However I still found a bunch of things really useful (see later).
Yelp as far as I can see from my own experiences isn't really that big of a thing in the UK, but TripAdvisor is, especially for hospitality sector. Google local/My Business is certainly becoming a thing here in the UK as was pointed out to me by a buddy who runs an outdoor activities centre in the Highlands. He has a tremendous understanding of Google and funnelling folks into his biz and banging on about it in the pub the other night.
Also in the UK we don't really have such a thing as BBB that google recognises as boosting the juice. Sure we have the British Chambers of Commerce and the CBI, but they're geared towards much larger businesses than your local SME (Small to Medium Sized Enterprise). There are local "Chambers of Commerce" in each council area, but meh.
That said, I'm working on unfecking a site that's never had image alt tags, no canonical refs (you can get at the same content from multiple URL's), out of nearly 200 pages there was one solitary H1, page titles were a mess...it goes on. The customer paid their previous "agency" a tidy sum for this site and somehow SEO was never looked at.
I did find your article genuinely useful though. I'm a freelancer now, and it seems I need to learn how to SEO as well as be a developer. I look forward to your follow ups.
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I can imagine that for some businesses this is also true. Not to mention people who are new to creating websites and don’t feel ready for their in-progress site to be indexed, or business that are in the process of closing down.
I think Squarespace does the right thing by making this option easy for the user to control. It’s weird to me that you encourage people to “blame” them. That sounds like a hidden agenda sort of bias to me.