SEO services for UK businesses

Search engine optimisation (SEO) is the work of making a website easy for Google to find, understand and trust, so it appears when people search for what you sell. It is several jobs, not one. A site can have excellent copy and still be invisible because Google cannot reach half its pages, or be technically spotless and still rank for nothing useful because no page targets the searches buyers make. Choosing the right service starts with knowing which of those problems is yours.

Who these SEO services are for

They suit small and medium-sized UK businesses whose website should be bringing in enquiries or sales and is not: service firms working in a defined area, online shops, professional practices, and B2B companies whose buyers research for weeks before they get in touch. Typically there is an owner or a marketing manager who knows the business well but has neither the time nor the specialist knowledge to diagnose what is wrong with the site.

They also suit in-house marketers and web developers who need a specialist for one part of the job, such as checking a rebuild before it goes live. They are a poor fit if you need a promise of top positions by a fixed date, or if the website cannot be changed. SEO works by changing pages; if nothing can change, an audit only tells you what you are missing.

If you would rather work with one specialist than an agency, the page on hiring a freelance SEO expert explains what that arrangement involves. Agencies that need extra specialist capacity can read how outsourced digital marketing for agencies works.

Core SEO services: which one you need

Start from what you are seeing rather than from the name of a service. The table matches the problems owners most often describe to the place I would start.

Keyword research, content writing, schema markup and Google Business Profile work also run as services in their own right. Every one is listed further down this page, and each has its own page explaining what it involves.

SEO for AI search

Google now answers many questions with an AI Overview above the ordinary results, and some people skip search altogether and ask ChatGPT, Perplexity or Gemini. For a business, the question becomes whether you are named or cited in those answers, not only whether you rank.

Most of what gets a page cited is the same work that helps it rank: pages Google can crawl, content that answers the question directly, a clear structure and consistent facts about your business across the web. The difference is emphasis. AI tools lift passages rather than whole pages, so a page that gives its answer plainly near the top, says who is behind it and supports its claims is easier to quote.

For most businesses I would handle AI visibility inside the normal SEO work rather than as a separate project. If it is your main concern, for instance because a competitor keeps being recommended in AI answers and you never are, my AI search optimisation service looks at Google’s AI features and the standalone assistants together.

SEO by platform and business type

The principles hold on every platform, but what you can change does not. Shopify locks parts of its URL structure and lets the same product be reached through several collection paths. WordPress can do almost anything, which is how plugins accumulate until the site slows down. Squarespace and Wix handle the basics sensibly and limit how far technical changes can go. WooCommerce and Magento shops with filtered navigation can generate large numbers of near-identical URLs that waste Google’s attention.

The type of business shapes the work as much as the platform. An online shop depends on its category and product pages, so ecommerce SEO starts with how the catalogue is organised. A B2B firm or a software company sells to buyers who compare options over weeks, so its content has to serve each stage of that research. A business with several branches needs each location to stand on its own in local search without the pages copying one another. Each of these has its own page in the list below.

SEO by industry

Some sectors come with rules that shape what a page may say. Claims about health and beauty treatments fall under the ASA and the CAP Code. Solicitors work under the SRA’s rules on publicity and price transparency, dentists under the GDC’s guidance on advertising, and financial firms under the FCA’s financial promotion rules. A CQC-registered clinic that has been inspected and rated must display that rating on its website. Copy in these sectors has to persuade without overstating outcomes.

Sector also changes how people search. A patient choosing a private clinic, a company comparing accountants and a couple booking a hotel all search differently, and the pages that win reflect those differences. The sectors I cover, and what is particular about each, are on the SEO by industry page.

How an SEO engagement runs

1. A first conversation. You tell me what you sell, who buys it, where the website falls short and what has been tried already. No preparation is needed.
2. The audit. I go through the site, your Search Console and analytics data and the search results you compete in, then rank what I find by how much it is costing you and how much effort it takes to fix.
3. A written plan and quote. What I would do, in what order and at what cost. You can hire me for all of it or part of it, or hand the plan to your own developer.
4. The work, fixes first. New content on a site Google struggles to crawl is wasted effort, so technical problems come before page improvements, new content and links.
5. Plain reporting. Regular updates on what changed on the site, what moved in Search Console and analytics, and what comes next. Rankings are reported, but enquiries and sales are the measure that counts.

Fixes to crawling and indexing tend to show in Search Console within weeks of Google revisiting the pages. Gains on competitive searches usually take months, and how many depends on how far behind the site starts and how hard competitors are working.

I am based in London and Reading and work with businesses across the UK. If you are in either city, see how I work with London businesses or Reading businesses; everyone else can read how I work with businesses elsewhere in the UK.

What SEO costs

SEO is priced by the job rather than by the hour spent on it. The things that move the cost most are:

• the size of the site and how much is wrong with it, since a 30-page service site and a shop with 20,000 products are different jobs;
• how competitive your searches are, which decides how much content and how many links it takes to compete;
• who makes the changes: I can carry them out myself, or write them up clearly for your developer;
• whether you need a one-off project, such as an audit or a migration, or continuing work.

After the audit you receive a written quote in pounds for the work in the plan, so you know the cost before anything starts. Be wary of a monthly package that promises page one at a fixed price without anyone having looked at your site. Nobody controls Google’s rankings, and a price set before the site has been checked pays for activity, not for fixing what is actually wrong.