London search results are crowded with national brands, directories and competitors with in-house marketing teams, so the work has to be chosen carefully rather than done in bulk. We handle the technical, on-page, content, local and link work for London businesses, make the changes ourselves and report from your own Search Console.
Thanks, that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will reply as soon as they can.
Book a time that suits you, or send a message on WhatsApp.
2020
Building since
1,000+
Clients served
UK
Registered company
4.6/5
Rated on Clutch
Quick answer
SEO in London is the same craft as anywhere else, applied to a harder market. Search engines still need to crawl, render and index your pages. Each page still has to answer what a buyer is actually asking. The site still needs links and mentions from other websites before it is trusted. What changes in the capital is how many capable competitors want the same results, and how finely those results are divided by place.
Two things set London apart. The first is crowding: for many commercial searches, page one is shared between national brands, comparison sites, directories and established firms with their own marketing staff. The second is geography. Plenty of people search by neighbourhood rather than by city, typing Clapham, Islington or a postcode district instead of London, and the map results they see depend on where they are when they search. A plan built only around the word London misses the way many buyers actually search.
For most businesses that means starting where the return is clearest. Technical faults that keep existing pages out of Google's index come first, then service pages that do not match how buyers describe their problem, then the Google Business Profile and area pages for the parts of London you genuinely serve. Broad terms for the whole city come later, if at all, and we will tell you plainly when a budget does not support chasing them.
A point about us, stated plainly: SpiderHunts has a registered office in London and a remote team. Nobody works at that address and there is nothing to visit. The work runs over video calls, shared documents and a named contact. If you want an agency you can meet in person every month, we are not the right choice, and it is better to know that now.
What we do
Six kinds of work. Few London sites need all of them at once, and the audit decides the order. If you are comparing one SEO company in London with another, ask which of these each one does itself and which it passes to a subcontractor or back to you.
Crawling, indexing, rendering, page speed, site structure and migrations. Redesigns are common, and a relaunch without a complete redirect map is a frequent cause of sudden traffic drops. We write the fixes and check them after release.
Titles, headings, internal links and page structure, matched to the words buyers use. For many London firms that means a separate page for each service rather than one long page listing a dozen, so each can answer its own search properly.
Fewer, better pages, chosen by what buyers search for and what your site can realistically win. National publishers own the broad guides, so useful content for a London business is usually specific: your service, your area and your buyers' real questions.
Google Business Profile categories and service areas, a steady routine for reviews, consistent business details across directories, and area pages for the parts of London you actually cover rather than a list of every borough.
Earning links and mentions that make sense for your business: trade and professional bodies, suppliers and partners, business groups and press coverage where there is a genuine story. Where a site has a history of bought links, we review those before building anything new.
Google's AI Overviews and assistants such as ChatGPT now answer some questions before anyone clicks. The groundwork is shared with SEO: crawlable pages, direct answers and business facts that agree everywhere. Every engagement covers that groundwork; if AI visibility is your main goal, our London AI SEO page goes into it properly.
How London searches
London behaves less like one market than like many overlapping ones. A search for a dentist, a solicitor or an electrician returns map results drawn mostly from businesses close to the person searching, so a firm in Wimbledon and a firm in Walthamstow are rarely fighting for the same customer, even though both are in London and both might describe themselves that way.
That has three practical consequences. First, your Google Business Profile needs to sit at a real address where you serve customers, or be set up as a service-area business with the address hidden. Google's guidelines do not allow a profile at a mail-forwarding address, or at a virtual office unless it is staffed during business hours, and addresses of that kind are common in London. Second, each area page needs to be genuinely about that area: which services you offer there, how appointments or call-outs work, and anything that differs, rather than one page copied with the borough name swapped. Third, your name, phone number and opening hours need to agree on your site, your profile and the directories, because conflicting details weaken all of them.
Businesses that sell across the whole city, or nationally from a London base, face a different problem. For them the place matters less and the subject matters more. The work is mostly technical and content, aimed at the specific services buyers search for, with London named where it helps the reader rather than repeated in every heading.
The common mistake in both cases is the same: treating London as a single word to rank for. Most of the enquiries are in the detail, the neighbourhood, the specific service and the question a buyer asks before they pick up the phone.
Choosing a supplier
London has SEO suppliers of every size, from one-person consultancies to large agencies. A few questions separate them faster than any pitch deck.
Start with who does the work. Many agencies sell through a senior person and deliver through a junior team or a subcontractor. That is not wrong in itself, but it should be said up front. Ask to meet the person who will run your account, and ask who will make technical changes to the site: them, your developers, or nobody.
Then look at how results are reported. Figures drawn from your own Search Console and analytics, in accounts you own, can be checked. A dashboard the agency controls, built around rankings for phrases nobody searches for, cannot. Be wary of any SEO expert in London who promises a position by a date: nobody controls Google's results, and a promise like that usually means the target was picked because it was easy, not because it brings enquiries.
A name, a role, and whether they are employed or subcontracted. You should be able to speak to that person directly.
A specific answer drawn from looking at your site is a good sign. A plan that would fit any business is not.
Impressions, clicks and enquiries on the pages the work touched, measured in your own Search Console and analytics.
Paid placements and link networks can do lasting harm, and cleaning them up later costs more than avoiding them.
Ask about the minimum term and the notice period. A long lock-in with no break clause deserves a second look.
A good supplier names work that is not worth paying for. If everything is recommended, nothing has been prioritised.
Cost
Our SEO retainers start from £1,500 a month, and larger SEO programmes from £3,000 a month. One-off technical SEO projects start from £2,500. Where the site itself is the obstacle and repairs would cost more than replacing it, a business website starts from £3,000. Every engagement gets a written quote with scope agreed up front, after the free audit.
Quotes from London suppliers can differ widely for what sounds like the same service. The difference usually comes down to five things: how many pages and locations the work covers; how contested the searches are in your sector; how much of the implementation the supplier does rather than hands back to you; whether link work means earning coverage or buying placements; and how much new content is written each month.
The surest way to spend less is to do things in the right order. Content written before the pages can be indexed, or links pointed at pages that do not turn visitors into enquiries, is money spent twice. An audit first, and a plan ranked by what each change is worth, keeps the budget on the work that pays back.
Common faults
Many London businesses that ask us for help are not short of effort. They are short of the right effort: blog posts published every month while the real problem sits in the templates, the profile or the links.
Not sure why a smaller competitor outranks you?
The audit compares your site with the pages that beat it for the searches you care about, and tells you whether the gap is technical, content, local or authority. It is free, and the findings are yours whether or not you hire us.
Typical situations
Illustrative examples, not client stories. Each shows the kind of problem we would look at first and what the work would aim for.
A family law practice whose pages sit beneath legal directories and national firms for broad searches. The work would start with one page per area of law, written around the questions clients ask, and a profile and review routine for the office clients actually attend.
Aim: found for specific legal services in the areas the firm serves
A B2B product company whose site describes features in its own vocabulary while buyers search by problem and by industry. The fix is research before writing: pages for the problems the product solves, fair comparison pages, and internal links that lead towards a demo.
Aim: reach buyers who have not heard of the product yet
A building or electrical firm working across four or five boroughs, with one generic London page, a profile pinned to a home address and few reviews. The work is a service-area profile, an honest page for each area covered, and a simple way of asking customers for reviews.
Aim: appear in map results across the boroughs actually covered
A private clinic competing with many similar practices within a short walk. Treatment pages that answer what patients ask, written with the advertising rules on health claims in mind, plus a complete and accurate profile, matter more here than publishing volume.
Aim: chosen for specific treatments, not only searched for by name
A group whose location pages are copies of each other and whose opening hours differ between its website, Google and the delivery apps. Each site needs its own page, its own profile and details that agree everywhere they appear.
Aim: each site found for its own neighbourhood
An ecommerce brand that moved platform and lost traffic because old product and category addresses were never redirected one to one. The work is a redirect map built from the full list of old URLs, checked after launch, and category pages rebuilt around what shoppers search for.
Aim: win back the pages lost in the move and protect them next time
How we work
Nothing is quoted before the audit. You can stop after it with the findings in hand, and if you continue you get a written quote with the scope agreed before work starts.
We crawl the site, compare it with what Google has indexed, review your profile and business details, look at your links, and study the pages that outrank you for the searches that matter. Findings come in writing.
Findings are ranked by what fixing them is worth, not by how alarming they sound. The quote follows that order, and anything not worth the money is written down and left out.
We make the changes: technical fixes as reviewable changes, page rewrites, profile corrections, pages for the boroughs you cover and outreach for links. You approve anything that touches live pages before it goes out.
Written by the person doing the work and drawn from your own Search Console and analytics: what we did, what moved, what did not, and what comes next.
Clear scope · Regular demos · Full handover
Honest fit
We are a software company that does SEO, with engineers who make the changes themselves. That suits some London businesses far better than others.
Who to hire
There is no single right answer. A freelance SEO specialist in London can be good value for a narrow, well-defined problem, and an in-house hire makes sense once search is a large and constant workload. An agency suits work that spans several disciplines at the same time.
| In-house hire | Freelance specialist | Agency, like us | |
|---|---|---|---|
| You deal with | Your own employee | One person | A named contact, with a team behind them |
| Covers | What one person knows | Usually one or two disciplines | Technical, content, local and links together |
| Who makes changes | Needs developer time from you | Often advice, sometimes hands-on | Varies, so ask; we make them ourselves |
| Cost shape | Salary, plus tools and training | Day rate or small retainer | Monthly retainer or a fixed-scope project |
| Main risk | One viewpoint, and a gap if they leave | Limited capacity and cover | Distance between you and the person doing the work |
| Suits | Large sites that change every week | A narrow, clearly defined problem | Several kinds of work running at once |
Sectors
Sectors that are prominent in London and where buyers often start with a search. These are general observations about the city, not a client list.
FAQ
Straight answers before you commit to anything.
Still have a question?
Ask us directly. A senior engineer reads every question.
Ask about your projectNo. SpiderHunts has a registered office in London and a remote team, and works with London businesses through video calls, shared documents and a named contact. The registered office is the company's legal address; nobody works there and there is nothing to visit.
Prices vary widely across London, so compare quotes on scope rather than on the headline fee. Ours are an SEO retainer from £1,500 a month, larger SEO programmes from £3,000 a month, and one-off technical SEO projects from £2,500. You get a written quote with scope agreed up front, after the free audit.
Technical fixes are usually the first to show, because they remove an obstacle rather than build something new. Local results often move next, once the profile, area pages and reviews are in order. Broad commercial searches across London usually take many months, and some are out of reach for a smaller site. We tell you which is which before you start.
It depends on the problem. If you mainly need judgement, such as deciding what to fix first or whether search is the right channel at all, one experienced consultant may be enough. If the work spans technical fixes, content, local and links at once, a team is usually more practical. We offer both; our SEO consultant page describes the arrangement where one named consultant leads and our engineers make the changes.
Sometimes, but for most sectors it is some of the hardest ground in the country. Those results are held by national brands, directories and comparison sites as well as established London firms. We look at who holds them today and tell you honestly whether the term is reachable on your budget. Specific services, neighbourhoods and buyer questions are usually where earlier progress comes from.
Yes, as a service-area business. Google lets businesses that travel to customers hide their address and list the areas they serve instead. What does not work is putting the profile at a mail-forwarding address or an unstaffed virtual office: that goes against Google's guidelines and can lead to the profile being suspended.
Yes, as part of a wider programme rather than as a package of so many links a month. We look for links and mentions that make sense for your business: trade and professional bodies, suppliers and partners, business groups, and press coverage where there is a real story. We advise against paid link schemes, and where a site has a history of them we review the existing links before building anything new.
Yes. A common split is that we take the technical work and its implementation while the existing team keeps content or PR. It works when the boundary is agreed in writing at the start, so nobody duplicates or undoes the other's work.
For the audit, only the site address and a short note on what you sell and where. For the work itself: access to Search Console and analytics, or permission to set them up in your name; access to the website, or a developer who can merge our changes; and an hour on a video call about your buyers and the parts of London that matter to you.
All of Greater London and the towns around it, because the work is remote. What changes from area to area is the kind of work rather than whether we can help: neighbourhood-level local search for businesses that customers visit or that travel to customers, and subject-led content for businesses that sell across the city or nationally.
Start here
Send the site, what you sell and the parts of London where you want more customers. We will crawl it, check your profile and the pages that outrank you, and send the findings with an honest view of what is worth doing. Free, and yours to keep.
Thanks, that’s with us.
A senior engineer reads every enquiry and will reply as soon as they can.
Book a time that suits you, or send a message on WhatsApp.