You don't need a NEW website to rank.

SEO competes for a search term generally. Local SEO competes for it inside a place, and adds a second battlefield: the map pack, which is drawn from Google Business Profiles rather than from websites. A business serving one town usually needs local SEO first, because it is cheaper, faster and less contested.

Search your own main service plus your town, in a private window. If you are not in the map pack and not on page one, you need local SEO. If you rank locally but nothing else brings enquiries, you need content rather than local work. If you rank for nothing at all, including your own business name, something is technically broken and an audit will find it in an afternoon.

Relevance, distance and how well known the business is. Google's own Business Profile help says "Local results are mainly based on relevance, distance, and popularity", and it describes prominence as how well known a business is, including its links and reviews. In practice that means a complete, active Business Profile in the right categories, consistent contact details everywhere, reviews arriving steadily, and a real page for each service in each area.

The Werehouse Media SEO audit crawls every page, then a person reads the results. It checks what Google and Bing have indexed against what you think they have, including orphan pages and pages competing for the same term. It covers the technical layer: redirect chains, Core Web Vitals from field data, mobile rendering, structured data and whether answer engines can read the site.

Where local applies, it reviews the Google Business Profile, citations, reviews, and service and location pages. It says what you could realistically rank for at the authority you have now, and which competitor pages are beating yours and why. You get a fix list in priority order, with the effort each item takes, written so any developer can act on it, and half an hour on a call to walk you through it.

The Werehouse Media SEO audit and fix list is normally £495 as a one-off, and it is free for a limited time. Across the UK market, audits run roughly £400 to £1,500 depending on the size of the site, in our own reading of published prices. The audit is a day and a half of a person's attention, and it decides where the next several thousand pounds go. The thing to check before buying any audit is whether a person reads the output, or whether you are being sold a crawler export with a logo on it. What ongoing SEO costs across the market, and what a monthly fee should buy, is covered in how much SEO costs in the UK.

SEO results arrive in stages, and the Google Business Profile moves first, often inside a month. Technical fixes show once Google recrawls the pages, and Google's own recrawl guidance says "Crawling can take anywhere from a few days to a few weeks." Content and authority take three to six months on anything contested, and longer on national terms. Anyone promising page one in weeks is either targeting terms nobody searches or about to do something that gets you penalised. If you need work booked next week, that is a job for Google Ads, and we will say so.

Cheap SEO is usually worse than none. The work that moves rankings is hours: technical fixes, pages written properly, outreach that earns a link rather than buys one. At £200 or £300 a month there are no hours in the budget, so what arrives is a report. Bought links and directory spam can actively cost you visibility, which is the one outcome worse than standing still. Google's spam policies list "Buying or selling links for ranking purposes" as the first example of link spam.

Yes. Most of the SEO work we do is on sites somebody else built, whatever they were built with. The audit says what the platform allows. Where a fix needs a developer, we either make the change ourselves or write it up so your own developer can, and the website stays yours throughout.

The groundwork is. The page structure, structured data and speed that search engines read are done as part of every website we build, so you are not buying them twice. Monthly local SEO or a full search programme is only worth adding when the audit shows the site needs ongoing work.

Yes. Werehouse Media is based in Sussex and works with businesses across the UK and worldwide, and Ed is often in Lisbon, Portugal. Local SEO does not need anyone on the ground: most of the work happens inside the Business Profile, the website and the listings. Sussex is the market we know best, from the contested map pack along the Brighton coast to the rural spread where a well-filled profile and a few good service pages can reach a whole catchment. Distance changes neither the price nor the method.

Some of it, yes, and you should. Claiming and completing your Google Business Profile is free, takes an afternoon, and is the highest-return hour available in local search. It would be poor form to charge you for something you can do that easily, so the audit tells you which parts are worth your own time and which are not.

No. Getting named in answers from ChatGPT, Google AI Overviews, Perplexity and Copilot is included in every engagement, because the technical foundation is the same work. Bing indexing, robots.txt access for answer crawlers such as OpenAI's OAI-SearchBot, and pages that open with a quotable answer are part of the same audit and the same monthly work. There is more detail on the AI search page.

No. Monthly work is cancellable with 30 days' notice, there is no minimum term, and every deliverable stays yours: the pages, the profile, the accounts and the documentation. Local SEO from £695 a month and the full programme from £995 a month both run month to month.