Most SEO advice is written for American and British websites. Indian businesses share the fundamentals but work in a different market: customers search by service and city, enquire by phone or WhatsApp as often as by form, and many search in more than one language. This guide sets out the order we would work in for a business starting SEO properly. It is not a promise of rankings; nobody can honestly give one.
Start with what people search for, by service and city
Local customers rarely search for a company name. They search for a service and a place, such as "pest control in Ahmedabad" or "website design in Gandhinagar". Two free sources show what people actually type:
- The Performance report in Google Search Console, once your site has been live for a few weeks
- Google's own search suggestions, and the "People also ask" questions for your services
Give each service its own page that answers the questions those searches imply: what it is, what it costs or how pricing works, how long it takes, and how to book. The Mr Antidot website, for example, has a separate page for each of its ten pest-control treatments, each with its time, starting price, method and a booking path.
Set up Google Business Profile properly
For searches with a place in them, the map results often appear before the websites. Google says local results are mainly based on relevance, distance and popularity. In practice that means:
- Verify the profile, and choose the most specific primary category
- Set real opening hours, a service area if you visit customers, and the services you offer
- Add your own photos of the premises, the team and the work
- Ask real customers for reviews, and reply to them. Never buy reviews or post fake ones: Google's policies prohibit fake engagement and remove it
Keep your name, address and phone number consistent
Use the same business name, address and phone number on your website, your Business Profile and the directories your customers use, such as Justdial or IndiaMART. Inconsistent details make it harder for search engines, and for customers, to trust that the listings describe one business.
Make the website easy to crawl and understand
- A unique title and description on every page you want found
- One canonical URL per page, so duplicates don't compete with each other
- An XML sitemap, submitted in Search Console
- Internal links from your home page and articles to each service page
- Structured data for your organisation, breadcrumbs and articles, generated by the site rather than pasted in by hand
Our own site works the same way: every page declares its own canonical URL, and the organisation, breadcrumb and article structured data comes from templates.
Speed matters on mobile data
Many visitors will reach you on a phone, on mobile data. Heavy images, embedded maps and large scripts cost them time before they see anything. We measured and fixed our own site, with real numbers, in website performance: what we fixed on our own site.
Write in the language your customers search in
If customers search in Hindi or Gujarati as well as English, consider pages in those languages, written properly rather than machine translated. Put each language on its own URL, and tell search engines how the versions relate with hreflang. A few good pages in a second language beat many thin ones.
Make enquiries easy, and measure them
An enquiry is the result that matters. Put a phone number and a WhatsApp link where people can tap them, keep forms short, and pass along context, such as the service the visitor was reading about. Then measure: on our own site, Google Analytics records clicks on phone, email and WhatsApp links as separate events, so we can see which pages lead to contact.
What to avoid
- Near-identical pages for every city with only the name swapped. Google treats these as doorway pages, which its spam policies prohibit.
- Keyword stuffing: repeating a phrase until the text stops reading naturally
- Buying links or reviews
- Anyone who guarantees a first-page ranking
A 90-day starting plan
- Month one: set up Search Console and analytics, verify and complete your Business Profile, and fix technical basics such as titles, canonical URLs, the sitemap and speed.
- Month two: improve or create one page per service, with real prices or pricing logic, photos and a clear way to enquire.
- Month three: publish articles that answer the questions customers ask before buying, link them to the service pages, and ask every happy customer for a review.
Then review what Search Console shows: which pages appear, for which searches, and which get clicks.
What to do next
For the technical checklist, read technical SEO that moves the needle. If you are in Gujarat, see our Gandhinagar studio page. Or send us your website and what you sell, and we will tell you what we would check first.