The UK qualifier
A US vendor’s page does not mention VAT, HMRC, GDPR as the UK applies it, or a UK bank. Pages that do, for the categories where it matters, win the buyer who needs the product to work here.
United Kingdom
SEO for startups in the UK
A UK startup usually discovers SEO at the point where paid acquisition has doubled in cost and a competitor is getting sign-ups for free. The competitor started building pages in month one. The searches were there all along: the category, the comparison, the job the product does, and the free thing that lets a buyer try before they trust.
The competition is the category leader, the review sites and the US vendors, who rank in the UK without trying. What is open is the qualified search: the category for a UK industry, a UK size of company, a UK regulation, and the comparison against the vendor everybody already uses. Those pages convert, because the buyer’s situation is in the search.
The measure is sign-ups and activations from search, tracked to the landing page in your own analytics, because a founder does not need a report about traffic.
The searches in the UK
The shapes startups are found by in the UK. The words in brackets are whatever the searcher puts there: the town, the suburb, the matter, the treatment.
- [category] software uk
- [competitor] alternative uk
- how to [job your product does]
- [category] for small business uk
What is different in the UK
Comparison pages first
A buyer typing a competitor’s name plus "alternative" has already decided to switch. Those pages are built first, honestly, and they are usually the first sign-ups from search.
The programmatic trap
Generating a page for every combination of feature and industry is the fastest way to get a young domain ignored. Fifty pages a buyer would thank you for beat five hundred they would not.
What a month of work covers for startups in the UK
- Two to four pages or articles each month, chosen from the search map we build in month one
- Comparison and alternative pages for the competitors your buyers already know
- Technical fixes: rendering, indexing, internal links between docs, blog and product pages
- Four to eight links a month through guest content, partnerships and digital PR
- Search Console reporting by page group, with pipeline attribution if your CRM allows it
- A quarterly review of the search map against what actually ranked
The industry page, SEO for startups, has the problems and the questions in full; the country page, SEO services in the UK, has the search landscape in the UK for every trade.
The search landscape in the UK
Directories hold the first page
For many trade and service terms the top results are aggregators. Two routes past them: the map pack, and pages specific enough that a directory listing cannot answer the question.
Town and postcode, not region
Buyers search by town. A page covering a whole county competes with pages written about each town in it, and loses to all of them.
British English, properly
Spelling, the word for the trade and the way an address is written all signal whether a page was written for this market or translated into it.
Cities in the UK with their own page
Each is written for the way that city searches and for the trades that search there most.
Working with us from United Kingdom
SEO happens in your accounts and on your website, so nobody needs to visit. We scope the work on a video call in your hours, send a written quote, and then work month by month with a call whenever you want one. The result is judged on the enquiries in your own records, never on a ranking report.
Results from real clients
Every number below is from the client’s own Google Search Console, for the period shown. Impressions are how often the site appeared; clicks are people who arrived. What each visit is worth is your sales process, not ours, so these are the visits we can prove rather than a conversion figure we cannot.
- 52,993clicksUp and Running Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 1 Mar 2023 to 14 Mar 2024
- Impressions
- 2,238,155
- CTR
- 2.4%
- Avg. position
- 13.49
+139,355% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
- 12,285clicksBackcountry Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 6 Jul 2023 to 31 May 2024
- Impressions
- 601,822
- CTR
- 2.0%
- Avg. position
- 19.3
+2,059% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
Questions startups in the UK ask us
We have no domain authority. Can this work?
Yes, if the pages target the qualified searches where page one is held by other small sites, which is most of them. The head terms come later, with the links the good pages earn.
Do you do the technical side too?
Yes, and on a startup site it is usually the smaller job: indexing, speed, and a structure that does not compete with itself. The pages are the larger job.
What do you report?
Sign-ups from search by landing page, activations, and the searches the site appears for, from your analytics and Search Console. Never a ranking on its own.
Book a call with us
A 30-minute call in your working hours. Tell us what you sell and where, and we will tell you what we would do first and what it involves. Prefer email? Send your website through the form and the Passieon Team will reply within two working days.