SEO for small business UK: are you being ripped off?
You paid for SEO. You got a report. You nodded along. The phone is still quiet. This is how to work out whether the work behind the report is real, using checks you can run yourself without taking anyone’s word for it.
We are an SEO agency writing about SEO agencies
Weigh that accordingly. An article telling you your current provider might be letting you down, written by someone who would happily take the work, is not neutral and it would be daft to pretend otherwise.
So this is built around checks you can run without us. Every one of them can be done in a browser, in a few minutes, using your own site and your own reports. If the answers come back fine, your provider is doing their job and you can stop reading.
Six things worth a second look
None of these is proof of anything on its own. Two or three together is a conversation worth having.
- Link counts without link names“Fifteen backlinks built this month” tells you nothing. Ask for the URLs. If the answer is a spreadsheet you cannot check, that is the answer.
- No changes to your actual site copyContent is the bulk of most SEO work. If nothing on your website has been rewritten in six months, ask what the retainer has been buying.
- Reports built on impressionsImpressions are the easiest number to make go up and the least connected to revenue. Ask for clicks, enquiries and calls instead.
- Deliverables you cannot picture“Ongoing optimisation” and “continuous improvement” are not deliverables. “Rewrote these four pages, fixed these nine broken links” is.
- No access to your own accountsYou should hold the logins to your Google Business Profile, Search Console and Analytics. If your agency holds them and you do not, that is leverage, not convenience.
- Nobody has mentioned Search ConsoleIt is free, it is the primary source of truth, and any provider not working from it is guessing.
Quantity is easy to sell and easy to fake
A backlink is another site vouching for yours. A link from a trade body, a supplier, a local paper or a genuine industry publication carries weight because someone with something to lose chose to point at you.
A link from an unrelated forum in another country carries none. It is trivially cheap to create, which is exactly why “we will build you five backlinks a month” is such a common line. The target gets hit. The links do nothing.
Two corrections to what is usually said about this, both of which matter if you are deciding what to do next.
- Junk links are usually a money problem, not a ranking problemGoogle is now fairly good at ignoring links it does not rate rather than punishing you for them. So the damage is normally that you paid for something worthless, rather than that your site has been harmed. That is still worth being angry about.
- Nobody can delete a link on a site they do not ownIf an agency offers to remove bad links, what they can actually do is ask the site owner, and failing that, disavow them in Search Console. Anyone promising deletion is either being loose with language or does not know how it works.
Google’s own guidance on link spam is public and worth five minutes of anyone’s time. It treats link schemes as a risk to be managed, not a service to be bought.
What replaces them is slower and duller: an accurate Google Business Profile, consistent name, address and phone details across the handful of directories people actually use, and a genuine presence wherever your industry already talks to itself. That is housekeeping rather than authority-building, and it should be sold as such.
Five checks you can run in ten minutes
Technical SEO is the plumbing. You do not see it, and if it is broken nothing else works. It is also the easiest area to charge for and not deliver, because most business owners have no way to verify it.
You do. All of these are free and none of them require any technical knowledge.
- Is your site secure?Load it and look at the address bar. If the browser says “Not Secure”, there is no SSL certificate. This is a fifteen-minute fix at most hosts and there is no excuse for it being outstanding.
- Are your page titles unique?Run a few of your pages through our meta title and description checker. If your service pages all share the same title, or none mention where you work, that is on-page basics undone.
- Does it work on a phone?Open your site on your own mobile. Text running off the screen, buttons you cannot press, or anything you have to pinch to read is a real problem, and most of your visitors are seeing it.
- Are there broken links?Our broken link checker will scan your site and list anything pointing at a page that no longer exists.
- Is Google actually seeing your pages?In Search Console, open the Pages report. It tells you what is indexed and what is not, and why. If pages you care about are excluded, that is the single most useful thing you will learn all week.
How to tell whether a human wrote it
Blogs are the cheapest genuinely effective thing a small business can do. They are also where outsourced, unedited content is most likely to turn up, repackaged under a British-sounding agency name.
I spent ten years as the owner and editor of a magazine, so I have read a lot of copy that somebody else was paid to write. The giveaways are usually geographic. Freelancing before this business existed, I lost count of the drafts where Birmingham had quietly become Birmingham, Alabama, and Lincoln had ended up in Nebraska. Nobody had caught it, because nobody had read it.
American spelling is the other common tell. Center, customize, sidewalk, gotten, faucet, elevator. A UK plumber’s blog referring to bathroom remodels was not written by anyone who has met a UK plumber.
Before anything goes live on your site, four checks:
- Are the details right?Business name, phone number, address and towns served, matched against your Google Business Profile. Inconsistent details across your own site work against you in local search.
- Is it British English?Optimise, favour, licence, enquire. And the places should be in the right country.
- Does it sound like your industry?A solicitor’s blog should not read like a lifestyle magazine, and a trades blog should not read like an American home improvement site.
- Is there anything only you could have written?A real job, a real problem, a real decision. This is the part that cannot be outsourced, and it is the part that makes the piece worth publishing.
A properly written and checked blog post takes a couple of hours. If someone is producing them for a fiver, arithmetic tells you what happened.
Five questions for whoever is doing your SEO
Including us. There are no trick questions here and any competent provider will answer all five without hesitating.
- What did you change on my website last month?Specific pages, specific changes. Not activities, outcomes you can look at.
- Which searches are actually sending me visitors?They should be able to open Search Console and show you, not describe it.
- What have you decided not to do, and why?Anyone who says everything is a priority has not thought about it.
- Who owns my accounts?The answer should be you.
- What would make you tell me to stop paying?Every engagement should have a point at which it stops being worth the money. Someone who cannot name theirs has not considered the possibility.
What honest reporting looks like
Paramount Space Cleaning in Coventry started from no visibility in October 2025. They now hold position one for “deep cleaning coventry”, have 55 keywords on page one, and traced a £7,000 commercial contract back to organic search.
The caveat we always attach: that is one business, in one city, in a competitive but not brutal sector, over seven months. It is not a projection for anybody else, and Nora approved every figure in it before we published.
Simon & Lisa Batchelor run Get Your Website Seen. Simon spent ten years as owner and editor of a magazine, then built and sold Commerce Computers Ltd, a trade computer supplier that traded online as shop4it.co.uk. So we have been on the buying side of marketing that did not work, which is most of why this site reads the way it does. We take six or seven UK small businesses at a time, deliberately. Every figure published here belongs to a client who approved it.
Want a second opinion on what you are paying for?
The free audit covers the technical checks above, your page titles, your content and your Google Business Profile. It is written by a person, it is lead generation and we are not pretending otherwise, and you get it without a call first.
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