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.
SEO services in the UK
UK search is shaped by directories and by a long habit of searching by town. Checkatrade, Yell and their equivalents hold a lot of first-page space for commercial terms, which pushes real businesses down and makes the map pack disproportionately valuable, because a directory cannot occupy it.
The second thing that shapes it is how specific UK buyers get. People search for the trade, the town and often the postcode area, and a site with one page for the whole county misses all of it.
What is different about search in the UK
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.
What the work covers
- Local SEO. Map pack, Google Business Profile, citations and location pages, so somebody searching nearby calls you rather than the next name on the list.
- Technical SEO. Crawl errors, speed, indexing, structured data and safe migrations, so the pages that win you work can be found and are not slow enough to lose the visit.
- On-page SEO. Titles, headings, internal links and page copy written around what a buyer is actually trying to do, not around a keyword.
- Content writing. Service pages and articles researched from the search results, written by people, edited for accuracy. Written to be quoted by an AI assistant as well as read by a person.
- Link building. Links earned from relevant sites through outreach and guest content. No networks, no bought placements.
- SEO audits. A full read of your site with every issue ordered by what it is costing you in lost enquiries.
- White-label SEO. The same work delivered under your agency’s name, with reports you can forward as your own.
- WordPress development. Fast, secure WordPress builds and fixes for the sites we optimize.
There is no package to pick from. What the site needs is decided on a call and written down before any work starts. The SEO services page explains what a month covers.
Individual services in the UK
Each of these has its own page for this market, because the work and the search behaviour are both different here.
Where this usually starts in the UK
These are the sectors where the pattern is clearest: a fixed catchment, a list of services people search for by name, and competitors who have not written a page for any of them.
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.
- 7,630clicksYour Place Physical TherapyPhysical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
- Impressions
- 284,589
- CTR
- 2.7%
- Avg. position
- 15.66
+1,184% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
- 6,816clicksPeak EndurancePerformance and physical therapy · 1 Sep 2023 to 31 May 2024
- Impressions
- 482,378
- CTR
- 1.4%
- Avg. position
- 16.16
+1,174% clicks against the previous period of the same length.
Questions about SEO in the UK
How do you get past Checkatrade and Yell?
You do not out-rank them on their own terms cheaply. You take the map pack, which they cannot enter, and you write pages specific enough that a directory listing is not a substitute for them.
Do you write in British English?
Yes, and it matters more than it sounds. A page reading "optimize your tire center" tells a UK reader immediately that nobody involved is local to them.
What comes first?
A free written read of the site within two working days, then a call, then a written quote. Nothing starts before you have that in writing.
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.