SEO in Yorkshire. Nine markets, not one.

The technical work is the same everywhere: a site Google can crawl, pages that answer what people search, and a Google Business Profile that is complete and active. What is genuinely regional is the competition, and Yorkshire is not one competitive market. When we last checked the map pack for this search, the businesses holding it in Sheffield had a median of 88 reviews and the top of the band was 210. In Wakefield the median was 9. That is the same county, the same search, and two completely different jobs: one is a two-year review-building programme, the other is winnable this quarter by any business that asks its customers properly. An agency selling "Yorkshire SEO" as one package is selling a plan built for an average that no actual business trades in.

Across the county most small businesses are quoted between £300 and £1,000 a month, and the spread has more to do with how the agency is structured than with how much work gets done. Ours is a single monthly with local SEO and Google Business Profile management inside it rather than sold alongside it, thirty days notice and no setup fee. You can see what sits in each tier before you speak to anyone.

Both descriptions fit what happens here. David does the work himself, which is what people mean by a consultant, inside a studio that also builds and hosts the site the SEO runs on, which is what people mean by a company. The useful question is not the label. It is whether the person who sold you the retainer is the person who edits your Google Business Profile, and how often they touch it. Ask that of everyone you shortlist and the shortlist gets shorter quickly.

The studio is in Leeds and the client list is mostly Yorkshire businesses: a concrete supplier, roofers in Headingley, scaffolders, a civils contractor, a fifty-year greengrocer in Holmfirth. It matters more than it sounds, because the map pack leans on genuine proximity. We can tell you which part of a search in your town favours a business with premises there, and we would rather do that on the first call than after you have paid for three months.

There are pages for Leeds, Sheffield, Bradford, York, Harrogate, Wakefield, Huddersfield, Halifax and Doncaster, each with the live numbers for that market rather than the same page with a name swapped. Work happens outside those too. The list reflects where we have measured the search results properly, not the limit of where we will take a client.

It splits, and the split is worth understanding before you buy. Google Business Profile and map pack work can move inside four to eight weeks, because you are correcting signals Google already holds rather than building new ones. Organic positions in a competitive city like Leeds or Sheffield take six months upwards. In the softer markets it is faster. Anybody offering one timescale for a whole county has not looked at the county.

Yes, and South Yorkshire is a good example of why the county gets treated as separate markets rather than one. Sheffield and Doncaster both have their own pages built on their own measured search results, and they are not remotely the same job: Sheffield is one of the harder map packs in the region, Doncaster is one of the softer ones. Rotherham and Barnsley are worked as part of the same programme without a page each, because a page for a town we have not measured properly is padding. If you are searching for an SEO agency in South Yorkshire, ask any shortlist which of those four they have actually looked at the results for.

Less than London and more than most of the north, but the county average is a useless number. Leeds and Sheffield are genuinely competitive, with established agencies and review counts in the hundreds. Wakefield, Halifax and Doncaster are not, and a business in one of those towns is frequently three or four decent reviews and a properly filled Google Business Profile away from the map pack. The mistake is buying a plan priced for Leeds when you trade in Halifax, or a plan priced for Halifax when you are trying to win Leeds.