SEO Services
We have seen the reports — the ones with green arrows and forty keywords in the top ten, sent every month to a business whose phone rings no more often than it did a year ago. It is entirely possible to win at SEO by every measure on the dashboard and lose at the only measure that pays wages.
A technical crawl covering indexing, rendering, architecture, speed and structured data · Keyword and search-intent mapping with an honest winnable-or-not assessment · On-page work across your commercial pages, including consolidating thin pages that compete with each other · Content production: service pages, cost guides, comparison content and FAQ sections
On this page
- Why do most SEO retainers disappoint?
- What does our SEO service include?
- Why does an agency that also builds software fix SEO faster?
- What drives the cost of SEO in the UK?
- What moves the cost up or down?
- What should you ask an SEO agency before you sign?
- What does SEO actually change, month by month?
- What do results look like, and how long do they take?
- Two honest caveats on timing
- Who have we done this for?
- Do you work with businesses outside the West Midlands?
Why do most SEO retainers disappoint?
Three failure modes account for nearly all of it: the agency targets terms that look impressive rather than terms that produce buyers, the recommendations never get implemented, and the traffic that does arrive lands on pages that cannot convert. We are set up to avoid all three — honest targeting, our own developers implementing the fixes, and conversion treated as part of the job rather than someone else's problem.
The wrong targets. A lot of agencies chase the term that sounds most impressive in a pitch rather than the one that produces buyers. “Digital marketing agency Birmingham” looks like the prize; in reality that result page is stacked with directory sites and long-established agencies, and even reaching page one delivers browsers rather than buyers. Meanwhile the cost-intent and problem-intent searches, where people are actually deciding, sit uncontested.
Recommendations that never get implemented. This is the big one. The agency produces a technical audit. The audit goes to your developer. Your developer is busy, or does not fully understand it, or disagrees with half of it. Six months later, most of it is still not done, and both sides blame the other. The retainer has bought a PDF.
Traffic that arrives at a website that cannot convert. You can double organic sessions and get exactly the same number of enquiries, because the pages people land on do not answer the question, do not establish trust and do not make it easy to get in touch. That is why we treat turning the visitors you already have into enquiries as part of the same engagement rather than a separate product.
What does our SEO service include?
Nine workstreams, delivered together rather than sold separately. A retainer covers the ones your site actually needs, in the order they will move the number.
- Technical SEO and Core Web Vitals. Crawling, indexing, rendering, site architecture, page speed, mobile usability, structured data and redirect hygiene. This is the foundation, and it is where we find the problems other agencies report but cannot resolve — rendering issues in particular, where a site's content is invisible in the raw HTML because it is drawn by JavaScript after load. We have fixed exactly that problem, including on our own website; a full technical SEO audit is where it gets diagnosed.
- Keyword and search-intent research. Not a list of a thousand keywords. A map of the searches your buyers actually make, grouped by what they are trying to do, with an honest assessment of which you can realistically win and which are locked up by directories or national brands. That assessment saves more budget than any tactic we could apply.
- On-page optimisation. Titles, meta descriptions, headings, content structure, internal linking and page architecture across your commercial pages. A very common finding is a set of thin service pages competing with each other for the same term. Consolidating them often produces more movement than months of new content.
- Content and landing pages. Service pages with enough depth to compete, cost guides that answer what buyers actually type, comparison content for people still deciding, and FAQ sections built from real questions. We write in your voice, in British English, without keyword stuffing — search engines got good at detecting that a long time ago, and so did readers.
- Local search and Google Business Profile. Profile optimisation, service areas, categories, review strategy, citation consistency and genuinely local landing pages. For most businesses with a physical location, local search and Google Business Profile work is the highest-return work available.
- AI search and answer engines. Your customers increasingly ask ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity or Google's AI overviews before they search normally. Getting cited there depends on entity clarity, question-shaped content, structured data and — critically — whether an AI crawler can read your site at all. Many cannot execute JavaScript, so a client-rendered site is invisible to them, which is the whole argument for optimising for answer engines.
- Authority and digital PR. Citations, directories, trade and chamber presence, and digital PR where there is a genuine story. This is slow work and there is no legitimate shortcut. We do not buy links, and we would encourage you to ask any agency that offers cheap link packages exactly where those links come from.
- Analytics, tracking and conversion. Conversion tracking that actually works, GA4 events for forms, calls, emails and WhatsApp, Search Console configured properly, and conversions imported so you can see which searches produce enquiries rather than which produce visits. Surprisingly often, this is broken or absent when we arrive, which means nobody has been able to judge any of the previous work.
- Monthly reporting. Enquiries first. Then calls, forms, organic sessions, impressions, keyword movement and Google Business Profile actions. What we did, what it changed, what we are doing next. Written so you can read it in ten minutes without a glossary.
Why does an agency that also builds software fix SEO faster?
Because it does not have to ask anyone's permission. Most SEO agencies can diagnose but not treat: they find the problem, write it up, and hand it to whoever built your site. We build websites and business software, so the fix and the finding sit in the same backlog.
Saurav Dhoju, our full-stack developer, works alongside Bikram Sah, our SEO specialist. When the audit finds that your pages are rendered client-side, or your canonical tags are wrong, or your product templates are generating duplicate titles at scale, we do not send you a ticket. We fix it.
This matters most in exactly the cases where SEO is hardest: JavaScript-heavy sites, e-commerce with thousands of generated URLs, custom platforms, and applications where the fix requires changing the software rather than the content. If your site is one of those, the difference between an agency that can only advise and one that can implement is usually the difference between a plan and a result — which is why SEO and website development are quoted together here, and why custom software work is available when the fix lives inside the application.
What drives the cost of SEO in the UK?
“SEO” describes wildly different amounts of work, which is why two quotes for it can look nothing alike. The honest question is not what the number is but what is actually included each month — how much technical implementation, how much content, how many locations or product categories, how much authority building. The bands below are how most businesses place themselves.
| Plan | Suited to |
|---|---|
| Foundation | A single-location local business. Google Business Profile, citations, on-page work on your core pages, monthly reporting. |
| Growth | A business competing regionally. Adds content production, technical implementation and wider keyword coverage. |
| Competitive | Competitive sectors or city-level competition. Adds authority building, conversion work and deeper technical engineering. |
| Custom | Multi-location, e-commerce, or platforms needing engineering as well as optimisation. |
What moves the cost up or down?
Five things decide where in the bands you land. None of them is how badly you want to rank.
- How competitive your sector is
- Whether your website needs technical work before optimisation is worth doing
- How much content needs producing, and who writes it
- How many locations or product categories you are targeting
- Whether you have existing analytics or we are starting from nothing
What should you ask an SEO agency before you sign?
Ask what happens in month one, who writes the content, how links are built, what you keep if you leave, and what they will refuse to do. Ten questions follow. They are written to help you judge any agency, including this one — if a competitor answers them better, hire the competitor.
- What exactly will you do in the first month, and what will you have to touch on the site to do it? A good answer is specific and unglamorous — indexing and rendering fixes, titles and internal links, conversion tracking repaired where it is broken — and it names who implements each item. A vague answer about research and strategy usually means month one produces a document. Ask them to talk you through what a technical audit actually finds.
- Who writes the content, and will anyone who understands my trade read it before it goes live? A good answer names a person, explains how they learn a business they did not previously know, and offers to show you something written for a client in an unfamiliar field. If the samples all sound the same, assume the words were generated and lightly tidied.
- Do you build links, and if so, where do they come from? A good answer describes citations, directories, trade bodies, chambers and digital PR, and can describe the kind of site each link would sit on. Cheap packages, blog networks and guest-post schemes breach Google’s guidelines and risk a manual action. Reluctance to name sources is itself the answer.
- What happens to the work if I leave? A good answer is that you keep all of it — pages, content, the Google Business Profile, the tracking setup — because it was built in your accounts and on your domain, with no buyout fee and nothing to license back. If any part of it lives in the agency’s account, find that out now rather than at the end.
- Which reports do I get, and can I see the raw numbers myself? A good answer gives you administrator access to your own Search Console and Analytics from the start, so every figure in a report can be checked against the source. If you cannot open the data yourself, you are not reading a report, you are reading a claim.
- What will you refuse to do? A good answer has real examples: no bought links, no doorway pages for towns nobody serves, no thin location pages, no guarantee of a ranking nobody controls. An agency with no refusals has no standards, and where it draws the line on location pages and service areas tells you most of what you need to know.
- How will you tell me when it is not working, and what would make you say so? A good answer names the measure and the moment: which number has to move, against what, and what changes if it does not. Twelve consecutive months of encouraging progress is not reporting. Ask what they told the last client they advised to stop.
- Would you tell me if search is the wrong channel for my situation? A good answer sometimes argues against a retainer — thin demand, a market where nobody searches, an urgent need better served by running ads while the organic work matures. Have the comparison of search against paid clicks before you commit, not six months in.
- What decides what this costs, and what would push it up? A good answer lists competitiveness, technical debt, how much content is produced, how many locations or categories are in scope, and whether analytics already exist — and it changes when the scope changes. What SEO retainers cost per month in the UK sets out the shape. Anyone quoting before looking at the site is guessing.
- Should this be an agency at all, rather than a freelancer or a hire? A good answer engages with the question instead of dismissing it, because the right shape depends on how much work there is and who owns it internally. Comparing a freelancer, an agency and an in-house hire is the decision sitting underneath the brief.
What does SEO actually change, month by month?
Early work changes the site, not the traffic graph. Foundations have to be crawled before anything moves, content takes time to be indexed and ranked, and authority is the slowest part of all. The last column below is the one most reports leave out: what you can honestly see at each stage.
| Stage | What gets done | What you can actually see yet |
|---|---|---|
| Foundations | Crawling, indexing and rendering fixes, redirect hygiene, page speed, structured data, and conversion tracking repaired where it is broken. At this stage the site changes far more than the content does. | Almost nothing in traffic, and that is the honest expectation. What exists at the end of it is a site that can be read properly and a measurement setup that will tell the truth later. A graph rising here is noise, not progress. |
| On-page and structure | Titles, headings, content structure, internal linking and page architecture across the commercial pages, plus consolidating thin pages that were competing with each other for the same term. | Impressions in Search Console move before clicks do. Rankings wobble as pages are re-crawled and re-evaluated, which looks alarming on a dashboard and usually is not. Still very little in enquiries. |
| Content | Service pages with enough depth to compete, cost and comparison guides, and answers to the questions buyers actually type — written so the page also turns a visit into an enquiry once someone lands on it. | Long-tail and low-competition terms first, and a handful of enquiries from pages nobody would have predicted. The terms you actually care about commercially are still nowhere, and that is normal. |
| Authority | Citations, directories, trade and chamber presence, and digital PR where there is a genuine story. Slow, unglamorous work with no legitimate shortcut available. | Movement on the competitive terms, usually last of all. This is also the stage where the earlier targeting either compounds or reveals that it was aimed at the wrong searches. |
| Compounding | Expanding what is gaining traction, rewriting what is not, and keeping the answer-engine and structured data side current as AI results take more of the page. | Enquiries, rather than rankings, finally become the number worth reading. By this stage the reporting can answer the only question that mattered at the beginning. |
What do results look like, and how long do they take?
Impressions usually move within four to eight weeks, rankings on realistic terms between months two and four, and enquiry-level results between months three and six. We would rather set expectations you can hold us to than sell you a timeline that makes the first three months feel like failure.
| Timeframe | What you should expect |
|---|---|
| Weeks 1–4 | Audit, strategy, and the technical foundations. You will see very little in traffic terms, and anyone showing you a graph going up in month one is showing you noise. |
| Weeks 4–8 | Fixes crawled and re-indexed. Impressions in Search Console are usually the first honest signal that something has changed. |
| Months 2–4 | Ranking movement on less competitive and long-tail terms. Local and Google Business Profile improvements often land earlier than website ones. |
| Months 3–6 | Enquiry-level results on most projects. Competitive terms take longer. |
| Months 6–12 | Compounding, as authority builds and content matures. |
Two honest caveats on timing
Local search in a thin market can move considerably faster than this. And a site with serious technical problems may show nothing at all until those are resolved, then move quickly once they are.
Who have we done this for?
We have delivered SEO, websites and business systems for clients including AOne Biz, Company Services Nepal, Delta Hospital & Research Center, Aama Jewellers, Himalayan Clean Energy and RM Agrotech, across professional services, healthcare, retail, energy and agriculture.
Our delivery record to date is international rather than UK-based, and we will not pretend otherwise. We are building a UK client base now, and we would rather show you live working sites we have built and introduce you to the people who built them than dress up anonymous sector labels as case studies.
The point
Our delivery record to date is international rather than UK-based, and we will not pretend otherwise.
Do you work with businesses outside the West Midlands?
Yes, across the UK and beyond. The work runs remotely by default — a crawl, a rewrite, a tracking fix and a reporting call do not require anybody to be in the room. Being registered in Oldbury matters if you want to sit down together; it does not decide who we can work with.
What changes with distance is the shape of the work rather than the arrangement. A single-location business competing in its own town needs something quite different from a national retailer or a firm selling into the whole of the UK, and that is the first conversation to have. If it helps to know who would be handling it, the people who would do the work are named rather than hidden behind an account manager, and a call to scope it properly is the quickest way to find out whether it is a fit.
The point
The work runs remotely by default — a crawl, a rewrite, a tracking fix and a reporting call do not require anybody to be in the room.
How We Work
Audit
Technical crawl, on-page review, content and intent analysis, Google Business Profile check, analytics validation, and a look at your three closest genuine competitors. You get a written report with issues prioritised by impact, not a list of 300 warnings from a tool.
Strategy
A keyword map, a page-by-page plan, and a roadmap in the order things should actually happen — technical foundations first, because content published on a broken site does not work.
Fix
Implementation, by us. Technical work, page rewrites, structured data, internal linking, Google Business Profile.
Build
New content and pages against the roadmap: service pages, cost guides, local pages, FAQ sections.
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View Case StudyFrequently Asked Questions
How long does SEO take to work?
Impressions usually move within four to eight weeks of technical fixes being crawled. Rankings on realistic terms follow between months two and four, and enquiry-level results between months three and six, compounding after that. Local search can be faster. A site with serious technical problems shows nothing until those are fixed. Anyone promising results in weeks is guessing.
How much do your SEO services cost and what is included?
Cost is decided by how competitive your sector is, whether the site needs technical work before optimisation is worth doing, how much content we produce, how many locations or product categories you are targeting, and whether analytics already exist. Every plan includes technical work, on-page optimisation, reporting and implementation rather than recommendations alone. We scope it before quoting.
Which is better for my business, SEO or PPC?
They answer different questions. PPC gives traffic today, stops when you stop paying, and is the fastest way to test whether a market responds. SEO is slower, compounds, and keeps working after the spend ends. Need enquiries this month, start with PPC. Building over years, start with SEO. Most businesses run both, with ads covering what organic cannot win.
Do you work with businesses outside the West Midlands?
Yes, across the UK and beyond. The work runs remotely by default — audits, implementation, content and reporting calls need nobody in the room. Being registered in Oldbury helps if you want to meet in person, and it is not a requirement. Clients elsewhere get the same people and the same process as clients down the road.
What happens if I stop the retainer — do I lose the rankings?
Not immediately. Technical fixes, content and structural improvements stay in place, and rankings usually hold for a period before eroding as competitors keep working. What stops is the compounding. You keep everything we built — pages, content, the Google Business Profile, the analytics setup — and there is no buyout fee.
Do you guarantee first-page rankings?
No. Nobody can, because nobody controls Google's index, and an agency guaranteeing rankings is either targeting terms with no competition or relying on you not checking. What we will commit to is a defined scope, implementation rather than recommendations alone, monthly reporting you can read, and an honest upfront view of which terms are realistically winnable.
Who actually does the work?
Bikram Sah leads SEO and Saurav Dhoju handles development, working with Bhupen Acharya and Pravin Pathak. We are based at 14 Chester Rise, Oldbury, B68 0SS. You deal with the people doing the work, not an account manager relaying messages.
What reporting do I get and how often?
A monthly report leading with enquiries, calls and form submissions, followed by organic sessions, impressions, keyword movement and Google Business Profile activity, then what we did and what is next. If your conversion tracking is not working when we arrive, fixing it comes first — otherwise none of the reporting means anything.
Do you buy links?
No. Paid link schemes breach Google's guidelines and put the site at risk of a manual action, which is a much more expensive problem than slow growth. We build authority through citations, directories, chamber and trade presence, and digital PR where there is a real story to tell.
Let's Build Something That Matters.
Tell us what you're trying to achieve and we'll help you find the right solution.