Local SEO Services
For most small businesses the three results in the map pack are worth more than the whole first page beneath them. Local SEO is the work that puts you in those three: a complete Google Business Profile, your details matching everywhere on the web, reviews that keep arriving, and a website that says where you work. It moves faster than the rest of SEO, often in weeks rather than months, which is why we usually start here.
A £1,000 deposit, then 11 monthly payments, or £5,500 for the year. That buys up to five target keywords, a named consultant, and a monthly roadmap you can read in ten minutes.
See all three packagesWhere this fits in your campaign
Google judges local results on three things: relevance, distance and prominence. You cannot change distance. Everything worth paying for sits in the other two, and prominence is where nearly every small business is leaving the most enquiries on the table.
The map pack moves fastest
A neglected Google Business Profile given proper attention can move position inside a fortnight. Nothing else in SEO is that quick, which is why it is the first thing we touch and the first thing you see in a report.
Consistency beats cleverness
Your name, address and phone number matching character for character across forty listings is dull work, and it outperforms most of what agencies sell as local SEO.
What local SEO actually is
Local SEO is the work that makes a business appear when someone nearby searches for what it sells. In practice that means two surfaces: the map pack (the three business listings with a map above the ordinary results) and localised organic results, the normal blue-link listing filtered by where the searcher is standing.
They are ranked differently, and that is the part most people miss. Ordinary organic results are driven mostly by your website. The map pack is driven mostly by your Google Business Profile, so a business can rank first organically and still be invisible in the three-pack directly above it.
Google weighs three broad factors for local results: relevance (does your profile match what was searched), distance (how close you are to the searcher), and prominence (how well known and how well corroborated you are). Distance is fixed. Everything worth paying for lives in the other two.
Why the map pack is worth more than page one
On a phone, the map pack fills most of the first screen. The three results in it take the large majority of clicks on local searches, and being fourth is close to being invisible. You sit behind a "More places" link most people never press.
So the gap between third and fourth is worth more than the gap between fifth and fifteenth in ordinary results. For a plumber, a clinic or a solicitor, moving from fourth to third is often the single most valuable thing that happens to their marketing all year.
It is also the part of search that responds fastest. Most of SEO is a three-to-six month conversation. A Google Business Profile that has sat half-finished since 2019 can move inside a month, because the work is not competitive. It is just work nobody did.
The five things that actually move local rankings
Strip out the jargon and this is the whole discipline. Everything else is a variation on one of these five.
- 01
Your Google Business Profile, filled in completely
The right primary category (the single most influential field on the whole profile) plus every relevant secondary category, real photos added monthly, services listed one by one, opening hours including bank holidays, and a post every week or two. Our full 26-point checklist is free and ungated.
- 02
NAP consistency
Your name, address and phone number identical everywhere, character for character, down to whether it says "Street" or "St". Most businesses have picked up two or three old addresses across directories, usually from a previous agency or a move. Cleaning that up is often month one, and it is frequently the change that moves the pack.
- 03
Reviews, in volume and recent
Ten reviews from 2021 read as a business that stopped trading. Two a month for a year is worth far more than twenty in one week, which looks exactly like what it is. Reply to every one. The reply is not for the reviewer, it is for the next fifty people who read it before ringing.
- 04
A page for every place you actually work
Google ranks pages, not businesses. One page listing six towns is a page about nothing. Six pages, each with its own proof and its own FAQ, is six chances to rank, provided they are genuinely different, which is where most agencies fall down.
- 05
Local schema and a site that says where you are
LocalBusiness structured data with the right coordinates, an address in the footer that matches the profile, and service pages that name the towns. Cheap, permanent, skipped constantly, and it means Google never has to guess where you are.
Where most local campaigns go wrong
Claiming too much territory. Setting your service area to "Yorkshire" when you work in three towns dilutes your relevance instead of extending your reach. Google reads an overclaimed service area as a weak signal, not ambition.
Keyword-stuffing the business name. "Business Name - Emergency Plumber Sheffield 24hr" breaks the guidelines, competitors report it, and suspensions take weeks to reverse. It is the highest-risk, lowest-reward move in local SEO and people still make it.
Buying reviews. Filtered at best, suspended at worst, and obvious to anyone who reads three in a row, including the customer you were trying to impress.
Building forty near-identical location pages. Worth dwelling on, because the previous version of this website did exactly that: 288 service pages generated in a single day, one template with the trade and town swapped. Between them they produced twelve clicks. Google’s helpful-content systems target that pattern specifically, and the damage is not confined to the thin pages. It drags on the whole domain.
What you can do yourself, honestly
A good deal of it. The Google Business Profile work is genuinely a morning’s job for someone who cares, and we publish the whole checklist rather than hiding it behind an email address. If your budget is under our floor, do that first. It is the highest-return hour in local marketing and it costs nothing.
What is hard to do around a full-time job is the sustained half: building location pages that are genuinely different from each other, auditing citations across dozens of directories, keeping reviews arriving every month, and watching what competitors change. That is what a campaign buys. If you have the time to do it yourself, you should.
Local SEO across South Yorkshire and beyond
We run local campaigns from Sheffield, and the markets we know best are Sheffield, Doncaster and the rest of South Yorkshire, plus Leeds, Harrogate and Rugby.
Campaigns start at £497 a month plus VAT, published in full. If your site is not showing up anywhere at all, run the nine-point diagnostic before you pay anyone. About a third of the time the answer is free and takes four minutes.
Four steps, then round again
SEO never finishes. The work runs on a loop, and you see the report every time round, good month or bad.
- Step 1Keyword research
We start with the terms that show buying intent, not the ones with the biggest numbers. Alongside those, lower-competition terms that rank sooner and bring early results.
- Step 2Competitor analysis
Then we look at who outranks you and why. Once we know what they are doing, we know what it takes to beat it.
- Step 3Implementation
The team does the work: on-page fixes, new content, links and local signals. Every item is listed in your monthly report, not buried in a dashboard.
- Step 4Reporting & revision
Each month you see what was done and what it moved. When something is not working, we change it rather than wait for it to come good.
Three packages. Prices included.
Pick the one that matches where your customers are. Pay for the year, or a deposit and eleven monthly payments. Either way, the number on this page is the number on the invoice.
- Up to 5 keywords per campaign
- Up to 5 URLs included
- GMB post every 14 days
- 1+ new landing page or article
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 10 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 7 days
- 2+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
- Up to 20 keywords per campaign
- Up to 10 URLs included
- GMB post every 4 days
- 5+ new landing pages or articles
- Targeted locations, blog posts, on-page SEO report
- Initial audit & corrections, citations audit
- Monthly roadmap & action report
Every package includes keyword analysis, heading tags and meta description optimisation, image alt tag analysis, duplicate content checks, sitemap creation, mobile responsiveness reporting, citations, load time testing and search engine reports. All prices are subject to change. Budgeting for the website too? Here iswhat a website should actually cost.
Need something fixed this week?
Unexpected deadline, site down, or let down by another agency? Call and we will tell you straight away whether we can help.
Straight answers to the usual questions
How long does local SEO take to work?
Map pack movement often shows within four to eight weeks, much faster than the rest of SEO, because most of the early work is completing things nobody completed rather than out-competing anyone. Stable, meaningful ranking change takes three to six months. If your Google Business Profile has been neglected for years, the first month is usually the biggest single jump you will see.
What is the difference between local SEO and regular SEO?
Regular SEO is mostly about your website; local SEO is mostly about your Google Business Profile and the consistency of your details across the web. They rank on different signals, which is why a business can sit first in the ordinary results and be invisible in the map pack directly above them. A proper campaign does both, weighted towards whichever one is costing you more enquiries.
Can I do local SEO myself?
Yes, a good share of it, and we publish our full Google Business Profile checklist free so that you can. Completing the profile properly, asking customers for reviews and replying to them are all things an owner can do better than an agency, because they know the business. What is hard to sustain alongside a job is the ongoing half: distinct location pages, citation audits across dozens of directories, and a review flow that does not stop in month three.
How do I rank in the Google map pack?
Complete your Google Business Profile with the correct primary category, make your name, address and phone number identical everywhere they appear, build a steady flow of recent reviews, and give each place you work its own page on your site. Those four things account for most of the movement most businesses will ever see. Distance from the searcher is the one factor you cannot change.
Do I need a physical address for local SEO?
You need a verifiable address for a Google Business Profile, but you can hide it and operate as a service-area business, which is the right setup for a trade that visits customers rather than receiving them. Virtual offices and mailboxes break the guidelines and get profiles suspended. If you work from home and would rather not publish it, the service-area option is the one you want.
How much does local SEO cost?
Our Local package is a £1,000 deposit then 11 monthly payments of £497 plus VAT, or £5,500 paid annually, and it includes a Google Business Profile post every fortnight and a citations audit. Across the UK market, local SEO retainers typically run from £300 to £1,200 a month depending on how many hours are actually being spent. Below about £300 nobody is looking at your account by hand.
The other services we run
- National SEOBusinesses selling UK-wide · B2B and professional services · Manufacturers and wholesalers
- Link Audits & Link BuildingBacklink audits and risk reviews · Disavow files, done carefully · Recovering from bought links
- Digital PRData and survey campaigns · Expert comment and reactive PR · Founder and spokesperson profiles
- Content MarketingBuying guides and comparisons · Service and landing page copy · Blog and editorial programmes
- Conversion Rate OptimisationEnquiry and quote forms · Landing pages for paid traffic · Checkout and basket flows
- PPC ManagementGoogle Ads search campaigns · Local Services Ads · Google Shopping
Ready when you are
Tell us what you are trying to rank for and we will look at the site and the search results before we reply. You get a straight answer, including if SEO is not the right spend for you yet.