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.
Businesses anywhere in the UK who have shortlisted a few agencies and cannot tell them apart. Every SEO website says the same six things, so the useful comparison is not what an agency claims but what it will commit to in writing.
Ask five questions and compare the answers instead of the websites. What will you do in month one? Where do links come from? Who writes the content? Will the Analytics and Search Console accounts be in my name? What is the minimum term and what happens if I leave? Agencies that are comfortable answering all five tend to be the ones doing the work properly.
Small-business retainers commonly start in the low hundreds per month, mid-market work runs into the low thousands, and competitive national campaigns go higher. London carries a premium of roughly a third over regional rates for comparable work. Those are market figures, not our rate card. We quote after an audit because the same monthly fee buys very different amounts of work depending on the state of your site.
Not by location. London has more agencies, so it has more good ones and more bad ones, and rates run higher because salaries and offices cost more there. Ranking work is identical wherever it is done. Judge on process and references.
Most of our work is remote and we take clients anywhere in the UK. We are in Manchester and will travel across the North West when a visit earns its keep. See areas we serve, which separates the two honestly.
Small enough that you deal with the people doing the work rather than an account manager relaying messages, and large enough to run technical, content and local work in parallel rather than one after the other. The trade-off is real: we take on fewer clients at once, and we will tell you when we are at capacity instead of accepting the work and stretching.
Two decades in search, trading as our own SEO business under the name SEO-Professional.co.uk. WhatIsSEO is that same business renamed, not a startup, and the Google profile carries 45 reviews at a 5.0 average. Run the free audit and judge the thinking directly.
In practice, three things: what they prioritise first, whether a person or a tool writes the content, and whether the reporting can be independently checked in your own Search Console. Everything else on an agency website is decoration.
In-house makes sense once you have enough search volume and content cadence to keep someone busy, which for most SMEs is further off than they expect. An agency covers several disciplines at once without a salary commitment. We are happy to give you an honest read on which side of that line you sit.
No. Nobody controls Google, so a guarantee is either meaningless or it is a promise to target keywords so uncontested that ranking for them proves nothing. Treat the offer itself as information about the agency.
Method transfers between industries more than agencies like to admit, so we do not restrict ourselves to a list. Where industry knowledge does matter is content, and that expertise comes from you. We draft, you correct the parts only you know.
Yes, and it is worth auditing what was done before rather than building on top of it. Previous link building in particular can carry risk that a new agency inherits without knowing.
Run the free audit. It takes under a minute, the report is emailed to you in full, and you are free to take it to any agency on your shortlist including the other ones.
Everything below is multiplication on real rates from our own keyword export for this market. No industry averages, no projections, and no claim about how much traffic you would win, because that depends on your site.
Cost per click × 1,000. The same thousand visits arriving organically cost nothing per click, which is the whole of the difference. Source: Semrush keyword data, Manchester SEO/marketing cluster, Aug 2026.
The four figures above are published third-party research and are cited so you can check them. Everything else on this page is our own data.
Everything on this page is teachable. A full day in a class of three or four is £499, or £999 with the work implemented on your own site while you watch. If you can give it an hour or two a day afterwards, that is usually the cheaper route.
Ask me anything about SEO, or about the tools, the training or what we do.
If your problem is one you can fix yourself with the free tools, I will say so.
Where I am not certain, I will say so rather than guess, and Imran will follow it up.
Answers are generated and can be wrong. For anything that matters, call 0161 315 1152.