Local SEO services. Win the map pack.

Most UK small businesses pay between £300 and £800 a month for local SEO, and agencies at the top end of that range are usually charging for reporting rather than work. Ours covers the Google Business Profile, review generation, local schema, citation consistency and the on-page work, with thirty days' notice and no twelve-month lock-in. We give you the figure on the audit call, once we have seen what your market actually demands.

Normal SEO competes for the blue links. Local SEO competes for the map pack, the three business listings that sit above them on any search with local intent. They are won differently. Blue links respond to content, links and technical work. The map pack responds to proximity, review volume and velocity, category accuracy and how complete and active your Google Business Profile is. For most service businesses the map pack is worth more, because it appears higher and carries a phone number.

A local SEO package should cover four things, and most of the cheap ones cover one. Google Business Profile management: categories, services, opening hours, photos and posts kept current. Reviews: a system that actually asks, plus replies to every one. Local on-page: location pages, local schema, internal links pointing at the pages you want in the pack. Citations: your name, address and phone identical everywhere they appear. Ours bundles all four into one monthly with no separate setup fee, and we tell you what sits in each level before you are asked to decide anything.

A consultant is usually cheaper and tells you what to do. An agency is dearer and does it. The failure mode with a consultant is a good audit that nobody ever implements, which is the most common way local SEO money gets wasted. The failure mode with an agency is paying for account management rather than work. Ask one question either way: who physically edits the Google Business Profile and writes the pages, and how often. Here it is David, weekly, and you can check the work whenever you like because the profile stays in your ownership.

Profile and category fixes can move things within weeks, because you are correcting signals Google already reads rather than building new ones. Review volume takes months, because it depends on real customers responding at a realistic rate. Anyone promising a map pack position by a fixed date is guessing. We report on enquiries rather than positions for exactly this reason.

Not always, and we will tell you before you pay rather than after. Proximity to the searcher is a ranking factor nobody can engineer away. If a competitor sits in the town centre and you are six miles out, there are searches you will not win from that postcode, and no amount of retainer changes it. What we can change is everything else: the profile, the reviews, the categories, the service areas, the site behind it. Where the geography is against you, we say so.

Yes, and it is often more important. A service area business can hide its address and still appear across the towns it covers, which is how trades, clinics and contractors compete without a high street unit. The profile has to be set up as a service area business from the start though. Getting that wrong, or listing a residential address publicly, causes suspensions that take weeks to appeal.

It matters for one specific thing and almost nothing else. Proximity is a genuine ranking factor in the map pack, so an agency that understands your town's pack, who holds it and on what review count, is worth more than one that does not. What location does not affect is the work: on-page, technical and content SEO run identically whether the person doing them is ten minutes away or two hundred miles. So the useful version of "SEO company near me" is not who is nearest, it is who has actually looked at the search results in your town. Ask any local SEO specialist you shortlist to tell you the current map pack leader for your main term and their review count. Anyone who has done the work will know it.

Enough to sit level with whoever currently holds the map pack in your town, which is a number you can count rather than guess. In Leeds web design the pack leader holds eighty-four. In a village trade it might be twelve. We check the real figure for your category and postcode at the start, tell you the gap, and build a review routine you can keep up rather than a one-off push that stalls.