The 80/20 rule in SEO

What the 80/20 rule means

The rule, the Pareto principle, is the observation, made in many fields, that a minority of causes produce a majority of the effect. The numbers are a figure of speech: nobody has measured that exactly 20% of SEO work produces exactly 80% of the results. The useful idea is that the work is lopsided, and that if you know which part is the heavy end, you can do that first.

For a local business this is not a theory. We see it in every review we do: a handful of searches bring nearly all the valuable visits, a handful of pages win them, and a handful of fixes would change the picture.

The vital few, for a local business

In roughly the order we would do them:

1. A complete, accurate Google Business ProfileThe right primary category, the services listed, real hours, photographs, and the address or service area set correctly. For the map results this is most of the game. Google describes what it looks at in its guidance on how local ranking works.
2. A page for each thing people search forNot a “services” page listing everything, but one page per service, and, where you genuinely work there, per place. This is the single biggest change on most small-business websites.
3. Reviews, as a habitAsked for at the end of every job, every time. Recent reviews separate businesses on the map more than almost anything else they can control.
4. A site that works on a phone and loads quicklyMost local searches are made on a phone. A site that is slow, cramped or hard to tap loses the visit before anyone reads a word.
5. TrackingCall tracking, form tracking and Search Console, so you know which of the above produced the enquiry. Without it you cannot tell the vital few from the trivial many.

Five things. None of them is clever, and none of them needs a monthly retainer to do once. Our local SEO checklist breaks them into tasks, and the scorecard tells you which you have already done.

The trivial many

Things that take time and rarely move the result for a local business:

• Blog posts nobody asked for. A post a week about “five tips for choosing a plumber” does not help a plumber rank for “emergency plumber York”. Useful guides for real questions can help; content for its own sake does not.
• Scores from tools. An SEO score of 92 out of 100 is a measurement of what the tool checks, not of whether customers find you.
• Meta keywords and keyword density. Google has not used the keywords tag for many years, and repeating a phrase does not help. Say it once, clearly, where it belongs.
• Directory listings beyond the useful few. Consistent details on the main directories help; the hundredth listing does nothing.
• Social media as a ranking tactic. Social media can bring customers directly; it is not a lever for Google rankings.
• Chasing every new feature. Most of what appears in the SEO news is aimed at large publishers and online retailers.

Trivial for a local business is not trivial for everyone. An online shop with ten thousand products has a different heavy end, catalogue structure, speed at scale, product data. The rule is the same; the list is different.

How to find your own 20%

The general list above is right for most local businesses, but your own heavy end is in your data:

1. Open Search Console and sort your queries by impressions. The handful at the top is the demand that matters.
2. Look at which pages receive those impressions. Usually two or three pages do nearly all the work.
3. Ask where your enquiries actually came from: the map, a page, a recommendation. If you do not know, that is the first thing to fix.
4. Compare with the businesses that outrank you on your main search. The difference is usually one of the five things above, not something exotic.

Our guide to checking your ranking properly explains the first two steps, and the free search review is a person doing all four for you.

Where the rule misleads

The 80/20 rule is about where to start. It is not a reason to stop. Once the vital few are done, the next few, local links, better photographs, a page for the second-biggest service, answering the questions customers ask before they call, are what separates a business that appears from one that leads. And in a competitive market, everyone has done the first five. That is when the detail starts to count.

The other way it misleads is by tempting people to skip the measurement. The 80/20 rule only works if you can see the 80. Tracking is on the list of five for that reason.