Start with the searches that lead to money
Most small businesses begin with the wrong keyword list. They pick broad terms with large volumes, which are competitive, expensive to reach and often searched by people who are nowhere near buying.
The useful list is shorter and duller: the service you sell, the place you sell it, and the problems people describe when they are ready to pay someone. If a term would make you pleased to see the phone ring, it belongs on the list. If it would bring a student doing research, it does not.
Give each service its own page
A single page listing six services will rarely rank for any of them. Search engines match a query to a page, not to a business, so each service you genuinely want enquiries for needs a page that covers it properly: what it involves, who it suits, what happens next.
This is usually the single biggest improvement available to a small business site, and it is a content job rather than a technical one.
Fix the technical basics once
Make sure every page can be crawled, has a unique title and description, loads quickly on a phone, and has one clear heading describing the topic. Check that only one version of the site is reachable, that the sitemap is accurate, and that nothing important is accidentally blocked.
These are not ongoing tasks. They are a short piece of work that stops good content being held back.
Claim and complete your local profile
If you serve a defined area, a complete Google Business Profile with accurate categories, services and opening hours will usually produce enquiries sooner than anything else on this list.
It also gives you somewhere to gather genuine reviews, which influence both how you rank locally and whether someone chooses to call you.
What can wait
Publishing a weekly blog, chasing links and rewriting the whole site can all wait. They matter later, once the service pages exist, the basics are fixed and you can see which pages already attract people.
Work in that order and progress is measurable. Work in reverse and it is very hard to tell what, if anything, helped.
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