SEO for Small Organisations
Plain-English search engine optimisation for small UK organisations. You'll learn how Google Search works now, use Search Console as your dashboard, find the searches that matter, improve your pages and content, get the most from your Google Business Profile, keep your site technically healthy and visible in AI answers, and measure what your SEO achieves.
Watch the 1-minute trailer
Plain-English search engine optimisation for small UK organisations. You'll learn how Google Search works now, use Search Console as your dashboard, find the searches that matter, improve your pages and content, get the most from your Google Business Profile, keep your site technically healthy and visible in AI answers, and measure what your SEO achieves.
The course has 8 modules, each with a short video, a written lesson, an exercise, a quiz and at least one worksheet (13 worksheets in all, in Word and PDF).
Who this course is for
Business owners, charity comms leads, practice managers and one-person marketing teams. Not technical.
Course content
Module 1: How Google Search Works Now
This module explains, in plain English, how Google finds your pages, decides whether to keep them and chooses what to show. It separates what Google says actually matters from the myths that still cost small organisations time and money, and explains what AI Overviews and AI Mode mean for you. You finish by choosing the handful of searches that bring real enquiries, which the rest of the course builds on.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus a 40-minute exercise.
What you'll be able to do
- Describe the three stages of Google Search (crawling, indexing and serving) and give reasons a page might not appear.
- Name the three parts of Google Search Essentials and explain what Google means by helpful, people-first content.
- Spot at least six common SEO myths that Google's own documentation rules out.
- Explain what AI Overviews and AI Mode are, how a website appears in them, and why there is no separate "AI SEO" trick, according to Google.
- Choose a short list of searches that signal someone is ready to enquire, donate, book or buy.
- Record a baseline of where their organisation stands today, to measure progress against.
Module 2: Search Console: Your SEO Dashboard
Google Search Console is the only place where Google tells you, for free, how your website is doing in its search results: which searches show your pages, how often people click, and whether Google can find and index the pages you care about. This module gets it set up properly and teaches you to read the handful of reports that matter. Every later module uses it.
about 70 minutes of reading, plus a 50-minute exercise on your own website.
What you'll be able to do
- Set up Search Console with the right type of property, and make sure your organisation (not just your web developer) owns it.
- Read clicks, impressions, click-through rate and average position correctly, and avoid the common misreadings.
- Use the branded filter, page filter, date comparisons, weekly and monthly views and annotations to answer real questions.
- Explain what Search Console does and doesn't tell you about AI Overviews and AI Mode, as of October 2026.
- Check whether your important pages are indexed, using the Page indexing report, URL Inspection and the Sitemaps report.
- Link Search Console to Google Analytics 4 so you can see search data next to what visitors did on your site.
Module 3: Finding the Searches That Matter
This module is about choosing the right searches to focus on. You'll learn to read what a searcher actually wants, gather real search phrases for free from Search Console and from Google itself, decide which ones are worth your effort, and give each of your important pages one clear main topic. By the end you'll have a keyword map: a one-page plan that the rest of the course builds on.
about 60 minutes of reading, plus about 75 minutes for the exercise.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain search intent and judge it for any search by looking at the results Google shows.
- Find the searches that already bring people to their site, using Search Console's Queries and Pages tabs and the branded filter.
- Collect new search ideas from autocomplete, "People also ask", related searches and AI Overviews, and know the limits of each.
- Use Keyword Planner and Google Trends with care, reading their figures as rough guides rather than exact counts.
- Score possible searches for relevance, intent fit, realistic chance and value, and pick the ones worth working on.
- Build a keyword map that gives each important page one main topic, and spot pages that compete with each other.
Module 4: On-Page SEO
On-page SEO is everything you control on the page itself: the headline Google shows, the short description under it, the headings and words on the page, the links between your pages, your images and the hidden labels that describe them. In this module you'll learn what Google actually uses from each of these, what it ignores, and how to fix your most important pages in an afternoon without touching any code.
about 80 minutes of reading, plus a 60 to 90 minute exercise on three of your own pages.
What you'll be able to do
- Write a title for any page that is unique, clear and accurate, and explain why Google sometimes shows a different one.
- Write a useful meta description, and say when Google uses it and when it doesn't.
- Structure a page with clear headings and an opening that tells visitors (and Google) what the page is about.
- Add internal links with descriptive link text, and judge when a URL is worth changing (and when it isn't).
- Write alt text and file names for images that help both screen reader users and Google Images.
- Decide which structured data is worth adding in October 2026, and check it with Google's Rich Results Test.
Module 5: Content That Earns Its Place
This module is about the words, pictures and pages that make up your website, and how to judge them the way Google says it tries to: by asking whether each page genuinely helps the people who land on it. You'll learn what Google means by people-first content and trust, how to use AI writing tools without getting into trouble, which content habits count as spam, and how to decide what to improve, merge or remove. You finish with an audit of your existing pages and a realistic plan for the next three months.
about 55 minutes of reading, plus a 60 to 90 minute exercise on your own website.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain what Google means by "people-first" content, and spot the warning signs of content written mainly for search engines.
- Describe E-E-A-T accurately (including the fact that Google says it is not a ranking factor in itself) and show trust on their own site through the Who, How and Why of each page.
- Use AI writing tools in line with Google's guidance, updated on 1 October 2026, including fact-checking everything that gets published.
- Recognise scaled content abuse, doorway pages and other content practices that Google's spam policies forbid.
- Audit existing pages and decide, page by page, whether to keep, improve, merge or remove them.
- Build a three-month content plan that the organisation can actually deliver.
Module 6: Local SEO and Google Business Profile
When someone searches for "accountant near me" or "emergency dentist Leeds", Google often shows a map and three businesses before any ordinary results. This module explains how Google chooses those businesses, and how to set up, complete and look after a Google Business Profile so yours has a fair chance of being one of them. It also covers the part most organisations get wrong: asking for reviews in a way that keeps you inside UK law and Google's rules.
about 75 minutes of reading, plus about 60 minutes for the exercise.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain the three factors Google's help page describes for local results (relevance, distance and prominence) and which of them they can influence.
- Decide whether their organisation is eligible for a Business Profile, and whether it should show an address or a service area.
- Verify, complete and maintain a profile: name, categories, hours, services, photos and posts.
- Ask for reviews in a way that complies with the Digital Markets, Competition and Consumers Act 2024 and Google's policies, and recognise review gating.
- Reply to reviews, report ones that break Google's rules, and know what has changed with questions on profiles.
- Check that their organisation's details are consistent across other websites and directories.
Module 7: Technical Health and AI Visibility
This module covers the technical side of SEO that a small organisation actually needs: a secure, mobile-friendly, reasonably fast website that Google can crawl and index properly, and a plan for when the website changes. It then looks at the controls you now have over how Google's AI features, Bing, ChatGPT and other AI tools use your content, so you can make a deliberate choice rather than leave it to chance.
about 60 minutes of reading, plus a 60 to 75 minute exercise on your own website.
What you'll be able to do
- Check that their site is served securely over HTTPS and works properly on a phone.
- Explain the three Core Web Vitals (LCP, INP, CLS), find their own scores, and decide whether speed is worth working on.
- Choose the right tool (robots.txt, noindex, canonical, redirect or 404) for keeping a page out of Google, handling duplicates or retiring a page.
- Plan a website change or redesign so that existing search traffic survives it.
- Decide whether to include or exclude their site from Google's AI features using Search Console's Search generative AI setting, and explain what Google-Extended does and doesn't control.
- Set up Bing Webmaster Tools and decide which AI crawlers (such as OpenAI's and Perplexity's) to allow in robots.txt.
Module 8: Links, Reputation and Measuring Results
This last module covers the part of SEO that happens away from your own website (links and mentions from other sites), then brings the whole course together into a monthly routine and a 90-day plan. You'll learn where the line sits between earning links and buying them, how to check your links calmly, and how to build a short monthly SEO report from Search Console and Google Analytics that ends in a decision. It finishes with a course wrap-up and where to go next.
about 60 minutes of lessons, plus about 75 minutes for the exercise.
What you'll be able to do
- Explain why links and mentions still matter, and where Google draws the line between earning links and link spam.
- Find genuine link and mention opportunities through partners, suppliers, associations, local press and the community.
- Use the nofollow, sponsored and ugc link attributes correctly, and explain why the disavow tool is rarely needed.
- Check their own links and manual actions in Search Console without panicking about spammy links.
- Build and run a monthly SEO review from Search Console and Google Analytics that ends in one decision.
- Write a 90-day SEO plan that pulls together the work from all eight modules.
Course downloads
What learners say
No reviews yet. Finish the course and be the first to review it.