National SEO
National SEO is a different job from local SEO, not a bigger one. Local rankings are decided largely by proximity and a Google Business Profile; national rankings are decided by whether your site is genuinely the better answer. That means the work moves away from citations and map pack signals and towards content depth, site structure and authority, which is slower and costs more.
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
National terms have no proximity to hide behind. When someone searches without a place name, Google has no geographic tiebreaker, so it falls back on which page most convincingly answers the question and which domain it trusts. Those are the only two levers you have.
Depth beats breadth every time
One genuinely thorough page on a topic will outrank six thin ones on the same topic, including your own. Most stalled national campaigns are competing against their own back catalogue.
Authority is the ceiling
Nationally you are up against sites with a decade of links. On-page work gets you to that ceiling quickly and no further, which is why national campaigns run longer and lean on PR and content in a way local ones do not.
When you have outgrown local SEO
The signal is usually in your enquiries rather than your rankings. You are winning the work you can see, and losing the work you never hear about because it never searched for your town.
Some businesses never had local intent to begin with. If you manufacture something, sell wholesale, or provide a service delivered remotely, nobody types your city and Google will not show a map pack, because there is nothing local about the query. A local campaign for that business is money spent competing for searches nobody makes.
Others outgrow it. A firm that spent three years dominating one county reaches the point where the county is the ceiling. The honest version of that conversation is that going national roughly doubles the timescale and the competition, and it is worth doing anyway if the market is there.
What actually changes when you drop the place name
Everything that made local SEO tractable stops applying.
- 01
Proximity disappears as a ranking factor
In a local search, being near the searcher is one of the strongest signals there is. Nationally there is no such thing, so the comparison is purely on merit and trust.
- 02
The map pack goes
No Google Business Profile, no reviews carousel, no directions link. The top of the page becomes ads and organic results, and you have to earn a place in the second of those.
- 03
The competitor set changes entirely
You stop competing with three firms in your town and start competing with everyone in the country plus the aggregators, directories and comparison sites that rank for everything.
- 04
Content stops being optional
Locally, a well-structured service page and a strong profile can carry you. Nationally the pages that rank are the ones that answer the question most completely, and there is no way to fake that cheaply.
- 05
Links start to matter more than anything else
They are the main way Google separates two pages that both answer the question well, and building them takes longer than everything else combined.
Structure: the mistake that stalls most national campaigns
The commonest reason a national campaign goes nowhere has nothing to do with authority. It is that the site is competing with itself.
A business that has published for a few years usually has four or five pages circling the same topic: an old service page, two blog posts, a landing page from a campaign in 2022 and something a previous agency added. None of them is definitive, they split the links and the relevance between them, and Google picks whichever it likes least.
Fixing that is unglamorous and it is often the single biggest gain available. One page per thing, the best version kept and improved, the rest redirected into it, and internal links pointed at the survivor. We have seen that alone move a page from the third page to the first without a single new link, because the strength was always there and was being divided five ways.
The same discipline applies going forward: a new page only earns its place if it is about something no existing page is about. That rule is why this site has 62 pages instead of the 359 the old one had.
Where national campaigns get their links
Locally you can get a long way on citations, a chamber of commerce listing and a couple of supplier mentions. None of that moves a national term.
What does: digital PR that earns coverage in publications people actually read, genuinely useful resources that other people in your sector cite because they are useful, and trade press, which is consistently underrated because the readership is small and the readership is exactly your buyers.
What does not: directory packages, guest post networks, and anything sold as a fixed number of links per month. Those were viable a decade ago. Now they range from ineffective to actively damaging, and cleaning up after them is a service we sell, which tells you how often it goes wrong.
How long it takes, honestly
A local campaign in a normal market shows movement in eight to twelve weeks and produces enquiries somewhere between three and six months. Double both for national, and add more if the market is one of the genuinely hard ones: finance, insurance, legal, anything where the incumbents have spent a decade and a fortune.
What you should see early is the leading indicators moving: more pages indexed, more terms appearing at all, positions improving on the less contested variants. Those show up long before the head terms do, and they are how you tell a campaign is working before it pays.
If your business needs enquiries this quarter rather than next year, the honest answer is paid search, running alongside rather than instead. Paid also tells you within three months which national terms actually convert, which makes the organic plan cheaper and better aimed.
What it costs
The National package is £997 a month plus VAT: a £2,000 deposit then eleven monthly payments, or £11,000 for the year. That covers ten target keywords, ten URLs and two or more new pages a month.
The keyword count is the part worth understanding. Ten national terms is a genuinely ambitious target, because each one is a market rather than a postcode. We would rather commit to ten and move them than list forty and report on movement in the ones nobody searches.
If your market is local and you are considering National because it sounds better, we will tell you to stay on Local at £497. That happens reasonably often.
The firms this page covers
What these have in common is a long consideration period and a high client value, which changes the arithmetic entirely: one client can pay for a year of campaign, so you need far less traffic than you think and far more trust than you are probably building.
- 01
Accountancy and finance
Accountants, bookkeepers, financial advisors, insolvency practitioners and mortgage brokers.
- 02
Legal
Solicitors and law firms, where the practice-area page rather than the firm page is what wins the enquiry.
- 03
Funeral directors
A sector with genuinely urgent local intent, almost no meaningful competition online, and a duty of care in the copy that most marketing advice handles badly.
- 04
Logistics and transport
Logistics companies, hauliers and transport firms, where the buyer is searching for a supplier rather than a service and the trade terms are close to uncontested.
- 05
Consultancy and advisory
Management consultants, HR consultants and IT support providers.
- 06
Insurance and property advice
Insurance brokers, surveyors and estate planners.
- 07
Recruitment and technical
Recruitment agencies, architects, engineering firms and security companies.
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
What is the difference between local and national SEO?
Local rankings depend heavily on proximity to the searcher and on your Google Business Profile, so the work centres on local signals, citations and reviews. National rankings have no proximity to fall back on, so they come down to which page best answers the question and which domain Google trusts most. That shifts the work towards content depth, site structure and authority, and it roughly doubles the timescale.
How much does national SEO cost?
Our National package is £997 a month plus VAT: a £2,000 deposit then eleven payments, or £11,000 for the year, covering ten target keywords and ten URLs. That is the published price and it does not move on a call. National genuinely costs more than local because the competition is national and the work is heavier, not because the label sounds bigger.
How long does national SEO take?
Expect meaningful movement in six to twelve months and real enquiry volume beyond that, roughly double a local campaign. In genuinely hard markets like finance, insurance or legal it is longer still. You should see leading indicators well before that: more pages indexed, more terms ranking at all, and progress on the less contested variants.
Can a small business compete nationally?
In a niche, yes, and that is usually the strategy. Competing head-on for a broad national term against a decade-old incumbent is a bad use of a small budget. Owning a specific, well-defined corner of the market completely is achievable and often more profitable, because the traffic is smaller and converts far better.
Do I still need a Google Business Profile for national SEO?
Keep it and keep it accurate, but it will not do much for national terms because there is no map pack on them. It still matters for brand searches, for anyone who does search with your town, and increasingly for how AI assistants confirm you are a real business. Maintaining it costs almost nothing, so there is no argument for neglecting it.
Should I run local and national campaigns together?
Usually yes, and the local half tends to fund the national half. Local rankings arrive faster and produce enquiries while the national work compounds. The pages do different jobs and do not compete, provided the site is structured so each page has one clear purpose rather than a location page and a national page both half-covering the same service.
The other services we run
- 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
- AI Search OptimisationEntity and schema modelling · Content written to be quoted · llms.txt and entity files
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.