If you run a business in Leeds or Sheffield or Nottingham, there is an obvious way to work out how to choose an SEO agency in the UK. You search for one in your city.
I did that six times this week, in six UK cities, and wrote down everything that came back.
What I found was not a shortlist of agencies. It was a directory paginating against itself, a page selling SEO on a cancer charity's domain, four doorway pages built for American towns that happen to share a name with an English city, and one template serving both Newcastle upon Tyne and Newcastle, New South Wales, with the same fake phone number on both.
This is not a complaint about Google. It is a practical problem, because the search that feels most sensible is the one that works least well. So this piece does two things. It shows you exactly what is on those pages, with names and URLs, and then it gives you the checks that actually separate a real agency from a page pretending to be one.
What I did
Six cities, six searches, one afternoon.
| City | What I searched |
|---|---|
| Leeds | link building services Leeds |
| Bristol | guest posting services Bristol UK |
| Newcastle | backlink services Newcastle UK |
| Leicester | SEO agency Leicester |
| Nottingham | link building services Nottingham |
| Sheffield | link building company Sheffield |
I opened what came back rather than reading the titles. Where a page made a claim I could check, I checked it.
I am not neutral here and you should know that before the rest of this. I sell guest post placements. That makes me a supplier in this market, not a bystander, and it is the reason I have put every URL in so you can look yourself instead of taking my word.
Sheffield: sixteen of the twenty results were one directory
The Sheffield search is the clearest case, so start there.
Twenty results came back. Sixteen of them were Clutch.
Not sixteen different Clutch listings. Eleven of them were the same Sheffield listing, paginated:
clutch.co/seo-firms/link-building/uk/england/sheffield
clutch.co/seo-firms/link-building/uk/england/sheffield?page=2
clutch.co/seo-firms/link-building/uk/england/sheffield?page=3and so on, through to page 11. Every page of that one listing, from the first to the eleventh.
The remaining five Clutch results were its Birmingham listing at page 6, and its United Kingdom listing at pages 18, 27, 29 and 31.
That leaves four results in total. Three were Semrush Agency Partners. One was an American IT company's page for a Sheffield in Pennsylvania, which I will come back to.
So for a search naming an English city of over half a million people, the number of results belonging to an actual agency in Sheffield was zero.
A directory is not a bad thing. Clutch publishes real reviews and plenty of real agencies are on it. But page 9 of a paginated listing is not an answer to your question. It is the eighty-first to ninetieth entry in a list, and it ranked because the directory is strong, not because entry eighty-one suits you.
Nottingham: the same city name, in Maryland and Pennsylvania
The Nottingham search returned two pages from one American IT company:
pragermicrosystems.com/.../link-building-services-maryland/link-building-services-nottingham/
pragermicrosystems.com/.../link-building-services-pennsylvania/link-building-services-nottingham/Read the URLs slowly. Nottingham is nested inside Maryland in one and inside Pennsylvania in the other. There is a Nottingham in both American states. Neither is the one in the East Midlands.
The same site turned up in two of my other searches. For Leeds it offered link-building-services-new-jersey/link-building-services-leeds-point/, and Leeds Point is a township in New Jersey. For Sheffield it offered a Pennsylvania Sheffield.
So one company has generated enough US city pages that four of them surfaced for three different English cities. The pages are not targeting the UK. They are targeting a name, and the name happens to be shared.
Also in the Nottingham results: Clutch's Sheffield listing, page 4. The directory is now ranking the wrong city's page for a city search.
And agencyapp.dmbx.aws.gartner.com, which is an Amazon Web Services subdomain belonging to Gartner, appearing in a public search for a Nottingham SEO company.
Nottingham was not all bad. Bulldog Digital Media, Cloudswitched, Tenet, SEO Works and Epic Edits are real UK businesses with real pages, and they were there. The problem is that they were mixed in with everything above, and nothing on the results page tells you which is which.
Newcastle: one template, two hemispheres
This is the one worth looking at closely, because it shows how these pages are made.
A site called RankForge, hosted on a free Cloudflare Pages subdomain at seo-rankforge.pages.dev, had two pages in my results:
seo-rankforge.pages.dev/services/link-building/uk/newcastle
seo-rankforge.pages.dev/services/link-building/australia/newcastle-auBoth carry the same page title, which opens "Link Building in Newcastle" and closes with "Expert SEO" and the brand name. Both carry the same H1, "Link Building & Digital PR Services in Newcastle".
The first lines differ, and that is the only real difference:
| UK page | Australia page | |
|---|---|---|
| Opening line | "Elevate your Newcastle brand with Link Building strategies built on data, expertise, and results." | "Expert Link Building services tailored for the unique challenges of the Newcastle, Australia market." |
| Testimonial | Emily Watson, Practice Owner, Bright Smile Dental | David Park, Head of Growth, FinanceHub |
| Price | $999 to $4,999 per month | $999 to $4,999 per month |
| Footer address | 123 Digital Drive, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA 94105 | 123 Digital Drive, Suite 500, San Francisco, CA 94105 |
| Footer phone | +1 (555) 123-4567 | +1 (555) 123-4567 |
Two things in that table should stop you.
The address is a placeholder. "123 Digital Drive, Suite 500" is the kind of filler that ships inside a website template and is meant to be replaced before launch.
The phone number is worse, and it is worth being precise about why.
555 is not an area code anybody can be reached on. It has never been assigned as a geographic area code in the North American numbering plan. Paired with 123-4567, which is simply the digits in order, it is the standard placeholder that ships inside a template so the designer has something to show.
Nobody has ever answered that number, because it cannot ring.
So here is a page offering to sell you link building in your city, for up to $4,999 a month, carrying a fictional telephone number in the footer. It is doing that for Newcastle in England and Newcastle in Australia at the same time, with the same words.
How many of these pages exist
I counted the city links on the UK Newcastle page. There are twenty more, all for the same service:
Sunderland, Edinburgh, Leeds, Hull, London, Manchester, Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield, Bristol, Leicester, Coventry, Nottingham, Brighton, Plymouth, Stoke-on-Trent, Wolverhampton, Derby, Southampton and Portsmouth.
That is twenty one UK cities for link building alone, before you count the other services and the other countries.
The part I cannot explain
Both RankForge pages carry a meta robots tag reading noindex, nofollow, and a separate googlebot tag saying the same thing.
A page marked noindex is asking search engines not to list it. These pages appeared in my results anyway.
I cannot tell you why. It could be that the tag was added recently and the pages have not been recrawled. It could be that the search I used is not reading from the same index. I am recording what I saw rather than explaining it, because the explanation would be a guess and this piece has enough certainties in it without one.
Bristol: not one real company
The Bristol search for guest posting services returned no company with a website of its own.
What it returned instead:
alive-internet.pp.ua, twice. The.pp.uasuffix is a free third-level domain.- Six posts from a single account on velog.io, a Korean blogging platform built for software developers.
- Three pages on notion.site.
- One page each on hackmd.io, portfolium.com, teachable.com and a JotForm form.
- A PeoplePerHour hourlie and a directory listing on localpage.uk.
The velog account is the clearest example of what these are. It posts as "guestpostlist", with the bio "Guest posting service for business blogs". The post I opened is dated 23 December 2025. It sells article writing, placement on UK sites, and "guaranteed approval". It points buyers at an external site, gives a Gmail address and a mobile number with the +91 India dialling code, and names no company anywhere. Its "read more" links run through a justpaste.it redirect to Blogspot pages.
None of that is illegal and I am not accusing anyone of fraud. But if you searched for a guest posting service in Bristol expecting to find a business in Bristol, you found a developer blog in Korea advertising a service contactable by Gmail.
Leeds and Leicester: where the directories take over, and where they do not
These two cities split in a way that explains the whole pattern.
Leeds, searched for link building: eight of the seventeen results were Semrush Agency Partners. Clutch took four more, and two of those were its Sheffield listing again, pages 2 and 10. Then the New Jersey Leeds Point page. Then a jobs board, and a listicle.
Two of the seventeen belonged to real companies, and one of those was served from a raw query string URL rather than a proper address.
Leicester, searched for SEO agency: real UK businesses, and quite a few. Bulldog Digital Media, Anicca, Opace, Herdl, Creative Ideaz, Limelight Digital, Imaginaire and Flycast Media all had proper pages with proper domains.
The difference is not the size of the city. Leicester and Leeds are both large. The difference is the phrase.
"SEO agency" is a term local businesses actually type, so real local agencies have built real pages for it and they rank. "Link building" is a term the industry uses and customers mostly do not, so nobody local has built anything, and directories and templates fill the gap.
That is the single most useful thing in this article, so it gets its own section.
The split nobody tells you about
| Phrase | Who ranks | What that tells you |
|---|---|---|
| SEO agency [city] | Real local agencies, plus some directories | Businesses search this, so agencies compete for it |
| Link building [city] | Directories, templates, free hosts | Businesses do not search this, so nobody local bothered |
| Guest posting [city] | Almost nothing real | As above, more so |
If you are hiring, this tells you which search to run. Use "SEO agency" plus your city, not "link building" plus your city, because the second one returns a market with no local sellers in it.
Even Leicester, though, mixed in creativemarketing.ai/leicester-ny-seo-agency, which is Leicester in New York state, and thriveagency.com/leicester-uk-seo-company/, which belongs to a Texas agency, and a page on a pages.dev free host.
That pages.dev pattern turned up in three of the six city searches, in Newcastle, Nottingham and Leicester, and again in a seventh search I ran outside them.
Seven checks before you hire anyone
None of these need a tool or any SEO knowledge. All of them can be done in the time it takes to make tea.
1. Find the address and the phone number, then test them.
Look in the footer. If the number starts +1 (555), it is fictional. If the address sounds like a template, search it in quotation marks and see how many other sites use it. A real agency has a real address you can find in two places.
2. Check the domain is the company's own.
A business selling you a service from something.pages.dev, something.pp.ua, a Notion page or a Korean blogging platform has not paid for a domain. That is not a style choice.
3. Swap your city for another and reload.
Change Newcastle to Leeds in the URL, or search the same company with a different city. If an identical page exists for twenty other cities, you are reading a template, and nobody at that company knows anything about where you are.
4. Find a named human.
Not a testimonial. A person who works there, with a surname, who exists somewhere other than that website. "Emily Watson, Practice Owner, Bright Smile Dental" is not a person you can find.
5. Ask who writes and who approves.
If the agency is going to place content for you, ask who decides what it says and who at the receiving site approves it. The answer tells you whether you are buying a placement or buying an advert. I have written about what you can and cannot pay for, including the parts that are awkward for me as a seller.
6. Ask what happens when a link disappears.
Links come down. In the most recent measurement, the median lost backlink had been live for 128 days. Ask for the replacement terms in writing and ask how long the window is. Here is how to check whether a link is still live yourself.
7. Check one site they would place you on.
Ask for a single example and look at it. Does it publish anything nobody paid for? If every article on it is sponsored, it is a shop with a masthead. There is a longer version of this in how to spot a link farm, and you can run a site through my free guest post site checker.
What a directory listing is actually worth
Clutch, Semrush Agency Partners, DesignRush and Sortlist all showed up repeatedly in these searches, and they are not the same as the template pages. They list real companies and Clutch verifies reviews.
The thing to understand is what a position in them means.
Being on page 9 of a Clutch city listing means the directory ranked well and you are the eighty-first name on it. It does not mean the directory recommends you. It does not mean anyone has read your page. The directory ranks. The entries ride along.
There is a second effect worth seeing, and the Leeds search showed it plainly.
Of the eight Semrush results there, three were not the English listing at all. The Spanish version appeared, at es.semrush.com. So did a Czech one, at cw.semrush.com, and a French one, at agencies.semrush.com/fr/. All three were listing agencies in Leeds, in languages nobody searching in Leeds was using.
That is not Semrush behaving badly. It is one strong domain publishing the same directory in many languages, and a search with so little real competition that translated copies of a listing still outrank whatever is left.
Which is the point. When you see a results page like that, the right conclusion is not "these must be the best agencies in Leeds". It is "almost nobody has built anything for this search".
So use directories as a source of names. Then take those names away and check them yourself. Do not read the order as a ranking of quality. It is mostly a ranking of who paid and who finished filling in their profile.
The real agencies that did turn up
It would be unfair to spend this long on the rubbish and not record what was real.
These are businesses with their own domain, a findable address and pages written for the city they name. I have not used any of them. I am not recommending them. I am saying they passed the checks in this article, which is a low bar and the only one I tested.
| City | Real UK businesses in the results |
|---|---|
| Leicester | Anicca, Opace, Herdl, Creative Ideaz, Limelight Digital, Imaginaire, Flycast Media, Bulldog Digital Media |
| Nottingham | Bulldog Digital Media, Cloudswitched, Tenet, SEO Works, Epic Edits |
| Leeds | ICS Digital, on its general service page, and FatRank |
| Newcastle | Bulldog Digital Media |
| Bristol | None |
| Sheffield | None |
Two things stand out in that table.
Leicester returned eight and Bristol returned none. The gap is the search phrase, not the city.
And Bulldog Digital Media appears in three of the six. They have built a separate page per city, which is exactly the tactic I have just argued against. The difference is that theirs are on their own domain, with their own address, written for a phrase people actually search. A city page is not automatically a doorway page. It becomes one when it is thin, templated and built for a phrase nobody types.
If you run an agency and you are thinking about city pages
This section is for a different reader, so skip it if you are hiring rather than selling.
The obvious growth move is to build a page for every city you could serve. Everything above is what that market looks like from the inside.
For "link building [city]" there is no local competition, which feels like an opportunity until you ask why.
There is no competition because there is no buyer. Agencies in Leeds are not stupid. If that phrase brought them customers they would have built pages for it years ago. They have built pages for "SEO agency" plus their city instead, because that is where the customers are.
So a thin city page gets you ranked in a market with no demand. Your neighbours on that results page are a template with a fictional phone number and a directory's page 9. That is the company you keep, and it is what a prospective client sees beside your name.
If your agency wants more placements without building any of that, my terms are set out on a page of their own, with the prices and with what your client does and does not see: white label link building for agencies.
The one that bothered me most
I ran one more search outside the six, for how to choose an SEO agency in the UK, to see what advice people are given.
On the first page was m.fightcancer.org/?p=1377380, titled "Best SEO Agency UK Delivering High-Quality Results".
The page sells SEO services. It claims case studies for the British Heart Foundation, Nike, HSBC and the National Lottery. The writing is broken in places, with fragments like "technical ," and "navigate the complexities of and drive" left in the text.
I cannot tell you from the page itself who owns that domain or how the content got there.
Here is what I can tell you. A page about hiring an SEO agency, claiming four household-name clients, was sitting on a domain named after cancer charity work. And it was ranking for the question.
Alongside it were gsstech.duckdns.org, which is a free dynamic DNS domain, a PDF exported from a Google Doc, and a development subdomain that was never meant to be public.
If you have been feeling that it is hard to find a straight answer about hiring an agency, that is why. It is not you.
What I could not check
Honesty about the gaps, because the piece is worthless without it.
I could not confirm who owns or operates any of these spam pages, so I have described what the pages say and nothing more.
I could not establish search volumes. I have inferred demand from who bothered to build pages, which is reasonable but is not a measurement.
I ran each search once, from one place, on one day. Results differ by location, by person and by hour. Run them yourself and you will not see exactly what I saw.
I could not explain how pages marked noindex appeared in results, as above.
And I cannot tell you that the real agencies I named are good. I checked that they are real, which is a lower bar and the only one this method reaches.
So, how to choose an SEO agency in the UK
Search "SEO agency" and your city, not "link building" and your city.
Ignore anything on a free host, anything with a 555 phone number, and anything that exists for twenty other cities.
Treat directories as a list of names, not a ranking.
Then take three names and ask them the seven questions. The ones who answer plainly, in writing, are the shortlist. The ones who talk about guarantees instead are not.
It is a slower method than reading page one. Page one, as it turns out, is not the thing it appears to be.
Questions people ask
How do I choose an SEO agency in the UK?
Search for "SEO agency" plus your city rather than "link building" plus your city, because the second phrase returns directories and templates rather than local businesses. Then check each candidate for a real address, a real phone number, a domain of their own, and a named person who exists elsewhere. Ask what happens when a link disappears and get the answer in writing.
Are Clutch and Semrush Agency Partners reliable?
They list real companies and Clutch verifies its reviews. The ranking order is not a quality ranking, and a deep pagination page is simply the eighty-first entry in a list. Use them for names, then check the names yourself.
Why do American companies rank for UK city searches?
Several English city names also exist in the United States. Nottingham is in Maryland and in Pennsylvania, Leeds Point is in New Jersey, and there is a Leicester in New York. Pages built for those American places can surface for searches about the English ones.
What is a 555 phone number?
555 has never been assigned as a geographic area code in North America, so nothing can be reached on it. Combined with 123-4567, which is just the digits in order, it is the placeholder that ships inside website templates. A business page still carrying +1 (555) 123-4567 never replaced it.
Should my agency build a landing page for every city?
The phrases with no local competition are the ones with no local buyers. A page built for those terms ranks next to templates and directory pagination, which is what a prospective client sees beside your name.
Is it worth searching for link building services in my city at all?
On the evidence here, no. That phrase returned almost no local businesses in any of the six cities. Search for an SEO agency in your city and ask them about links once you are talking.
How long should a link replacement guarantee be?
Ask for the terms in writing and read them. In the most recent decay measurement, the median lost link had been live 128 days, so a window shorter than that covers very little. A guarantee with no stated terms is not a guarantee.
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