The world of search is evolving faster than ever—GA4 is now the default with Universal Analytics now a thing of the past, Google’s ai based Search Generative Experience (SGE) is rolling out, and Core Web Vitals have new weighting. Below is an actionable, no-fluff checklist we use at Clarus Digital to keep our SME clients in front of the pack.

1. Technical Foundations (tick these off first)

1.1 Keep your CLS < 0.1 and INP < 200 ms

Google protects it’s brand by prioritising websites with a great user experience and this includes the speed. They added INP (Interaction to Next Paint) to Core Web Vitals back in March 2025. Test with PageSpeed Insights weekly and talk to your web or hosting team about how the speed can be improved if your website is not performing well.

1.2 Switch to HTTP/3 and QUIC

Hosts like Kinsta and Cloudflare (our preference) now enable it with one click—worth 100–300 ms off first byte. It’s a quick win.

1.3 Ensure log-file monitoring

Google allocates a finite amount of time to each domain each month, so you don’t want to waste it on errors or unnecessary processing by looking for crawl-budget waste on parameterised URLs; plug gaps with robots.txt and canonical tags.

2. On-Page Content That Wins the SGE Carousel

2.1 Add a concise AI-ready answer paragraph

Add them (< 90 words) near the top. These can really give you a fast presence at the top of the search results. To get an idea of what works, take a look at results across differing verticals.

2.2 Embed FAQPage schema

To earn a People-Also-Ask slot under the answer paragraph. Create a list of your relevant FAQs for all landing pages. Our WordPress Elementor websites support tagging the content as FAQ schema to help with this. Keep the FAQs up-to-date!

2.3 Refresh content quarterly

As per the item above, SGE previews favour freshness signals. Don’t be lazy even when you start getting good SERP results. Google rewards efforts and penalises inactivity.

3. Local & “Near Me” Optimisation

3.1 Create unique, 300-word service-area pages

(e.g., “SEO company in Brighton”). It’s not a new tactic, but it still works. Keep the content relevant and unique.

3.2 Collect at least 5 new Google Reviews per quarter

This can be difficult for many customers, especially those in the B2B sector serving a low number of high value clients but as with everything, where there is a will, there is a way. Perhaps make a team member, usually a client or sales manager,  ‘customer experience champion’ and approach this in a holistic way, integrated into your sales process including making it a part of your terms.

3.3 Sync opening hours to public holidays in the GBP time zone automatically via the GMB API

There is nothing more annoying than turning up to or calling a business that says it is open in the Google Business Profile but is in fact closed. It’s a fast way to get negative Google reviews. If you don’t know what GMB is or who looks after it in your organisation, then you need to address that fast.

4. Off-Page Authority Signals

4.1 Partner links

Ask relevant suppliers for a footer link to your case study. They should be interested in showcasing where and how their own products are used. It’s a win-win.

4.2 B2B Digital PR

Contribute articles, especially data-driven research, to your relevant trade mags like Marketing Week or Construction UK Magazine. You might be lucky and get a backlink from a domain with a high Domain Authority of 50+

4.3 Keep Your Toxicity Score < 2%

Use tools such as SEMrush. A task for your SEO agency this one, but it’s a good idea to ask about it if you don’t receive a summary at least once a year, so that you know if you have a problem or not. They can allocate time to removing or disavowing them from your SEO package if they don’t already. Google has said that they can discern the good from the bad and don’t necessarily punish you for it, but it’s still a good idea to keep it under control in case the algorithm changes.

5. Analytics & Measurement

5.1 GA4 custom funnels

measuring from first visit → form submission. It is every marketers dream to be able to see what content attracts the converting customers and if your website is correctly tagged and constructed then you should be able to get this information straight out of Google Analytics.

5.2 Looker Studio blended ROAS dashboard

For both organic + paid campaigns. Our client’s already receive a monthly Looker Studio report demonstrating performance for each channel with data from GA4 and Search Console, but if your SEO provider only provides you with a simple screenshot, then you should be asking yourself if they even know how well you are performing, let alone sharing that information with you.

5.3 Server-side tagging

This is to preserve conversion data post-cookie expiration. With the strict rules on data protection, it’s important, especially for larger business with a lot of online sales, to collect the data on a server so that it is available after the cookie has expired in the client-side browser for any marketing platforms used for your automated marketing that you may be using.

6. Emerging Trends to Budget For

6.1 Image SEO for multi-modal SGE

Include EXIF geo-tags. By adding location data (lat and long) to your image’s EXIF data, you can signal to search engines that your images are related to a specific location, which could improve your local search rankings. 

6.2 Answer-engine optimisation

For ChatGPT and similar plugins and sidebars. Sometimes called Generative Engine Optimisation (GEO), it focuses on making your content the primary source of answers when AI-powered search engines like ChatGPT are used. Unlike traditional SEO, which focuses on ranking in search results, AEO aims to have your content directly quoted as the answer to a user’s query. The debate is still running on what value this provides to a website, especially with this area evolving fast but at the end of the day, if your content is relevant then the user may click through to your website using the link next to the answer, the format and journey of which is constantly updated by Google as they experiment with what works best.

6.3 Authorship signals (E-E-A-T)

Add an author headshot and industry-relevant credentials. At Clarus, we have been using this tactic for some of our clients for a while, but it seems to be gaining traction as others catch up. Google has pushed for and rewarded ‘Experience, Expertise, Authoritativeness, and Trustworthiness’ for some time now and we identified a while ago that using the existing WordPress Author pages as team profile pages and adding photos, bios and LinkedIn links (amongst other things) as a pragmatic approach to achieving this and we have achieved near instant decent rankings as a result, for both the author pages and their related links.

Next Steps

We recommend that you run through this list against your site, record and gaps in a spreadsheet, and prioritise fixes by business impact. Need a hand? Book a free 30-minute audit with Clarus Digital, and we’ll benchmark your current score and talk about how we can help you with our SEO, website and hosting services. Call us on 01273 042470 or email us at [email protected] (or use our form).