SEO

Invisible on Google for the searches that matter?

In the UK, Google holds roughly 92.7% of search (Q1 2025, Searchlab / DigitalApplied) — more dominant than in the United States. SEO for a small business is the work of getting found there. That means a site that search engines can crawl and trust, pages written in the words UK customers actually type, and a monthly report that ties the work to enquiries rather than to impressions.

Sound familiar?

Three situations a small business may recognise.

The site that looks right and brings nothing. It looks the part on a phone. Search your service and your town, and it is not on the first page. The contact form stays quiet.

The report that always goes up. Every month a PDF arrives: impressions up, a "domain authority" score up. Nobody can say whether any of it produced a phone call, and nobody has touched the pages since the site launched.

The clinic with a keyword it cannot use. Some of the treatments clinics offer are ones no UK clinic may advertise to the public. A keyword plan built around one of them produces page titles that read like an advert the ASA can act on.

How it works

1. Technical fixes come first. The audit checks crawl and indexation (whether search engines can reach and index your pages), Core Web Vitals (how fast pages load, respond and stay stable) and structured data, in Bing as well as Google. Bing Webmaster Tools is set up in the first week, because ChatGPT and Copilot both run on the Bing index. We are an engineering firm. If we build or maintain your site, the fixes go straight into the code. On a site we did not build, the audit maps what is fixable on your current platform.
2. Keywords are researched on UK volumes. "Optimisation" and "optimization" are not the same keyword and do not carry the same volumes. Every pull runs with a UK locale filter, and the variant carrying UK volume goes in the title and the heading. Each page gets one target.
3. Local SEO: your pages, then the area you serve. The pages already written for people ready to buy are optimised first. Then come location pages for the area you serve, each with genuine local substance.
4. Writing, every month. Pieces briefed from the keyword research, each aimed at a term the site needs to win, and published on your site.
5. A report you can check. Each month's report shows what was done and what moved, from Search Console alongside analytics, tied to your enquiries. On a UK site that asks for cookie consent, some visitors are never measured, so analytics is a sample that moves with your consent rate. Search Console counts impressions and clicks before a banner is shown, and the report carries both.

There is no separate "AI optimisation" package. Google's guidance of 15 May 2026 says the same ranking systems power AI Overviews and AI Mode, and its generative features retrieve from the Search index — index well and you are already optimising for them. So there is no llms.txt (Google has said it does not use it), no AI-specific schema and no chunked question-and-answer rewrites.

What the starting price buys

£750 a month, excl. VAT, runs one organic campaign: the technical audit and the fixes that follow, UK keyword research, on-page and location work, writing every month, and a report tied to enquiries.

Add when you need it: more towns or branches that must rank · more writing a month · link work where the terms you need are contested. Each is priced when you need it.

What keeps you safe

Nothing in this retainer buys or incentivises reviews. Fake reviews or undisclosed incentivised reviews can bring a CMA fine of up to 10% of global turnover or £300,000, whichever is higher. An agency offering to seed your reviews is offering you a liability; the local SEO checklist covers what is allowed, and our guide to UK law on asking for Google reviews sets out the rules in full.

If you run an aesthetic clinic, some of the terms in your market name treatments no UK clinic can legally advertise to the public, and CAP's guidance counts indirect references to them, not only their names. The keyword map targets consultations instead; aesthetic clinics sets out what that leaves.

If tracking is added to your site for the report, it asks before setting anything non-essential, and declining has to be as easy as accepting.

What it costs

From £750 a month, excl. VAT, shown on the pricing page with our other services. For context, a full SEO campaign for a UK small business runs £500–£1,500 a month and upward (dotwall / RedEagle, 2026).

When something else fits better

Under Google's guidelines, a business can have a Google Business Profile if customers visit its premises or it travels to its customers; a virtual office does not count. If that is you, the profile comes first, and it is not part of this retainer. It is the single most valuable thing you can fix in local search, Google charges nothing for the profile, and it should be finished before you spend a pound on a retainer. If you sell same-day services from a shopfront, the profile is the whole game, and we will tell you so rather than sell a retainer around it.

If you need customers this week, paid search is the honest answer; this retainer is organic only. If your site fundamentally cannot meet Core Web Vitals or carry proper structured data, fixing or replacing it is the highest-leverage move, and that is Web Development. If a budget of £150 a month is what you have, it buys upkeep rather than a campaign, and we would rather say so than take it. To see where your own site stands first, request a free audit.

Get in touch with the searches you want to be found for, or read how a project runs first.