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29 guides · 6 themes · updated 9 Oct 2026
Plain-English guides for the owner or manager of a London business, grouped by theme and written to be checked: every third-party figure carries its source and the date we read it, and every guide ends with the questions it raises and the guides that follow it.
Most SEO advice written for business owners is either a sales page with a reading list attached or a reworded copy of someone else’s post. These 29 guides are written for a different reader: the owner or manager of a London business who has a decision to make, sometimes after a previous agency let them down, and who wants to understand the work well enough to buy it, check it or do part of it themselves.
Three rules hold in every guide. Every figure that is not ours is attributed to its source, with a link and the date we read it, in a numbered list at the end of the guide. Where a guide quotes a published price or a contract term, it quotes the page the words appear on. Where no reliable figure exists, the guide says so rather than inventing one. Our own prices are published as indicative until they are confirmed on the pricing page, and the guides that mention them say the same.
Each guide opens with a short summary and a contents list, and ends with the questions readers ask most, the sources, and the guides that follow on from it. Reading times are stated on every guide: the shortest takes about 7 minutes, the longest about 24. If you want a guide applied to your own site, the free The London Review is the next step: a person reads your site and replies in writing within 2 working days. No automated score, no call required.
The guides sit in 6 themes, listed beside this text and in order below: Cost and choosing (7), Local London (7), Technical (8), Content and authority (2), AI search (2), Industry playbooks (3). If you are deciding whether to hire anyone, start with Cost and choosing. If your customers are in one borough or a handful of postcodes, go to Local London next. The technical checklists are written to be handed to whoever builds your site, agency or not.
7 guides
Start here if you are deciding whether to hire anyone at all. What SEO costs in London and what moves the price, how to choose an agency and the questions to ask it, what a contract should and should not say, what a monthly report should contain, how long the work takes, and when Google Ads is the better buy.
Cost and choosing
Published London and UK prices run from under £500 to over £10,000 a month. This guide shows who publishes what, how each pricing model works, what moves the figure for your business, and how to set a budget that survives month six.
Cost and choosing
Most London businesses choose an agency on the strength of a pitch. This guide gives you a better method: decide what you need, check the proof the way a sceptic would, read the terms before the deck, and score every shortlisted agency on the same sheet.
Cost and choosing
Technical fixes show in weeks, local search in one to three months, competitive London rankings in six to twelve. This guide explains why there are three clocks, what to expect month by month, what changes the pace, and the early signs that tell you the work is taking hold before rankings move.
Cost and choosing
The marketing page says "no contracts"; the terms say upfront payment, notice periods and cancellation fees. This guide quotes the clauses we found in London and UK agency contracts, explains why a ranking guarantee is a warning sign rather than a comfort, and sets out what fair terms look like.
Cost and choosing
Twenty-five questions grouped by what they reveal, with the answer a good agency gives and the answer that should end the meeting. Our own answers are included so you can hold us to them.
Cost and choosing
A monthly SEO report exists so you can decide whether to keep paying. This guide sets out the numbers that answer that question, where each one comes from, how rankings are misread, and the metrics that look like progress while nothing changes.
Cost and choosing
Google Ads buys visibility by the click and stops when you stop paying. SEO earns it over months and keeps producing after the work is done. Which to fund first depends on how soon you need enquiries, how much margin you have per sale, and how your customers search. This guide gives you the comparison and a decision table.
7 guides
For the business that serves a borough, a postcode or a walk-in catchment. Local search from first principles, the Google Business Profile in detail, ranking in your own borough, how "near me" searches work in London, several locations without duplicate pages, reviews handled properly, and what you can do yourself before paying anyone.
Local London
If you run a small London business and can give it about four hours a month, you can do the SEO that matters most yourself with free tools from Google. This guide says what to do, in what order, with examples from across London, and is honest about the point where doing it yourself stops paying.
Local London
London is one city on a map and hundreds of local markets on a phone. This guide explains what local search is, why it behaves differently here, and the five pieces of work that move a London business into the map pack, in the order we would do them.
Local London
Your Google Business Profile is the first thing most London customers see of you, and it is free. This guide goes through every section in the order Google asks for it, with the rules that get profiles suspended, the settings that matter most in a dense city, and a monthly checklist to keep it working.
Local London
A business can be first in Barnet and invisible in Enfield, two miles away. This guide explains why ranking in London is decided borough by borough and often street by street, which place names to build around, how to write area pages that help rather than harm, and how to measure what each borough is sending you.
Local London
"Near me" is not a keyword you can own. It is an instruction to Google to use the searcher's location, and in London that location changes every few hundred metres. This guide explains what actually happens when someone searches "near me", why the phrase itself is the wrong target, and the changes that make a business appear more often in the results that matter.
Local London
Three branches in London are three local search markets, not one. This guide sets out how to give every site its own page and its own Google Business Profile, keep the details identical everywhere, and run reviews and reporting branch by branch without the whole thing collapsing into one brand page.
Local London
Reviews are earned one guest, patient or client at a time, and there is no shortcut that is both legal and durable. This guide covers the ask, the link, the timing, replying to every review, what to do about the bad ones, and what reviews do and do not do for your ranking, all inside Google's rules and UK law.
8 guides
The checklists the technical work is done from: a full technical SEO checklist, Core Web Vitals and what moves each metric, schema markup with examples, what to protect in a redesign or a migration, how penalties happen and how sites recover, international targeting, and a glossary of the terms every other guide uses.
Technical
Sixty checks in nine groups, each with the way to test it and the Google documentation behind it. Work through them before concluding that your content is the problem; in our experience a site that is hard to crawl, slow to render or confused about its own URLs will not rank however good the writing is.
Technical
Core Web Vitals are three measurements of how a page feels to a real visitor: how fast the main content appears, how quickly it responds to a tap, and whether it jumps about while loading. This guide explains each one, shows how to read the reports without being misled by the score, and sets out the fixes that actually move the numbers on WordPress and Shopify.
Technical
Structured data tells Google what a page is about in a format it can read without guessing. This guide covers the types that still matter for a London business, the two that stopped earning anything in 2026, how to write them in JSON-LD and how to test them without inventing a single review.
Technical
A redesign changes how a site looks. Search traffic is lost when it quietly changes what the site says, where pages live and how fast they load. This checklist takes you from the crawl you run before anyone opens a design tool to the 90 days of monitoring after launch, with the London mistakes we see most.
Technical
A migration moves a site: to a new domain, a new platform, a new URL structure or a new host. Each move has its own failure mode and its own Google tooling. This checklist covers the inventory, the redirect map, the Change of Address tool, the launch sequence and the twelve weeks after, using Google's own documentation for every rule.
Technical
Most "penalties" are not penalties. A traffic drop has six common causes and only one of them is a manual action from Google. This guide shows how to tell them apart using Search Console, what Google's own documentation says about each, and how to recover without buying a fix that makes it worse.
Technical
The 120 or so words that turn up in SEO proposals, audits and monthly reports, each explained in a sentence or two with a London example. Read it end to end once, then use it to check what an agency is actually promising you.
Technical
Selling into another country online means a second set of search decisions: which URL structure, which language and region codes, how to tell Google which page is for whom, what to translate and what to rewrite, and how to measure each market on its own. This guide takes each decision in order, with Google's documentation as the reference.
2 guides
What AI Overviews, AI Mode and answer engines change for a London business: which searches they affect, how sources are chosen, what a zero-click result costs you, and what it takes for a page to be cited.
AI search
Generative engine optimisation (GEO) is the work of becoming the source an AI assistant quotes when someone asks about what you do. This guide explains how ChatGPT, Gemini, Perplexity, Copilot and Google's AI results find their sources, what is the same as ordinary SEO and what is different, the six changes that matter on a London business site, which crawlers to allow, how to measure citations with the tools that exist, and the one thing no agency can promise. Every platform fact is quoted from the platform's own documentation, read 9 October 2026.
AI search
AI Overviews have been in UK results since August 2024 and AI Mode since July 2025. This guide explains what each one is, which kinds of London searches tend to get them, what the published evidence says about clicks, how Google says it chooses the pages it links, the controls you have, how to read the effect in Search Console, and the work that makes a page the one that gets cited. Every Google statement is quoted from Google's own documentation or announcements, read 9 October 2026.
3 guides
Platform and sector guides written from the work: ecommerce SEO from category structure to product pages, the limits and fixes specific to Shopify, and WordPress without the bloat.
Industry playbooks
A store ranks or fails on structure before it ranks or fails on words. This guide works through the order that matters for an online shop: the category tree, product templates, filters and duplicate URLs, internal links, structured data and feeds, speed, and the content that earns the research searches before the purchase. Written for London retailers who also have a shop, a showroom or a delivery radius.
Industry playbooks
Shopify handles more of the technical basics than any other store platform, and it also fixes more things you cannot change. This guide separates the two: what Shopify does for you, what it will not let you touch, and the collection, product, duplicate URL, speed and app decisions that are yours to get right. Every platform fact is quoted from Shopify's own documentation, read 9 October 2026.
Industry playbooks
WordPress can be one of the cleanest platforms for search or one of the slowest, and the difference is almost entirely decisions made in the first hour and never revisited. This guide goes through them in order: core settings, the category and tag structure, the single SEO plugin and what it must do, images and media, speed, structured data, and the theme bloat worth removing. Every platform fact is from WordPress.org documentation, read 9 October 2026.
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