# WhatIsSEO > Manchester SEO Agency offering technical, on-page, local and ecommerce SEO, plus AI Search Optimisation (GEO/AIO) — helping businesses appear both in Google and in AI answer engines like ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google AI Overviews. New agency (founded 2026), built on a free live audit rather than sales claims. WhatIsSEO runs a genuine, live technical + on-page + AI-visibility scanner at /free-seo-audit — enter a name, email and URL and the full report is shown on screen and emailed. No fabricated case studies, client counts or years-in-business are used anywhere on this site; the case-studies page states plainly that the agency is new. ## What this company is WhatIsSEO is the trading name of WEB PRINT & SIGNS LIMITED (Companies House 16585795), registered at 116 Bury New Road, Manchester, England M8 8EB, United Kingdom. It is an SEO agency, not a directory, publisher or software vendor. Note on the name: "SEO" here means search engine optimisation (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Search_engine_optimization). It is unrelated to the Korean family name Seo. ## Who it is a good fit for - UK small and medium-sized businesses that need organic search visibility. - Businesses wanting a diagnosis before a sales conversation: the audit at /free-seo-audit runs on a live site and the findings are handed over whether or not the visitor becomes a client. - Companies who have had poor experiences with agencies and want reporting they can verify themselves in their own Google Search Console. - Agencies and web studios needing SEO delivered behind their own brand (/white-label-seo). ## Who it is not a good fit for - Anyone wanting guaranteed rankings, bought links, or bulk directory submissions. This site declines that work and explains why at /cheap-seo-uk. - Businesses needing a website built. WhatIsSEO does not build websites. - Anyone needing an agency physically based outside Greater Manchester, Cheshire or Lancashire. Work elsewhere in the UK is remote, and /areas states this plainly rather than implying offices that do not exist. ## Services - [SEO Services](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-services): Full-service SEO for businesses across the UK: technical fixes, on-page optimisation, content and link earning, built around a plan we show you before we start. - [Local SEO](https://whatisseo.co.uk/local-seo): Get found by customers searching near you. Google Business Profile, local citations, reviews strategy and location pages that actually rank. - [Technical SEO](https://whatisseo.co.uk/technical-seo): Site speed, crawlability, indexing and schema. The foundation that content and links can't compensate for if it's broken. - [Ecommerce SEO](https://whatisseo.co.uk/ecommerce-seo): Product and category pages that rank, a feed that doesn't fight your own SEO, and a site structure that scales past 50 products without breaking. - [AI Search (GEO/AIO)](https://whatisseo.co.uk/geo-aio): ChatGPT, Perplexity, Gemini and Google's AI Overviews now answer questions directly, without a click. GEO (Generative Engine Optimisation) and AIO (AI Optimisation) are how you get cited in that answer instead of skipped. - [SEO + PPC](https://whatisseo.co.uk/digital-marketing): SEO and paid search working from the same keyword and conversion data, instead of two agencies pulling in different directions. ## Packages, pricing and specialist pages - [SEO Packages. What You Actually Get for the Money](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-packages): An honest breakdown of the four shapes an SEO package normally takes in the UK, what each one should include, and how to tell whether the one you're being sold fits your site. - [SEO Packages in Manchester](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-packages-manchester): What SEO packages look like for Manchester businesses specifically. A market where agency saturation is high, quotes vary enormously, and the difference between proposals is rarely explained. - [Affordable SEO That Doesn't Cut the Corners That Matter](https://whatisseo.co.uk/affordable-seo): Affordable SEO is a real thing. It works by narrowing scope, not by lowering standards, and the difference between the two is the whole subject of this page. - [Cheap SEO in the UK: What It Actually Buys You](https://whatisseo.co.uk/cheap-seo-uk): A straight look at the bottom of the UK SEO market. What the low prices are paying for, which of it is harmless, which of it can get your site penalised, and how to check before you buy. - [SEO Consultant in Manchester](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-consultant-manchester): Consultancy instead of a retainer: an experienced pair of eyes on your site, your market and your existing agency's work, delivered as advice you can act on with whoever you like. - [SEO Audit for Manchester Businesses](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-audit-manchester): A full diagnostic of why your site isn't ranking: technical, on-page, off-page and AI visibility. Delivered as a prioritised fix list you own, whether you hire us afterwards or not. - [SEO Copywriting in Manchester](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-copywriting-manchester): Content written to rank and to convert. Researched against real search intent, written by people, and checked by someone who knows your business instead of generated at volume. - [White Label SEO for UK Agencies](https://whatisseo.co.uk/white-label-seo): SEO delivery behind your brand. For web design studios, marketing agencies and developers whose clients keep asking for SEO they do not want to build a team for. - [Looking for an SEO Agency Near You?](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-agency-near-me): Whether your SEO agency needs to be local is a fair question with an honest answer: mostly it does not matter, and here is exactly when it does. - [SEO Across the North West](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-north-west): One region, several genuinely different search markets: Manchester, Merseyside, Lancashire and Cheshire behave differently enough that a single regional strategy usually underperforms in all four. - [SEO Agency UK. How to Pick One, and What We Do Differently](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-agency-uk): There are thousands of SEO agencies in the UK and very little to separate them on a website. This page gives you the questions that do separate them, and answers all of them about ourselves first. - [SEO Expert: What the Title Should Mean](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-expert): Nobody licenses the word "expert" in this industry, so it gets used freely. Here is what genuine expertise looks like in practice, how to test for it in a conversation, and where ours sits. - [On-Page SEO: The Work You Control Completely](https://whatisseo.co.uk/on-page-seo): On-page SEO is everything on the page itself, which makes it the one pillar where nothing is outside your control and the feedback loop is fastest. - [AI SEO: Being the Answer, Not Just a Result](https://whatisseo.co.uk/ai-seo): AI assistants now answer a large share of the questions that used to become clicks. They still cite sources. This is the work of becoming one of those sources. - [SEO Strategy: Deciding What Not to Do](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-strategy): Most SEO fails on sequencing instead of execution. A strategy is mainly a decision about order, and about which opportunities you are deliberately going to ignore. - [SEO Marketing: Where Search Fits in the Rest of It](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-marketing): SEO is one channel among several, and it behaves differently from the others. This page covers what it is good at, what it is bad at, and how to size it against everything else you are spending on. - [B2B SEO: Low Volume, High Stakes](https://whatisseo.co.uk/b2b-seo): B2B search volumes look discouraging until you price a single deal. Twenty of the right visitors a month can carry a pipeline, which changes almost every decision about how the work is done. - [International SEO: Selling Across Borders Without Splitting Your Site](https://whatisseo.co.uk/international-seo): Expanding into new countries introduces problems that do not exist in a single market: duplicate content across near-identical pages, the wrong version ranking, and search behaviour that does not translate. - [Shopify SEO: Working With the Platform's Limits](https://whatisseo.co.uk/shopify-seo): Shopify handles a lot of SEO well and imposes a few fixed constraints that no amount of optimisation removes. Knowing which is which saves a great deal of wasted effort. - [WordPress SEO: Flexible Enough to Get Wrong](https://whatisseo.co.uk/wordpress-seo): WordPress can be configured for excellent SEO or catastrophically bad SEO, and the difference is rarely the plugin you chose. These are the settings and habits that decide it. ## Areas served In person across Manchester, Chester, Liverpool, Bolton, Stockport, Preston, Altrincham, Wigan, Rochdale. Remotely, from Manchester, across the rest of the UK including Brighton & Hove, London, Birmingham, Leeds, Glasgow, Sheffield, Bristol. See https://whatisseo.co.uk/areas. ## Guides (free, no email required) - [What Is SEO? The Complete Plain-English Guide (2026)](https://whatisseo.co.uk/what-is-seo): SEO is the work of making a website easy for search engines to find, understand and trust, so it appears when people search for what you offer. This guide explains exactly how that works, with diagrams, a step-by-step tutorial and honest timelines. - [SEO Meaning: What the Letters Stand For](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-meaning): SEO stands for search engine optimisation. This page gives the definition, the pronunciation, the terms that surround it, and the two other things "SEO" commonly means so you can tell which one you have found. - [The SEO Audit Checklist](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-audit-checklist): The exact checklist we run through on every audit: technical, on-page and off-page, so you can spot the obvious issues yourself before you ever talk to an agency. - [How We Do Keyword Research](https://whatisseo.co.uk/keyword-research-guide): The actual process. Not just "use a keyword tool", for finding search terms with real commercial value and a realistic chance of ranking. - [What Is GEO / AIO? AI Search Explained](https://whatisseo.co.uk/what-is-geo-aio): ChatGPT, Perplexity and Google's AI Overviews now answer questions directly. Here's what Generative Engine Optimisation and AI Optimisation mean, and why blocking the wrong bot in robots.txt can shut you out entirely. - [How Much Should SEO Cost in Manchester?](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-pricing-manchester): What drives SEO pricing, why "how much for SEO" has no single answer, and the questions worth asking before you sign anything. - [Freelance SEO Consultant vs. an Agency](https://whatisseo.co.uk/freelance-seo-vs-agency): Both can do good work. Here's the honest trade-off between hiring a freelance SEO consultant and hiring an agency, so you pick based on your actual situation, not a sales pitch. - [Want to Learn SEO Yourself? Start Here](https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-training-manchester): Not every business needs to hire this out. If you'd rather learn to do your own SEO, here's a realistic starting path, and where the line sits between DIY and "now you need help". - [Technical SEO Essentials](https://whatisseo.co.uk/technical-seo-essentials): The technical fundamentals that quietly cap your rankings if they're broken. Explained without needing a developer background to follow. ## Tools - [Free SEO + AI Visibility Audit](https://whatisseo.co.uk/free-seo-audit): A real, live scan of your site. On-page SEO, technical health, and whether AI systems like ChatGPT and Perplexity can even read you. Results in seconds, on this page, right now. ## Free tools (no signup, no limits) Forty tools at https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-tools — enter one URL and run any of them against a live page. Each has its own page: - [Keyword Density Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/keyword-density-checker): See which words and phrases your page actually emphasises, one, two and three words at a time. - [Word Count Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/word-count-checker): Count the visible words on any live page, with sentence and reading-time figures. - [Readability Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/readability-checker): Flesch Reading Ease and grade level for any live page. - [Text to HTML Ratio Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/text-to-html-ratio-checker): How much of your page payload is actual content versus markup. - [Keyword Placement Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/keyword-position-checker): Check whether your target keyword appears in the six placements that matter. - [Anchor Text Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/link-text-checker): Find links labelled "click here", "read more" and other text that describes nothing. - [Title Tag Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/title-tag-checker): Length, approximate pixel width, and whether Google will cut your title short. - [Meta Description Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/meta-description-checker): Check length and pixel width, and spot pages with no description at all. - [Heading Structure Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/heading-structure-checker): Full H1 to H6 outline, with multiple-H1 and skipped-level warnings. - [Image Alt Text Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/image-alt-checker): Find every image missing an alt attribute, and tell decorative from broken. - [Canonical Tag Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/canonical-tag-checker): Check the canonical URL, spot conflicts, and confirm it points where it should. - [Open Graph Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/open-graph-checker): Check the tags that control how your page looks when shared. - [Internal Link Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/internal-link-checker): Count unique internal and external links, and flag isolated pages. - [HTTP Header Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/http-header-checker): See the full response headers your server sends. - [Redirect Chain Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/redirect-checker): Trace every hop from the URL you enter to the page that finally loads. - [Robots.txt Tester](https://whatisseo.co.uk/robots-txt-tester): Fetch and parse robots.txt, and check nothing important is blocked. - [XML Sitemap Finder](https://whatisseo.co.uk/sitemap-finder): Locate your sitemap, confirm it parses, and count the URLs in it. - [Meta Robots Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/meta-robots-checker): Check whether a page is set to noindex, in the HTML or in the headers. - [HTTP Status Code Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/http-status-checker): Confirm what status code a URL really returns. - [Mobile Friendly Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/mobile-friendly-checker): Check the viewport tag and spot fixed widths that break on phones. - [Charset & Language Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/charset-doctype-checker): Check doctype, character encoding and the html lang attribute. - [Server Response Time Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/server-response-time-checker): Measure time to first byte from a real request. - [Page Size Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/page-size-checker): How heavy the HTML document is, and how many resources it pulls in. - [Compression Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/gzip-compression-checker): Check whether your server compresses responses with gzip or Brotli. - [Cache Header Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/cache-header-checker): Inspect Cache-Control, ETag, Expires and Last-Modified. - [Render Blocking Resources Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/render-blocking-checker): Find the scripts and stylesheets in your head that delay first paint. - [Page Resource Counter](https://whatisseo.co.uk/page-resource-counter): Inventory every image, script, stylesheet, iframe and third-party host. - [AI Crawler Access Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/ai-crawler-checker): Send a real request as GPTBot, ClaudeBot, PerplexityBot and Googlebot, and see what your server actually returns. - [llms.txt Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/llms-txt-checker): Check whether your site publishes an llms.txt, and read what it says. - [Schema Markup Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/schema-markup-checker): Extract every JSON-LD block, list the types, and catch invalid JSON. - [FAQ Schema Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/faq-schema-checker): Extract the question and answer pairs marked up on any page. - [Business Schema Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/business-schema-checker): Check your Organization or LocalBusiness markup, including sameAs profile links. - [AI Extractability Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/ai-readability-checker): Check whether your content is structured so an AI answer engine can quote it cleanly. - [Security Headers Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/security-header-checker): Check the six response headers that harden a site against common attacks. - [HTTPS Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/https-checker): Confirm HTTPS works, that HTTP redirects to it, and when the certificate expires. - [Mixed Content Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/mixed-content-checker): Find insecure http:// resources loading on a secure page. - [Accessibility Basics Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/accessibility-checker): Check the machine-checkable accessibility fundamentals. - [Cookie Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/cookie-checker): See which cookies a page sets before any consent is given. - [Favicon Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/favicon-checker): Check the favicon is declared and reachable, including the Apple touch icon. - [Social Preview Checker](https://whatisseo.co.uk/social-preview-checker): See the title, description and image that will appear when your link is shared. ## Complete site index https://whatisseo.co.uk/seo-knowledge lists every page on this site grouped by subject. ## Claims this site does not make No client counts, years in business, testimonials, review scores or case study results appear anywhere on this site, because the agency is new and has none to report honestly. Pricing pages quote UK market ranges and label them as market ranges, never as a rate card. Where keyword difficulty or search volume figures appear, they are only shown for keywords with verified data. ## Contact - [Contact](https://whatisseo.co.uk/contact) — hello@whatisseo.co.uk, we reply to every enquiry within 1 business day. - [About](https://whatisseo.co.uk/about)