JDWA

Local SEO retainer

Local SEO for UK trades and service businesses. From £449 a month.

Generic "organic traffic" doesn't pay your bills. Calls, bookings and foot traffic do. Local SEO is what gets your business in front of the people actively searching for what you do, in the area you actually serve. It's the highest-return marketing channel a local service business can run, and it's the one most agencies get wrong.

I don't sell a generic SEO package. I work a defined, repeatable monthly process that I personally review at every step. The dashboard shows everything: rank changes, posts that went live, citations cleaned, reviews responded to, backlinks acquired. There's no PDF landing in your inbox once a month pretending the other 29 days didn't happen.

The work sits on top of a technical foundation. If your site has slow pages, broken redirects, missing schema markup, or a thin internal linking structure, the monthly retainer is running on a treadmill. Most prospects I talk to have at least some of this. The Technical SEO Foundation is the bounded project that fixes it before the retainer starts. Optional but recommended.

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What's in the retainer

The full monthly cycle, not a one-off audit

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Google Business Profile: ongoing optimisation, photo work, and weekly post scheduling

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Daily rank tracking for Google organic + the local Maps 3-pack, with the last 12 months of history on day one

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Daily OnPage technical audit (broken links, duplicate H1s, missing schema, slow pages)

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Backlink monitor (new + lost per week, anchor distribution) + proactive backlink acquisition on Growth

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GBP posts 3-4/month on Core, 6-8/month on Growth. Written by me, reviewed by me, sent through your approval window

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Multi-platform review monitoring across Google, Yelp, Tripadvisor, Trustpilot, with response drafting

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Citation cleanup + ongoing monitoring across Yell, Yelp, Thomson Local, FreeIndex and 20+ more UK directories

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AI visibility tracking — AEO & GEO (Google AI Overviews + ChatGPT + Perplexity + Gemini) on Growth tier

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Monthly report with a personal written note from me explaining what moved and why

The work lands because every deliverable passes through my review before it reaches you. Nothing is published or sent unreviewed, and the dashboard surfaces every step so you can see it.

How I work

A defined, repeatable monthly process

  1. Step 1. Establish baseline. Once you've connected Search Console, GBP and Meta in your dashboard, I run and personally review your baseline audit within 48 hours. That audit becomes the benchmark everything else is measured against.
  2. Step 2. Build the GBP + citations signal. GBP is the single biggest local-SEO lever. I audit it for completeness, accuracy, photos, posting cadence; fix the gaps; start the posting schedule. In parallel I run a citation audit and clean up NAP inconsistencies across the directories that matter for your trade.
  3. Step 3. Compound the work. Technical SEO fixes, monthly content pieces, review response drafting, monthly backlink research + outreach (2 pitches on Core, 8 on Growth, same niche-scanning engine, different volume per tier), AI visibility tracking (Growth). Each month compounds, the dashboard shows the trend so you can see whether it's working or not, and where to change approach.

Questions

Honest answers, not sales-script

Local SEO is ranking your business in the Google Maps 3-pack and the local-finder results for queries like "plumber near me" or "emergency dentist Bristol". For trades and local services, these are the searches that turn into phone calls. General SEO covers the rest; local SEO covers the ones that pay the bills.

Honest answer: 3-6 months for meaningful rank movement on the local pack. I can show you ranking movement from week one because I pull historical data back years, but the actual rank gains compound over months, not weeks.

GBP optimisation and posting (3-4/month on Core, 6-8/month on Growth), citation cleanup and ongoing monitoring across UK directories, multi-platform review monitoring and response drafting, daily keyword and local pack rank tracking, daily technical SEO audit, and a full live dashboard with all of it visible to you.

No. What I do is the actual work that moves the needle: GBP optimisation, citations, reviews, technical SEO, content, backlinks, and I show every result in the dashboard so you can see it moving (or not).

The dashboard is the difference. Most agencies send you a static PDF on the 1st of each month and pretend the other 29 days don't exist. I give you a live login where you can see the rankings, the GBP posts, the citations I've submitted, the reviews I've responded to, the backlinks I've acquired. Every action logged, every metric visible.

Trades are my core niche, plumbers, electricians, builders, roofers, locksmiths, gas engineers, but I also work with healthcare and wellness practices (dentists, chiropractors, physiotherapists) and certain local professional services. I turn down e-commerce-only businesses because the playbook is different.

I offer a one-off reinstatement service (£250-£400 flat). I diagnose, submit the appeal, and stay with you through the back-and-forth with Google. We can't guarantee reinstatement, but I can guarantee you don't pay me unless I believe there's a real path to reinstatement.

In practice, yes: Google uses your website to validate the GBP, to confirm what you actually do, and to decide whether you match a query. A thin or missing website caps how far local SEO can take you. The good news is you don't need a fancy one: a well-structured 5–10 page site built for speed and clarity is enough to rank in most local markets.

I work with what you have first. If the structure, content, and speed are reasonable, I'll optimise on top of them. If the foundation is fundamentally broken (huge page-builder bloat, no mobile layout, no schema), I'll tell you straight and quote you a rebuild. But I never tear down a working site to upsell you a new one.

Rank tracking for your target keywords (both local-pack and organic), traffic and visibility trends from Search Console, Google Business Profile insights (calls, direction requests, profile views), site health scores from PageSpeed, the action log of what I did this month and why, and a short personal note from me explaining what actually moved and what didn't. No PDF full of vanity metrics that don't tie to your business.

Reviews are one of the strongest local-ranking signals. Both the count and the recency, and increasingly the substance of what people actually write. I monitor your reviews across Google, Checkatrade, Yell, Trustpilot, and any industry-specific platforms, alert you to new ones, and help you draft responses that sound like a real person (not a templated 'thanks for your feedback').

Ready to see what you're working with?

The work lands because it's reviewed, not because it's magic. Below are the things business owners ask before signing up most before signing up.

Or skip ahead and book a free audit, I'll walk you through what the dashboard would look like for your specific business.

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Related services

Growth retainer

Links, digital PR and content: the authority side of local SEO

GBP, citations and reviews get you into the local results. Links, press mentions and useful content are what keep you there when competitors start doing the basics too.

Digital PR

Earned coverage in local, regional and trade press, never paid placements:

  • Original local data: a short survey of tradespeople on a question journalists care about, giving them local figures they can quote.
  • Expert quotes: answering journalist requests with a quotable line from you.
  • Local news hooks: commenting first on regulation changes, product recalls or weather that spikes demand.
  • Business news: partnerships, milestones and community work, written up so a local editor would want to run them.

No fabricated spokesperson quotes, no paid coverage, no mass-mailed press releases.

Content

Content about the work you do, tied back to calls and bookings:

  • Pillar plan: three to five topics your business can credibly own, each with a target keyword cluster.
  • Personas: who each piece is for, in their language, with the trigger that makes them call.
  • Editorial calendar: one month at a time, so themes drive what gets written.
  • Briefs and attribution: every piece has a goal before it's written, and enquiries are tagged to the piece that drove them.

Local SEO for your trade, in your city

The work above is the same everywhere; what wins differs by trade and by market. Each page covers what customers search for and what I'd fix first.

A quick honest note.

Fees cover the work we do, not outcomes we don't control. Once a fee is paid, it's not refundable. The work begins immediately. Search engine rankings, third-party platform decisions, audience reception: those are outside anyone's control. What we control is doing the work, reviewing it personally, and showing you every step in the dashboard. Full terms.

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