, and graphics) are placed below the fold and load generatively as the user scrolls down the page.
- Fast-loading pages are also essential, as the longer a page takes to load, the more likely it is that a user will jump off.
- You also want any sense of visual clutter to be kept a minimum on your web pages, and reducing this clutter will also help facilitate faster loading times.
- Responsive designs that intuitively adapt depending on the device being used (as desktop, laptop, tablet, smart phone, etc.).
Mobile Responsiveness: A Non-Negotiable for SEO
Responsive design has been an important component of website optimisation since the early 2010s, and it’s only become more essential since then. As of 2025, approximately 20.29 million Australians browse the web on mobile – this equates to more than 78% of our country’s population. So, mobile optimisation isn’t a “nice to have”, it’s a “need to have”.
Mobile Search and Google’s Mobile-First Indexing Policy
In case you didn’t know, Google implemented a mobile-first indexing policy back in October of 2023, which meant the search giant prioritised the crawling, indexing, and ranking of mobile-optimised websites. By July 2024, they stopped indexing websites that did not have a mobile-accessible version. So, if your website isn’t mobile optimised, you’ll have a hard time ranking in search results.
Google’s pivot to mobile-first indexing reflected the significant shift in search behaviour as more and more people began to conduct more searches via mobile devices. This shift shows no signs of slowing down as smartphones and internet-ready mobile devices continue to become more accessible to more people.
Key Features of Mobile-Friendly Design
Without a doubt, websites that utilise responsive design have become the norm. This type of design makes for a much easier optimisation experience. There’s no splintering between different desktop and mobile domains, and the design and usability of a site can be easily refined for all devices from one place. Most website builders and CMS’s these days provide responsive design solutions by default, especially if you utilise the templates they provide.
Part of good responsive design is also ensuring that content is legible on smaller screens (with easier-to-read fonts), that menus adapt to the different viewports (mobile, tablets, folding phones, etc.), and that clickable buttons (such as a “Call Now” CTA) are easy to press with expanded hit areas.
It’s also good to account for data restrictions that can apply for phones by reducing how much data is required for a page to load (e.g. using mobile-optimised images and video, eliminating more resource-heavy data from specific mobile pages, etc.)
Site Structure and Its Impact on SEO
Finally, there’s site structure, which remains a critical component of good website SEO.
What Is Site Structure?
Site structure covers various facets of good website design and SEO. At its core, it’s all about the organisation of content and information on websites. This ranges from things like a classic sitemap (which essentially is like a table of contents for your entire site that search engines can refer to) to how your navigation menu is structured, the use of clickable breadcrumbs, logical internal linking, and more. Schema markups are also incredibly valuable as they provide context to Google and other search engines as to what specific pages on your website are all about.
Good structure also applies to individual pages. How they’re structured on a hierarchical level, especially through the use of proper heading attributions (H1’s, H2’s, H3’s, etc.), creates a clear breakdown of the page’s content and related subtopics/categories.
Why Site Structure Matters for SEO
Good site structure makes it far easier for search engines to crawl and index your site. By providing clear structure on individual pages and the website as a whole, search engines will have a better understanding of your website, what it’s about, and what search terms or queries it would most clearly cater to.
Easier crawling and indexing also means any time your website is updated, those revised or new pages will more efficiently appear in search results. This also benefits any efforts you may undertake for ChatGPT optimisation or other Large Language Model (LLM) AI platforms that source information from search engine results.
Along with the benefits it offers in terms of pure visibility to search engines, a good site structure makes it easier for users to navigate your website. A well-structured navigation menu and easy-to-understand pages that touch on relevant information for them will give them more reason to stay on your website.
For small businesses, a well-optimised website is really important. While it requires more patience and ongoing work to get the best results, it’s also a marketing effort that yields massive returns over time and keeps your business relevant on a more consistent basis than other one-and-done digital advertising solutions.
If you’re looking to improve the SEO of your small business website, Reform Digital can help. Get in touch today to get started.
