Local SEO consultant in London

What I work on

Why local search in London needs its own approach

The ranking model is the same everywhere. What changes in London is how much of everything there is in a small space, and how the city is divided up.

Density, and distance from the searcher

Google measures distance from the person searching.¹ In a market town with three accountants, all three can show for most of the town. In central London there can be dozens within a mile, and in my experience the businesses shown change noticeably within a few streets. That is why I measure visibility on a grid across your catchment, and why a ranking report taken at your office tells you little about the borough next door.

Thirty-three local authorities, and twenty service areas

Greater London is 32 boroughs plus the City of London.¹² A Business Profile can list up to 20 service areas, set by city, postcode or another type of area, and the whole area should sit within about two hours' drive of where the business is based.¹³ A plumber or cleaner covering the whole city cannot list every borough, and does not need to. List the areas you genuinely take work in, or London itself, and let the website show the work across the rest.

Virtual offices and co-working addresses

Plenty of London companies use a registered office or a virtual office address they never work from. Google's guidelines exclude virtual offices from Business Profiles, and an office in a co-working space only qualifies if it has signage, receives customers during business hours and is staffed during those hours.² It is one of the first things I check, because a profile built on the wrong address puts everything else at risk.

How Londoners name places

People search London by neighbourhood, postcode district and nearest station as well as by borough, and those do not line up. Clapham Junction station is in Battersea, in Wandsworth, while most of Clapham is in Lambeth. Pages and profiles that use the names your customers use, at the level they use them, match more of the searches that matter than a list of boroughs does.

Directories, chains and national brands

For many London searches the organic results are full of directories, review platforms and national chains with far bigger sites. Competing with them on the broadest terms is slow and expensive. The specific searches are usually more winnable: the service plus the neighbourhood, the particular problem, and the questions customers ask before they book.

Branches across several boroughs

A group with branches in Camden, Croydon and Canary Wharf is competing in three different local markets. Each branch needs its own profile, its own page and its own line in the reporting, because a group total can look healthy while one branch is invisible. I have written about why group reporting hides failing branches.

Who I work with

From 2014 to 2021 I worked freelance for small businesses: trades, restaurants, clinics and shops, where every pound spent is noticed. Since then the work has grown to include groups with many locations and the teams that run them.

How we would work together

There is no package or price list. Every project starts with a conversation about the business and the problem, and if I am not the right person for it, I will say so. The work usually takes one of four shapes.

What I will not do

Some local SEO tactics work for a while and then cost the business its profile, or break the law. These are off the table.

• Promise a position. Nobody can guarantee a first-place ranking on Google,¹⁴ and the map pack changes with where the searcher is standing.
• Add keywords or a location to your business name on the profile.²
• Set up a profile at an address you do not work from.
• Offer rewards for reviews, filter out unhappy customers before asking, or write reviews on anyone's behalf.³
• Build pages for places where you have nothing to say.
• Report rankings without saying what they brought in.

What local SEO costs in London

I do not publish prices, because the work varies too much. A single café with a tidy profile needs a fraction of what a clinic group with eight branches does. The cost depends on how many locations there are, how crowded your category is in your part of London, how much your own team or developer can take on, and whether the site needs rebuilding.

For a sense of the wider market, Ahrefs polled 439 SEO providers for a study last updated in August 2024. Local SEO averaged $1,557 a month, against $2,917 for SEO in general, and $75 to $100 was the most common hourly rate for local work.¹⁵ The figures are in dollars and the study gives no UK breakdown, so treat them as a rough guide to how pricing is structured.

When you compare quotes, ask who will do the work, what will be reported each month, and what happens to the profile and pages if you stop. Google's own advice on hiring an SEO suggests asking for examples of past work and about experience in your industry and your city.¹⁴